Author: whatcathyreadnext

WWW Wednesdays – 19th December ‘18

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WWWWednesdays

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!

Currently reading

So Much Life Left OverSo Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières (hardcover)

A sweeping, heartbreaking novel following Daniel in his troubled marriage with Rosie as they navigate the unsettled time between the World Wars.

Rosie and Daniel have moved to Ceylon with their little daughter to start a new life at the dawn of the 1920s, attempting to put the trauma of the First World War behind them, and to rekindle a marriage that gets colder every day. However, even in the lush plantation hills it is hard for them to escape the ties of home and the yearning for fulfilment that threatens their marriage.

Back in England, Rosie’s three sisters are dealing with different challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and they find themselves using unconventional means to achieve their desires. Around them the world is changing, and when Daniel finds himself in Germany he witnesses events taking a dark and forbidding turn.

By turns humorous and tragic, gripping and touching, So Much Life Left Over follows a cast of unique and captivating characters as they navigate the extraordinary interwar years both in England and abroad.

SympathySympathy by Olivia Sudjic (paperback)

At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own.

As Alice closes in on Mizuko, her ‘internet twin’, realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question – where do we come from? – can now be found online.

Recently finished (click on title for review)

The Rise and Fall of Becky SharpThe Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp by Sarra Manning (paperback)

Beautiful, brilliant, ruthless – nothing can stop Becky Sharp.

Determined to leave her poverty-stricken roots behind her, Becky Sharp is going to take every opportunity offered to her to climb to the top. Whether it’s using her new BFF Amelia Sedley to step up into the rarified world of London’s upper classes, or seducing society’s most eligible bachelors, Becky Sharp is destined for great things – at any cost..

From London to Paris and beyond, the world is there for Becky’s taking – even though some people are determined to stop her along the way…

A hilarious contemporary retelling of the classic society novel, Vanity Fair, featuring the irrepressible Becky Sharp.

LyinginVengeanceLying in Vengeance by Gary Corbin (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author)

In this sequel to award-winning courtroom thriller Lying in Judgment, Peter Robertson must choose between two horrible options. Both involve death and revenge.

Peter Robertson, 33, once fought a man on a remote forested road and left him to die. Six months later, he served on the jury that freed a wrongfully accused man – and let his own secret slip to a beautiful but manipulative fellow juror, Christine Nielsen.  Two months later, Christine wakes him in the middle of the night with a threat: kill Kyle, the man who stalks and abuses her, or have his own murderous past exposed. (Review to follow.)

WhiteWaterBlackDeath2White Water, Black Death by Shaun Ebelthite (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author)

Magazine editor Geneva Jones has been sent on a trans-Atlantic cruise to help secure a major advertising agreement from the CEO of the cruise line, Rachel Atkinson, but her efforts to win her over are curtailed by a mysterious crew death. Geneva suspects foul play. Rachel insists its suicide.

A former investigative journalist, Geneva can’t resist digging deeper, but what she finds is far more devastating.  (Review to follow.)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Edible WomanThe Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (paperback)

Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancé and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn’t count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can’t stomach…

The Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional cannibalism, men and women, and the desire to be consumed.

Stories We Tell OurselvesStories We Tell Ourselves by Sarah Francoise (paperback)

Frank and Joan’s marriage is in trouble. Having spent three decades failing to understand each other in their unfinished house in the French alps, Joan’s frustrations with her inattentive husband have reached breaking point. Frank, retreating ever further into his obscure hobbies, is distracted by an epistolary affair with his long-lost German girlfriend. Things are getting tense. But it’s Christmas, and the couple are preparing to welcome home their three far-flung children.

The children, though, are faring little better in love themselves. Maya, a gender expert mother-of-two, is considering leaving her family and running off with a woman; Wim is considering leaving his girlfriend; and Lois, who spends her time turning war documentaries into love poems, is facing a change of heart.

Written with a rare precision and insight, the author explores the thorniness of familial love and its capacity to endure with warmth, wit and disarming honesty.

Buchan of the Month: Introducing Sick Heart River by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

Sick Heart River is the final book (for 2018) in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month.  Appropriately perhaps, it was also Buchan’s last novel.  In fact, he finished it only a fortnight before his death and it was published posthumously.  It also happens to be one of my favourite of his novels.  The ending always leaves me slightly teary.

To find out more about the project and my reading list for 2018, click here.  Buchan of the Month will return in 2019 with a new selection of books by John Buchan, both fiction and non-fiction.  If you would like to read along with me you will be very welcome.  Just leave a comment on the challenge post when it’s published in the New Year.

SickHeartRiver2What follows is an introduction to Sick Heart River.  It is also an excuse to show a picture of my lovely edition of the book complete with dust jacket.  I will be posting my review of the book later in the month.

John Buchan (by then Lord Tweedsmuir) started writing Sick Heart River in the Autumn of 1939.  His private secretary, Mrs. Killick, wrote to Susan, Lady Tweedsmuir, “His Excellency is writing a very odd book…so unlike him, so introspective.” As Kate Macdonald has remarked, ‘Sick Heart River was Buchan’s farewell to his writing career, written at the end of his life’.  David Daniell, who has written extensively on John Buchan’s life and work, describes Sick Heart River as ‘a moving novel…deeply meditative’.

On 5th February 1940, Buchan told his sister Anna, ‘I have finished my novel [Sick Heart River] and my autobiography [Memory Hold-the-Door]’. The following day, Buchan suffered the cerebral thrombosis that ultimately proved fatal and he died on 12th February.  Sick Heart River was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1941.  In the US it was published under the title, Mountain Meadow.

Sick and fearing he has not long to live, Sir Edward Leithen embarks on what he believes may be his last mission: tracking down and restoring to health Francis Galliard, a young Canadian banker who has gone missing in the wilds of northern Canada.  Leithen’s quest takes him – and the reader – on a journey from New York, to a farmhouse in Quebec, by air across the Barrens to the Arctic shore of Canada and to the country west of the Mackenzie River in a search for the mysterious Sick Heart River.

The latter parts of Leithen’s journey mirror that taken by Buchan to the north of Canada in 1937 whilst he was Governor General of that country.  During this trip, in scenes reminiscent of the book, Buchan met French missionaries working with the Hare Indians, a tribe ravaged by tuberculosis.   Buchan’s first biographer, Janet Adam Smith, notes, ‘It is plain how much Buchan put into the novel of his experience in Canada, particularly Quebec and the North’.  Adam Smith also argues that in Sick Heart River, Buchan makes Leithen more like himself than in any of the earlier books in which he’d featured, such as The Power House and John Macnab.  She notes: ‘Leithen’s body – lean and getting leaner, needing sleep and waking tired, active in spite of pain – is Buchan’s.’

Janet Adam Smith reports that by 1960 the Hodder & Stoughton edition of Sick Heart River had sold around 96,000 copies.  In the US, it sold over 20,000 copies in hardback and a further 300,000 copies when published in paperback.

Sources:

David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)
Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland, 2009)
Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])