Category: Read

#WWWWednesday – 12th February 2025

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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!

What I’m Currently Reading

Front cover of Butter by Asak Yuzuki

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (Fourth Estate)

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer”, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Front cover of The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway

The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway (eARC, epoque press)

Returning from Brazil with his wife and daughter, Oisín is looking to rebuild a life in Ireland and reconnect with his mother, Brigid, who has early onset Alzheimer’s. As her condition deteriorates she starts to speak Irish, the language of her youth, and reflect on her childhood dreams and aspirations.

Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery, and as past traumas are exposed they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are.

The Language of Remembering asks how we connect to the people we love and how we move on from the past to find meaning in the present.

A Year in a Small Garden by Frances Tophill (BBC Books)

A Year in a Small Garden follows Frances Tophill as she creates her new garden in a terraced house in Devon. Working in a small space, the book documents her journey to bring life to her garden, including tips and tricks for you to achieve similar results in whatever spaces you have at home.

The book is structured around the stages of building her small garden, and branches out to include small community gardens Frances works with, as well as projects to create in small spaces at home – with a focus on growing food and planting in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way.

Featuring new photography shot throughout the year, as well as Frances’s own journal and garden notebooks, this book will not only give you an insight into Frances’s journey creating her first garden – but will help you create a beautiful, productive, garden at home.

What I’ve Just Read

Front cover of A Cold Wind From Moscow by Rory Clements

A Cold Wind From Moscow by Rory Clements (Zaffre) 

Winter, 1947. Britain’s secret services have been penetrated. The country is more vulnerable than ever – and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin knows it. He decides it is time to send his master of ‘Special Tasks’ to create extra chaos.

But Stalin has a more important motive than mere disruption. He has a man on the inside who must be protected at all costs – a communist super-spy who has the secrets of the atomic bomb at his fingertips.

Freya Bentall, a senior MI5 officer, no longer knows who to trust and is left with one to bring in an outsider whose loyalty is beyond question – Cambridge professor Tom Wilde. His task: to find the traitor in MI5.

Bentall has three main suspects and Wilde must get close to them all. That means delving deep into the criminal underworld, attaching himself to the cultural elite of the arts and finding a way into the extreme reaches of British politics.

As winter bites and violence erupts, Wilde faces an uphill battle to protect those he loves from merciless killers. And he knows that one slip will spell disaster for the country – and his family. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Front cover of The Paris Dancer by Nicola Rayner

The Paris Dancer by Nicola Rayner (eARC, Aria via NetGalley)

Paris, 1938. Annie Mayer arrives in France with dreams of becoming a ballerina. But when the war reaches Paris, she’s forced to keep her Jewish heritage a secret. Then a fellow dancer offers her a lifeline: a ballroom partnership that gives her a new identity. Together, Annie and her partner captivate audiences across occupied Europe, using her newfound fame and alias to aid the Resistance.

New York, 2012. Miriam, haunted by her past, travels from London to New York to settle her great-aunt Esther’s estate. Among Esther’s belongings, she discovers notebooks detailing a secret family history and the story of a brave dancer who risked everything to help Jewish families during the war.

As Miriam uncovers Esther’s life in Europe, she realises the story has been left for her to finish. Grappling with loss and the possibility of new love, Miriam must find the strength to reconcile her past and embrace her future.

Book Review – The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor @vintagebooks

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About the Book

Front cover of The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome. Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.

During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him – one where the consequences could be lethal.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: Harvill Secker
Publication date: 30th January 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Ghosts of Rome is the second book in the author’s Rome Escape Line trilogy. I loved My Father’s House but, if that’s possible, I loved this one even more. As before, the book has a wonderful cast of characters. (Many of them were real people who committed acts of the utmost bravery as part of the actual Choir.)

The author brings each character brilliantly to life, in particular through the invented transcripts of interviews recorded twenty years after the events, allowing us to hear the distinctive voices the author has created for them. For example, the acerbic wit and Irish lilt of diplomat’s wife, Delia Kiernan (my favourite) or the Cockney accent and sardonic asides of John May.

As the book opens, Gestapo chief Paul Hauptmann is under increasing pressure from Berlin to bring an end to the activities of ‘The Choir’ and capture the escaped Allied prisoners hidden in places across Rome and in the Vatican City itself. Not only is his career on the line but the lives of his wife and daughters too, removed for ‘safe keeping’ by Himmler. Increasingly he tries to justify his own actions: the brutal interrogation of prisoners, the meticulous drawing up of death lists for savage reprisals. ‘Important to push away weakness. Too far along the road. Sometimes a man of peace must perform terrible duties, he tells himself. I had to do what I did, there was no other choice.’ And he has become obsessed with one particular member of the Choir, Contessa Giovanna Landini (known as Jo to her comrades).

Having taken possession of her palazzo, he wanders its corridors admiring her furniture, selecting paintings he thinks Hitler might appreciate, examining her extensive wardrobe and choosing gowns to send to his wife Elise in a vain attempt to win back her favour. (He’s almost certain she’s being unfaithful.) He raids the Contessa’s wine cellar, listens to her records, examines her books and takes midnight strolls in her garden. ‘She feels close to him here – every garden is a portrait of its owner.’ Most creepily of all, he takes to sleeping in her bed.

For The Choir, operating the escape line has become a cat and mouse game but one in which there are thousands of Nazi cats for every mouse. No mercy is shown to those who harbour escapees, there are tempting rewards for those prepared to inform and harsh reprisals on the population of Rome for German soldiers killed in acts of resistance. Add to this Allied bombing raids, food and fuel shortages, and Rome has become a very uncomfortable place in which to live.

The Choir’s missions outside the Vatican have become increasingly dangerous and the burden of responsibility for so many lives is huge. There are escapees hidden in every nook and cranny of Rome: abandoned buildings, crawl spaces, cellars, tunnels, even catacombs. It weighs on all the members of The Choir, but particularly on Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty whom the others look to for guidance. He is physically and mentally exhausted, and finding less and less solace in prayer. ‘Pallid, puff-eyed, watchful, uncombed, he has started to acquire the aura of a man who lives in shadow.’ No wonder, with a bounty on his head. As he confides to Jo, ‘I’m lately on a mission into a shadowy old dungeon – my head – to rescue a beaten-down prisoner – my soul.’

Like My Father’s House, the book combines thrilling action scenes that are full of tension with wonderful writing. There’s also an intriguing sub-plot involving an injured airman that explores the sort of moral dilemmas members of The Choir face. Is saving the life of one man worth endangering the lives of others, including your comrades? Can you live with yourself if you turn away and do nothing?

By the end of the book we know, sadly, there are characters we won’t meet again. But the work must go on because the Nazis are not yet defeated and a savage beast is often most dangerous when cornered.

I found The Ghosts of Rome an utterly compelling historical thriller, full of tension and authentic detail. Although I shall be sorry for the series to end, at the same time I cannot wait for the final book.

In three words: Gripping, suspenseful, immersive

About the Author

Author Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father’s House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessey Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeline Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

Connect with Joseph
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