#WWWWednesday – 15th 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!

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What I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading Our London Lives from my NetGalley shelf, The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile 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.

The Assassin of Verona by Benet Brandreth (Zaffre)

Venice, 1586. William Shakespeare is disguised as a steward to the English Ambassador. He and his friends Oldcastle and Hemminges possess a deadly secret: the names of the catholic spies in England who seek to destroy Queen Elizabeth. Before long the Pope’s agents will begin to close in on them and fleeing the city will be the players’ only option.

In Verona, Aemelia, the daughter of a Duke, is struggling to conceal her passionate affair with her cousin Valentine. But darker times lie ahead with the arrival of the sinister Father Thornhill who is determined to seek out any who don’t conform to the Pope’s ruthless agenda . . .

Events will converge in the forests around Verona as a multitude of plots are hatched and discovered, players fall in and out of love and disguises are adopted and then discarded. Will Shakespeare and his friends escape with their secrets – and their lives?

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

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?

What I’ll Be Reading Next

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

When a young man’s girlfriend vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the city, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.