Category: Currently Reading

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!

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Currently reading

A proof copy (which I have nearly finished, honestly!), an eARC, a book for Nonfiction November and a book for a blog tour. Phew!

The Push by Ashley Audrain (ARC, courtesy of Michael Joseph)

What if your experience of motherhood was nothing like what you hoped for – but everything you always feared?

‘The women in this family, we’re different…’

The arrival of baby Violet was meant to be the happiest day of my life. It was meant to be a fresh start. But as soon as I held her in my arms I knew something wasn’t right. I have always known that the women in my family aren’t meant to be mothers.

My husband Fox says I’m imagining it. He tells me I’m nothing like my own mother, and that Violet is the sweetest child. But she’s different with me. Something feels very wrong. Is it her? Or is it me? Is she the monster? Or am I?

Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time by Inez Holden (Handheld Press)

Emerging out of the 1940-1941 London Blitz, the drama of these two short works, a novel and a memoir, comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment.

Inez Holden’s novella Night Shift follows a largely working-class cast of characters for five night shifts in a factory that produces camera parts for war planes. It Was Different At The Time is Holden’s account of wartime life from April 1938 to August 1941, drawn from her own diary. This was intended to be a joint project written with her friend George Orwell (he was in the end too busy to contribute), and includes disguised appearances of Orwell and other notable literary figures of the period.

The experiences recorded in It Was Different At The Time overlap in period and subject with Night Shift, setting up a vibrant dialogue between the two texts.

Cesare by Jerome Charyn (eARC, courtesy of No Exit via NetGalley)

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him ‘Cesare’ after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies.

Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.

The Morning Star by Gita V. Reddy (ebook, courtesy of the author)

A desperate woman calls a neighbor before dying in childbirth. Is it a coincidence that she chooses someone who will give her all to save the baby from its unscrupulous father?

When Sudha answers a telephone call in the middle of the night, she cannot know how it will change her life. From the first, she feels a strong connection with the motherless baby. She brings her home and names her after the Arundhati star.

Sudha loves Arundhati – Anu as she calls her – as much as she does her son. She is the daughter of her heart, a precious gift that fate has given her. As the threat to Anu’s safety increases, she grows desperate and takes a drastic step to protect the baby.

Only, it might cost her everything she holds dear…

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Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my reviews

How To Belong by Sarah Franklin

The Stasi Game (Karin Müller #6) by David Young

The House in the Hollow by Allie Cresswell

Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson (eARC, courtesy of Doubleday via NetGalley)

Meet Eve, who has departed from her thirty-year career to become a Free Spirit; Sally, who has waved goodbye to her indifferent husband and two grown-up children; and Anastasia: defiantly independent narrowboat-dweller, suddenly vulnerable as she awaits a life-saving operation.

Inexperienced and ill-equipped, Sally and Eve embark upon a journey through the canals of England, guided by the remote and unsympathetic Anastasia. As they glide gently – and not so gently – through the countryside, the eccentricities and challenges of canal boat life draw them inexorably together, and a tender and unforgettable story unfolds.

Disarmingly truthful and narrated with a rare, surprising wit, Three Women and A Boat is a journey over the glorious waterways of England and into the unfathomable depths of the human heart. (Review to follow)

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What Cathy (will) Read Next

337 by M. Jonathan Lee (proof copy, courtesy of Hideaway Fall) 

337 follows the life of Samuel Darte whose mother vanished when he was in his teens. It was his brother, Tom who found her wedding ring on the kitchen table along with the note. While their father pays the price of his mother’s disappearance, Sam learns that his long-estranged Gramma is living out her last days in a nursing home nearby.

Keen to learn about what really happened that day and realising the importance of how little time there is, he visits her to finally get the truth. Soon it’ll be too late and the family secrets will be lost forever. Reduced to ashes. But in a story like this, nothing is as it seems.