Category: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 4th July 2021

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories edited by Margaret Jull Costa.

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Most Anticipated Releases of the Second Half of 2021.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to have a good nose around what others are reading. I also shared an extract from The Lady in the Veil by Allie Cresswell and published my review of The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi as part of the blog tour.

Thursday – I shared my Five Favourite June 2021 Reads. 

Friday – I published my review of This Shining Life by Harriet Kline as part of the blog tour. 

Saturday – I took part in this month’s #6Degrees of Separation meme creating a chain of books starting from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media.

New arrivals

Snow CountrySnow Country by Sebastian Faulks (eARC, courtesy of Hutchinson via NetGalley)

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her HouseHow the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

In Baxter Beach, Barbados, moneyed ex-pats clash with the locals who often end up serving them: braiding their hair, minding their children, and selling them drugs.

Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the Baxter Beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences.

A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives. 

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Business as Usual by Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford
  • Top Ten Tuesday
  • WWW Wednesday
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Those I Have Lost by Sharon Maas
  • Book Review: Songbirds by Christy Lefteri
  • Audiobook Review: A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

#WWWWednesday – 30th June 2021

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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

A Long Petal of the SeaA Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (audiobook)

In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love.

In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants, and together are sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda to embark on the SS Winnipeg along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life. As unlikely partners, they embrace exile and emigrate to Chile as the rest of Europe erupts in World War.

Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning. Over the course of their lives, they will face test after test. But they will also find joy as they wait patiently for a day when they are exiles no more, and will find friends in the most unlikely of places. Through it all, it is that hope of being reunited with their home that keeps them going. And in the end, they will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

This Shining Life CoverThis Shining Life by Harriet Kline (eARC, courtesy of Transworld Books)

For Rich, life is golden. He fizzes with happiness and love. But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

When Rich dies, he leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. His wife, Ruth, can’t imagine living without him and finds herself faced with a grief she’s not sure she can find her way through.
At the same time, their young son Ollie becomes intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?

But when they discover a mismatched collection of presents left by Rich for his loved ones, it provides a puzzle for them to solve, one that will help Ruth navigate her sorrow and help Ollie come to terms with what’s happened. Together, they will learn to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, and treasure the true gift that Rich has left them: the ability to embrace life and love every moment.

Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my review.

The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories edited by Margaret Jull Costa

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (The Henna Artist #2) by Alka Joshi

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Business As UsualBusiness As Usual by Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford  

Hilary Fane is an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the mutterings of her surgeon fiancé. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings rapidly diminish, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman’s (a very thin disguise for Selfridges), and rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernizing systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.

Business as Usual is charming, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It’s deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and fascinating for its unflinching descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy.