On What Cathy Read Next last week
Blog posts
Monday – I shared my review of The Night of Shooting Stars by Ben Pastor as part of the blog tour.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Questions I’d Ask My Favourite Authors. Also, as part of Women In Translation Month, I shared my review of The Bitchby Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman.
Wednesday – It wouldn’t be “hump day” without WWW Wednesday, the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…as well as have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.
Thursday – I published my review of my Buchan of the Month for August, A Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan.
Friday – I published my review of The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville as part of the blog tour. I also shared an extract from Son of Escobar: First Born by Roberto Sendoya Escobar.
Saturday – I shared my Henley Literary Festival 2020 Reading List, a selection of books by authors appearing (in virtual form) at this year’s Festival.
Phew! Another busy blogging week… As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or so shared my blog posts on social media.
New arrivals
Green Hands by Barbara Whitton (ARC, courtesy of Imperial War Museum and Random Things Tours)
It is 1943, and a month into their service as Land Girls, Bee, Anne and Pauline are dispatched to a remote farm in rural Scotland. Here they are introduced to the realities of ‘lending a hand on the land’, as back-breaking work and inhospitable weather mean they struggle to keep their spirits high. Soon one of the girls falters, and Bee and Pauline receive a new posting to a Northumberland dairy farm.
Detailing their friendship, daily struggles and romantic intrigues with a lightness of touch, Barbara Whitton’s autobiographical novel paints a sometimes funny, sometimes bleak picture of time spent in the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War.
The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn (eARC, courtesy of Michael Joseph via NetGalley)
Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but against all medical odds, he seems revitalized in nature. Together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible.
Now, life beyond The Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult – until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow.
The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit’s instinctive connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.
V2 by Robert Harris (eARC, courtesy of Cornerstone via NetGalley)
The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second.
Rudi Graf has dreamt since childhood of sending a rocket to the moon.I nstead, along with his friend Werner von Braun, he has helped create the world’s most sophisticated weapon – the V2 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton warhead that travels at three times the speed of sound. In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat, Hitler orders 10,000 to be built.
Now, in the winter of 1944, Graf finds himself in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland. Haunted and disillusioned, he’s tasked with firing the V2s at London. Nobody understands the volatile, deadly machine better than he does.
Kay Caton-Walsh is an officer in the WAAF. She has experienced at first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. As the rockets rain down, she joins a unit of WAAFs on a mission to newly-liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, the hope is that Kay and her colleagues can locate and destroy the launch sites. But at this stage in the war it’s hard to know who, if anyone, you can trust. For every action on one side, there is an equal and opposite reaction on the other.
As the death toll soars, the separate stories of Graf and Kay ricochet off one another, until in a final explosion of violence their destinies are forced together.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Blog Tour/Book Review: The Museum Makers by Rachel Morris
- Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Make Me Hungry
- Blog Tour/Book Review: V For Victory by Lissa Evans
- Waiting on Wednesday
- My Five Favourite August Reads
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Talland House by Maggie Humm
- Six Degrees of Separation
