Category: My Week in Books

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of The Deception of Harriet Fleet by Helen Scarlett as part of the blog tour. 

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday ‘official’ topic was Books I’d Happily Throw in the Ocean but as I prefer to spread book love rather than hate, I compiled a list of Books Set at Sea.

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…as well as have a good nose around to see what books others have plucked from their shelves.  I also shared my publication day review of The Tuscan House by Angela Petch as part of the blog tour.

Thursday – I published my review of There’s No Story There by Inez Holden.  

Friday – I shared my Five Favourite March 2021 Reads and there were some cracking books amongst them.

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

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New arrivals

This Other Island by Steffanie Edward (eARC, courtesy of Bookouture via NetGalley)

When Yvette receives a call to say her estranged father Joe has been attacked in a seemingly random act of violence, she rushes to his side. But when she arrives, she finds a man different to the larger-than-life father of her memories. Joe is broken, too scared to describe his attacker to the police, and seemingly haunted by memories of his past – memories he’s fought to suppress.

About the boat journey that brought him and his wife Dolina to their new home in a hostile and unwelcoming Britain – as part of the Windrush Generation. About the secrets left behind in St Lucia… And about the darkest secret of all – the one that he has carried with him since stepping off the boat that cool, wet August day.

As he fights for his life, he begs Yvette to find out what really happened on the last day of that crossing. Because, for forty years, Joe has believed that he killed a man. A man who had loved Dolina too. And who might hold the key to Yvette’s own story…

A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated by Sam Taylor (review copy, courtesy of Gallic Books)

‘On the mountain, the only monsters are the ones you take with you.’

Summer 1954. Stan has been hunting for fossils since the age of six. Now, having made a career out of studying the remains of tiny lifeforms, he hears a story he cannot forget: the skeleton of a huge creature, a veritable dragon, lies deep in an Alpine glacier. And he is determined to find it.

Leaving his life in Paris behind, Stan sets out in pursuit of a legend. But he is no mountaineer, and to attempt his dangerous expedition he must call on loyal friend and colleague Umberto, who arrives with an eccentric young assistant, and expert guide Gio. Time is short: the four men must descend before the weather turns. Bonds are forged and tested as the hazardous quest for the earth’s lost creatures becomes a journey into Stan’s own past.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

• Book Review: The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
• Blog Tour/Book Review: After The Storm by Isabella Muir
• Waiting on Wednesday
• Book Review: Don’t Turn Around by Jessica Barry

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of A Book of Secrets by Kate Morrison as part of the blog tour. 

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Places In Books I’d Love to Live but I decided there were some Authors’ Homes I’d Have Loved To Live In.  I also publication day spotlight on Courage Without Grace, the new book by Jeannie Zokan, author of The Existence of Pity.

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…as well as have a good nose around to see what books others have plucked from their shelves.  

Thursday – I shared my publication day review of the first in a new historical mystery series, The Drowned City by K. J. Maitland.  

Friday – I published a spotlight feature about The Cotillion Brigade, the new book by Glen Craney, author of The Virgin of the Wind Rose.

Saturday – I celebrated the first Saturday of a new month by taking part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme.  See where my chain led me from this month’s starting book, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

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

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New arrivals

The Cotillion Brigade by Glen Craney  (ebook, courtesy of the author)

Georgia burns. Sherman’s Yankees are closing in. Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?

1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.

Five years later, secession and total war against the homefronts of Dixie hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history. Nannie defies the traditions of Southern gentility by forming a women’s militia and drilling it four long years to prepare for battle. With their men dead, wounded, or retreating with the Confederate armies, only Captain Nannie and her Fighting Nancies stand between their beloved homes and the Yankee torches.

Hardened into a slashing Union cavalry colonel, Hugh duels Rebel generals Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest across Tennessee and Alabama. As the war churns to a bloody climax, he is ordered to drive a burning stake deep into the heart of the Confederacy. Yet one Georgia town – which by mocking coincidence bears Hugh’s last name – stands defiant in his path.

Read the remarkable story of the Southern women who formed America’s most famous female militia and the Union officer whose life they changed forever.

A Corruption of Blood (Raven, Fisher, and Simpson, #3) by Ambrose Parry (eARC, courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley)

Edinburgh. This city will bleed you dry.

Dr Will Raven is a man seldom shocked by human remains, but even he is disturbed by the contents of a package washed up at the Port of Leith. Stranger still, a man Raven has long detested is pleading for his help to escape the hangman.

Back at 52 Queen Street, Sarah Fisher has set her sights on learning to practise medicine. Almost everyone seems intent on dissuading her from this ambition, but when word reaches her that a woman has recently obtained a medical degree despite her gender, Sarah decides to seek her out.

Raven’s efforts to prove his erstwhile adversary’s innocence are failing and he desperately needs Sarah’s help. Putting their feelings for one another aside, their investigations will take them to both extremes of Edinburgh’s social divide, where they discover that wealth and status cannot alter a fate written in the blood.

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (hardcover)

What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Deception of Harriet Fleet by Helen Scarlett
• Book Review: There’s No Story There & Other Wartime Writing by Inez Holden
• Top Ten Tuesday
• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Tuscan House by Angela Petch
• Waiting on Wednesday
• My Five Favourite March Reads