#WWWWednesday – 2nd July 2025

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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What I’m Currently Reading

I’m listening to an audiobook of the next title on my 20 Books of Summer 2025 list, I’m reading a book from my NetGalley shelf and a review copy.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton) #20BooksOfSummer25

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, two young poeple notice one another.

They share a cup of coffee, a smile, an evening meal. They try not to hear the sound of bombs getting closer every night, the radio announcing new laws, the public executions.

Meanwhile, rumours are spreading of strange black doors in secret places across the city, doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai. Someday soon, the time will come for this young couple to seek out one such door: joining the multitudes fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world.

The Last Apartment in Istanbul by Defne Suman (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

I was writing to her, so that she would know me not as this old person whose joints creaked when he rose from a chair, but as the real the man who dreamt, deceived, envied, loved…

Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his seventy-five years. From its lofty windows, he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified, Pericles has retreated into its shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits, his isolation deepens.

But when Leyla, a sparky and beautiful thirty-something moves in, Pericles is enthralled. And when he discovers Leyla is a writer, he decides to put his own pen to paper and record his own fraught that of a Greek man subjected to the politics of oppression and intimidation in twentieth-century Turkey.

Green Ink by Stephen May (Swift Press)

David Lloyd George is at Chequers for the weekend with his mistress Frances Stevenson, fretting about the fact that his involvement in selling public honours is about to be revealed by one Victor Grayson. Victor is a bisexual hedonist and former firebrand socialist MP turned secret-service informant. Intent on rebuilding his profile as the leader of the revolutionary Left, he doesn’t know exactly how much of a hornet’s nest he’s stirred up. Doesn’t know that this is, in fact, his last day.

No one really knows what happened to Victor Grayson – he vanished one night in late September 1920, having threatened to reveal all he knew about the prime minister’s involvement in selling honours. Was he murdered by the British government? By enemies in the socialist movement (who he had betrayed in the war)? Did he fall in the Thames drunk? Did he vanish to save his own life, and become an antiques dealer in Kent?

Whatever the truth, Green Ink imagines what might have been with brio, humour and humanity; and is a reminder that the past was once as alive as we are today.

What I’ve Just Read

One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter (Allison & Busby)

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster, telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D cup that he wasn’t married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but there she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica, aged five; greedy, cross-patch Gillian, who refused to be ignored; and Ruby…

Ruby tells the story of the family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby’s own life. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee (William Heinemann) #20BooksOfSummer25

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt.

Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past – a journey that can be guided only by one’s conscience.