#WWWWednesday – 8th October 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!

---

What I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading Our London Lives from my NetGalley shelf, a review copy of Andropov’s Cuckoo and I’m listening to the audiobook of Transcription.

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey (Atlantic via NetGalley)

1979. In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.

Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together.

Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives.

Andropov’s Cuckoo by Owen Jones

Two girls, born thousands of miles apart in Kazakhstan and Japan just after World War II, meet and are like peas in a pod. They also get on like sisters and keep in touch for the rest of their lives.

However, one wants to help her battle-scarred country and the other wants to leave hers for the West. They dream up a daring, dangerous plan to achieve both goals, which Andropov, the chief of the Soviet KGB, is told about. He dubs it Operation Youriko and it is set in motion, but does it have even the remotest chance of success?

Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.

Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

What I’ve Just Read

Dominion of Dust (A Time For Swords #4) by Matthew Harffy (Head of Zeus)

AD 797, Cyprus. Warrior-monk Hunlaf and his crew are on a voyage to acquire an important Christian relic before it falls into the hands of Byzantium’s scheming Empress Eirene.

Hunlaf’s crew receive unexpected help as they seek their treasure, but soon find themselves betrayed. About to leave for home empty-handed, the adventurers instead sail further east: to Jerusalem, the Holy Land, abundant in relics. And dangerous intrigues.

Hunlaf and his friends will face a deadly race against time as they attempt to secure a holy treasure, outwit Byzantium’s zealous agents, and avoid grisly deaths at the hands of the local rulers. (Review to follow)

Tombland by C. J. Sansom (Mantle)

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady? (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

The Secretary by Deborah Lawrenson (The Book Guild)

Moscow, 1958. At the height of the Cold War, secretary Lois Vale is on a deep-cover MI6 mission to identify a diplomatic traitor. She can trust only one man: Johann, a German journalist also working covertly for the British secret service.

As the trail leads to Vienna and the Black Sea, Lois and Johann begin an affair but as love grows, so does the danger to Lois.