On the blog last week
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Bookish Places. I shared ten books set in places I’ve visited.
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.
Friday – I published my interview with author Thomas Messel about his historical novel The Nightingale of Bath.
New on my shelves
Agrippa by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Julius Caesar is dead, and the lives of two teenaged boys are about to be changed forever. One is Caesar’s 17-year-old nephew, Octavius, whom he has made his heir.
The other is Octavius’s closest friend, Agrippa.
To claim Octavius’s inheritance, they must fight the giant figures of the Roman Empire – and, against all odds, they win. Octavius becomes the Emperor Augustus. For twenty years, they rule the world together.
Now Agrippa is fifty. Ailing and alone, betrayed by his wife’s infidelity, he takes refuge in his house on the Bay of Naples and begins to write his memoirs. Yet to stir up the past can be dangerous. From his earliest meetings with Julius Caesar, through the epic conflict with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the great naval battle of Actium and the endless wars to expand the empire, he describes how one man has dominated his life: the cunning, ruthless, unknowable Octavius.
The Farther Shore by Seth Fleisher (Green City Books via NetGalley)
Southern Africa, turn of the twentieth century. Marais is a brilliant naturalist and iconoclastic journalist whose evolving theories about memory, addiction, and the hive mind are decades ahead of their time. But when tragedy strikes, he disappears into a remote African forest – leaving behind his newborn child and his conscience, and embarking on research that will haunt both their lives.
Thirty years later, his son Charles – now a professor of ancient Buddhist history at Harvard – discovers that the university’s most powerful faculty are mining his father’s research to bolster theories of racial hierarchy. Accompanied by a mysterious Jewish graduate student whose fate has become entangled with his own, Charles must journey to South Africa to confront his father, heal his fractured past, and stop a sinister plot taking root at the world’s most prestigious institution.
What I’m currently reading
I’m reading Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks from my NetGalley shelf and an ARC of historical mystery Seething Lane by Jack Jewers.
Look out for…
- Book Review: Conqueror (Agricola #4) by Simon Turney
- Book Review: Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
What Cathy Read Next... 