Category: Read

#WWWWednesday – 15th March 2023

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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

The RomanticThe Romantic by William Boyd (Viking) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss.

Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is.

This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.

A Complicated MatterA Complicated Matter by Anne Youngson (eARC, Doubleday via NetGalley)

I used to believe the world had been created for me; every stone and grain of sand. As I grew older, I began to think of myself as something tacked on to the edge.

1939, London: From McPhail’s Passage to Kensington’s Grand Palace Hotel, Rose Dunbar is evacuated from her humble home on the Rock of Gibraltar and dropped into a chaotic city of falling bombs, perplexing class rules and bad weather. Despite being ‘flagrantly foreign’ to the locals, she becomes an efficient go-between for the upper-class ladies helping out with the war effort and her own tribe of noisy displaced families.

It is only when she is shifted to the countryside to become secretary to the plain-speaking and sightless Major Inchbold that Rose’s dizzying journey to womanhood will become more surreal than ever, as she drinks tea at the vicarage, shields her best friend from abuse and stands up for the lower orders. But Rose’s greatest dilemma is yet to come, as she must decide where her home – and her heart – really lies.

Recently finished

No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby (Aria) 

The Spy Across the Water by James Naughtie (Head of Zeus)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The SettlementThe Settlement by Jock Serong (Text Publishing, Australia) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women.

He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…

But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal.

In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna—a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself.

#BookReview #Ad No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby

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No Life for a LadyAbout the Book

Violet Hamilton is a woman who knows her own mind. Which, in 1896, can make things a little complicated…

At 28, Violet’s father is beginning to worry she will never find a husband. But every suitor he presents, Violet finds a new and inventive means of rebuffing. Because Violet does not want to marry. She wants to work, and make her own way in the world.

But more than anything, she wants to find her mother Lily, who disappeared from Hastings Pier 10 years earlier. Finding the missing is no job for a lady, but when Violet hires a seaside detective to help, she sets off a chain of events that will put more than just her reputation at risk.

Can Violet solve the mystery of Lily Hamilton’s vanishing before it’s too late?

Format: eARC (328 pages)                 Publisher: Aria
Publication date: 2nd March 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find No Life for a Lady on Goodreads

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My Review

Those looking for a light-hearted, cosy historical mystery will find they’ve come to the right place with No Life for a Lady. Violet is a sparky, likeable character who is determined to resist her father’s efforts to marry her off. There’s fun right from the beginning as Violet recalls the ways she’s managed to fend off potential suitors to date. This includes pushing one such unfortunate into a boating lake and inserting a hot teapot between herself and another.

It was unclear to me why Violet has waited ten years to make a serious attempt to investigate her mother’s disappearance but once she embarks upon it she has no intention of stopping. Except that her chosen detective turns out to be no ‘knight in shining armour’. (Violet, you should have trusted your instincts). Suddenly, Violet wonders if she’s really ready to find out her mother’s secrets and to have them become the talk of the ladies of Hastings, not to mention the men. She’d wanted discretion, wishing to keep the investigation from her father.

Although it makes for some slapstick humour, I wouldn’t have minded if the author had made Violet slightly less ditzy. She’s frequently tripping over things, bumping into lamp posts and even getting locked inside a price of furniture at one point.  She’s also rather naive although, to be fair, that does lead to some laugh out loud moments, such as Violet’s errand on behalf of a Mrs Monk, the same lady who corrects a few of Violet’s misapprehensions about ‘marital intimacy’.  And, for a prospective detective, Violet is a little quick to reach conclusions based on limited evidence, including about one particular person.  However, she’s up for pretty much anything – except house cleaning – leading one character to remark ‘You are the most infuriating female I’ve ever met’.

Set in 1896, there’s a nice depiction of a Victoran seaside town complete with bathing carriages, small boys dressed in sailor suits and ladies promenading in their finery, although I’m not sure the phrase ‘get his finger out’ would have been in common parlance then. If I’m wrong, I stand corrected.

Finding the solution to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance provides Violet with grounds for believing she has what it takes to become a detective. It also signals there is potentially more fun to come in the company of this particular Lady Detective.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Aria Fiction via NetGalley.

In three words: Light-hearted, funny, entertaining

Try something similar: Duels and Deception by Cindy Anstey

Hannah DolbyAbout the Author

Hannah Dolby’s first job was in the circus and she has aimed to keep life as interesting since. She trained as a journalist in Hastings and has worked in PR for many years, promoting museums, galleries, palaces, gardens and even Dolly the sheep. She completed the Curtis Brown selective three-month novel writing course, and she won runner-up in the Comedy Women in Print Awards for this novel with the prize of a place on an MA in Comedy Writing at the University of Falmouth.  She currently lives in London. (Photo: Twitter profile)

Connect with Hannah
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