On the blog last week
Monday – I published my review of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was New Authors I Discovered in 2025.
Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.
Saturday – I took part in the Six on Saturday meme, sharing six things from my garden this week. I also published my review of Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
New on my shelves
The Cut Line by Carolina Pihelgas, trans. by Darcy Hurford (World Editions via NetGalley)
In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship. She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. Physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.
Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.
Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too.
The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.
The Perfect Circle by Claudia Petrucci, trans. by Anne Milano Appel (World Editions via NetGalley)
Two women far apart in time, a mysterious unsellable mansion in Milan that connects two lives that start to overlap as impossible parallels are revealed in this story of passion, betrayal, and selfish desire.
In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze.
Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father’s judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect—how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder? As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately—this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.
Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan (World Editions via NetGalley)
As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown.
Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London.
That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy?
Invitation from a Dictator by Rory Clements (Viking via NetGalley)
On the eve of war, a royal guest is lured into Hitler’s deadly web . . .
Munich, 1937. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor have arrived in Germany, due at Hitler’s mountain retreat at any moment. But that night, a string of attacks devastate the city, soon claimed by the rising Communist group, Red Freedom. Brutal and bloody in their methods, there’s no doubt that Edward, Wallis and their host at the Berghof are their next target.
They are put in the urgent care of Detective Sebastian Wolff, but the choice between protecting the prince and fighting for his own politics becomes all the more complicated when Wolff realises who is behind Red Freedom: Ulrike, his first love and the mother of his son.
Words for Patty Jo by Jill Arlene Culiner (eARC, Wild Rose Press)
A passion for books creates a lasting bond between teenage Patty Jo and David, but small-town prejudice and social differences doom their romance. After a summer of reading and falling in love, David heads for university, foreign adventure, and a dazzling career; Patty Jo marries slick, over-confident Don Ried.
Yet plans can go horribly wrong. The victim of her violent husband, Patty Jo abandons her home and children to live on the streets of Toronto. David, a high-ranking executive in Paris, is dismayed by the superficiality of corporate success.
Forty years later, Patty Jo and David meet again. Both have defied society; both have fulfilled their dreams. And what if first love was the right one after all, and destiny has the last word?
What I’m currently reading
I’m reading Trial by Terror from my Classics Club list, The Shock of the Light from my NetGalley shelf and listening to the audiobook of Room 706.
Look out for…
- Book Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
- Book Review: Julia Sleeps by Zoe Caryl
What Cathy Read Next... 