#WWWWednesday – 21st August 2024

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

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Currently reading

To Calais, In Ordinary Time by James Meek (Canongate) #20BooksOfSummer24

Three journeys. One road.

England, 1348. A gentlewoman is fleeing an odious arranged marriage, a Scottish proctor is returning home to Avignon and a handsome young ploughman in search of adventure is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.

Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.

Six Lives by Lavie Tidhar (Apollo via NetGalley)

Six lives, connected through blood and history, each rooted in the dirt of their inheritance, look to the future, and what it might hold.

THE GUANO MERCHANT – In 1855, Edward Feebes travels to the guano islands of South America, to investigate an irregularity in the accounts of the House of Feebes & Co.

THE BLACKMAILER – In 1912, post-mortem photographer and reluctant blackmailer Annie Connolly plots her escape from Ireland to America on board the Titanic.

THE IDEALIST – In 1933, idealistic Edgar Waverley faces a choice of the heart when he becomes embroiled in a country house murder.

THE SPY – In 1964, hapless KGB agent Vasily Sokolov makes his career conjuring valuable information from worthless detritus.

THE MOVIE STAR – In 1987, actor Mariam Khouri looks back at ‘Black Dirt’, the movie that lifted her from the streets of Cairo.

THE HEIRESS – In 2012, Isabelle Feebes attempts to break with her poisonous heritage once and for all. Can she forge a new life for herself in the New World? Can you ever truly escape your past?

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Recently finished

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (Bloomsbury)

Venice. 1704. In this city of glittering splendour, desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted every through a tiny gap in the wall every day.

Eight-year-old Anna Maria is just one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà’s walls – but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted, she is on a mission to become Venice’s greatest violinist and composer, and in her remarkable world of colour and sound, it seems like nothing with stop her.

But the odds are stacked against an orphan girl – so when the maestro selects her as his star pupil, Anna Maria knows she must do everything in power to please this difficult, brilliant man. But as Anna Maria’s star rises, threatening to eclipse that of her mentor, the dream she has so single-mindedly pursued is thrown into peril…

From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals, this is a story of one woman’s irrepressible ambition and rise to the top, of loss and triumph, and of who we choose to remember and leave behind on the path to success. (Review to follow)

Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts (Quercus) #20BooksOfSummer24

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What Cathy Will Read Next

A Place Without Pain by Simon Bourke #20BooksOfSummer24

Aidan Collins has always been an outsider, a weirdo, an oddball. But the arrival of his worldly, urbane cousin Dan, changes his life completely. Dan introduces Aidan to alcohol, to girls, to a life beyond the four walls of his bedroom, and eventually, to the night out to end all nights out in Dublin.

What he sees in the capital, what he’s exposed to, also changes Aidan’s life, but not in a good way. A scene behind a closed door haunts him, torments him, leaving behind scars which may never heal.