#WWWWednesday – 30th 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 close to finishing the audiobook of The Mirror & the Light, I’m reading The Best of Intentions on my Kindle and historical crime mystery The Body in the Ice, the next book on my 20 Books of Summer 2025 list.

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate) #20BooksOfSummer25

‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

The Best of Intentions by Caroline Scott (Simon & Schuster via NetGalley)

1932: When gardener Robert Bardsley arrives at Anderby Hall, an Elizabethan manor house in the Gloucestershire countryside, it is home to ‘Greenfields’, a community of artists and idealists.

Robert has been employed to revive Anderby’s famous roses and restore the topiary garden, but he also soon befriends the other residents: from colourful neighbour Trudie, who makes a formidable cocktail and keeps her late-fiancé’s ashes on the mantelpiece, to composer Daniel, recovering from the horrors of the Great War. The only person he can’t win over is Anderby’s schoolteacher, Faye, who finds him . . . perfectly vexing.

But just as Robert starts to feel at home, the residents discover that the old orchard has been sold to a property developer who has plans for an estate of Tudorbethan bungalows. Can they find a way to keep their creative community alive or will the new housing development put an end to the spirit of Greenfields?

The Body in the Ice by A. K. MacKenzie (Zaffre) #20BooksOfSummer25

Christmas Day, Kent, 1796. On the frozen fields of Romney Marsh stands New Hall; silent, lifeless, deserted. In its grounds lies an unexpected Christmas offering: a corpse, frozen into the ice of a horse pond.

It falls to the Reverend Hardcastle, justice of the peace in St Mary in the Marsh, to investigate. But with the victim’s identity unknown, no murder weapon and no known motive, it seems an impossible task. Working alongside his trusted friend Amelia Chaytor, and new arrival Captain Edward Austen, Hardcastle soon discovers there is more to the mystery than there first appears.

With the arrival of an American family torn apart by war, intent on reclaiming their ancestral home, a French spy returning to the scene of his crimes, ancient loyalties and new vengeance combine to make Hardcastle and Mrs Chaytor’s attempts to discover the secret of New Hall all the more dangerous.

What I’ve Just Read

The Coming Fire by Greg Mosse (Moonflower Books)

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Viking)

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water.

In the ruins of Nineveh, an ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies, hidden in the sand, fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black River Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book sending him across the seas: Ninevah and its Remains.

In Turkey in 2014, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.

In London in 2018, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything. (Review to follow)

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. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Lion Hearts (Essex Dogs #3) by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

Three years on from the Siege of Calais:
The Black Death has wreaked havoc in Europe. The Castilians are moving against England. The Essex Dogs have scattered.

In Winchelsea, Loveday struggles to keep his tavern afloat in the aftermath of the Death. Nowadays, the only battles he fights are the ones within his own mind.

In Windsor, Romford thrives as a squire at King Edward III’s court, his days as an archer fading into memory. But when an unpaid debt threatens everything he’s built, Romford must call upon the lessons he learned all those years ago: be cunning. Be ruthless. Be quick.

With England still reeling from the Death and the Castilian threat on the rise, the kingdom’s future has never been more uncertain.

Each had reasons for leaving the Essex Dogs behind. But a life like that isn’t so easily forgotten. And for these men the fighting isn’t over yet.