Category: Read

My Week in Books – 28th February 2021

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of She Came To Stay by Eleni Kyriacou as part of the blog tour.

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books That Made Me Laugh Out Loud.  I had a chuckle about how long some of the books on my shelves have been waiting for me to read them.  I also shared my publication day review of historical crime mystery The Art of the Assassin by Kevin Sullivan.

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 review of The Northern Reach by W. S. Winslow as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I published my review of Nick by Michael Farris Smith, a novel imagining the early life of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

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

New arrivals

To the Fair Land by Lucienne Boyce (ebook, courtesy of the author and Rachel’s Random Resources)

In 1789 struggling writer Ben Dearlove rescues a woman from a furious Covent Garden mob. The woman is ill and in her delirium cries out the name “Miranda”. Weeks later an anonymous novel about the voyage of the Miranda to the fabled Great Southern Continent causes a sensation. Ben decides to find the author everyone is talking about. He is sure the woman can help him – but she has disappeared.

It is soon clear that Ben is involved in something more dangerous than the search for a reclusive writer. Who is the woman and what is she running from? Who is following Ben? And what is the Admiralty trying to hide? Before he can discover the shocking truth Ben has to get out of prison, catch a thief, and bring a murderer to justice.

Cecily by Annie Garthwaite (eARC, courtesy of Viking via NetGalley) 

Cecily Neville marries a traitor’s son when she is sixteen. It’s a risk, but one she is willing to take. For though Richard Duke of York’s name brings great danger, it also brings a claim to the throne. And as a woman who watched Joan of Arc burn without flinching, Cecily is not afraid.

Politics and children soon become her life’s work. Politics in order to survive. Children to marry off, and to teach to serve their King. But also, should the opportunity arise, to take his place…

Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft by Samantha Silva (eARC, courtesy of Allison & Busby via NetGalley) 

‘Now, daughter, I’m to tell you a story to coax you into the world…’

Justice. Equality. Life lived to its fullest. These were the tenets at the heart of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life; the mother of Mary Shelley and arguably the world’s first feminist.

August, 1797. When Mary Wollstonecraft’s labour begins on a fine summer’s day everything appears normal. However, after her baby girl, her second daughter, is delivered, both mother and child will fight for survival. In that time, Mary Wollstonecraft weaves the tale of her life to bind her frail daughter close and to give herself a reason to fight, even as her own strength wanes. She describes a life lived against the conventions and restrictions of her time. A life that urgently demanded equality for herself and all women. A life that tempered triumph with loss.

Conjuring the all-too-brief moment when the stories of influential mother and daughter overlapped, Love and Fury is a tribute to the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative and passing that legacy on to her daughter.

The Consequences of Fear (Maisie Dobbs #16) by Jacqueline Winspear (eARC, courtesy of Allison & Busby via NetGalley) 

September 1941. While on a delivery, young Freddie Hackett, a message runner for a government office, witnesses an argument that ends in murder. Crouching in the doorway of a bombed-out house, Freddie waits until the coast is clear. But when he arrives at the delivery address, he’s shocked to come face to face with the killer.

Dismissed by the police when he attempts to report the crime, Freddie goes in search of a woman he once met when delivering a message: Maisie Dobbs. While Maisie believes the boy and wants to help, she must maintain extreme caution: she’s working secretly for the Special Operations Executive, assessing candidates for crucial work with the French resistance. Her two worlds collide when she spots the killer in a place she least expects. She soon realizes she’s been pulled into the orbit of a man who has his own reasons to kill—reasons that go back to the last war.

As Maisie becomes entangled in a power struggle between Britain’s intelligence efforts in France and the work of Free French agents operating across Europe, she must also contend with the lingering question of Freddie Hackett’s state of mind. What she uncovers could hold disastrous consequences for all involved.

Blood Runs Thicker by Sarah Hawkswood (eARC, courtesy of Allison & Busby via NetGalley)

August 1144. Osbern de Lench is known far and wide as a hard master, whose temper is perpetually frayed. After his daily ride to survey his land, his horse returns to the hall riderless, and the lifeless body of the lord is found soon after. Was it the work of thieves, or something closer to home?

With an heir who is cast in the same hot-tempered mould, sworn enemies for neighbours and something amiss in the relationship between Osbern and his wife, undersheriff Hugh Bradecote, the wily Serjeant Catchpoll and apprentice Walkelin have suspects aplenty.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Garden of Angels by David Hewson
  • Top Ten Tuesday 
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Masters of Rome (Rise of Emperors #2) by Gordon Doherty & Simon Turney
  • Book Review: Dangerous Women by Hope Adams
  • Book Review: Stella by Takis Würger
  • #6Degrees of Separation

#BookReview Nick by Michael Farris Smith @noexitpress

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NickAbout the Book

Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak and yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)           Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 25th February 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

Find Nick on Goodreads

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My Review

The year 2021 marks the 125th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, coming out of copyright in the USA. Nick is described by the publishers as Michael Farris Smith’s attempt to pull Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, ‘out of the shadows and into the spotlight’.

In his foreword to Nick, Farris Smith notes that, in The Great Gatsby, Nick provides very little information about himself. Essentially, the reader knows only that he fought in the Great War, he was from the Midwest and that he was turning thirty years of age. Using this sparse information as a starting point, the author sets out to imagine the events that shaped the character of Nick Carraway the reader will meet in The Great Gatsby.

Of the three things mentioned above, the fact he fought in the Great War is the biggest focus of Nick. Indeed, the scenes in the trenches of the Western Front were the most compelling parts of the book for me. There is a particularly gripping episode in which Nick joins the rest of his troop on an advance over rain-soaked terrain in a forest held by German forces. Later, Nick volunteers to work in the tunnels being excavated under the enemy trenches, becoming a “listener” whose role is to detect the sound of German troops or tunnellers. In a nod to his future role as narrator of The Great Gatsby, he proves himself an exceptionally good listener.  Later in the book, whilst working for a brief time in the family hardware shop, the author has him become a good observer too, noticing the mannerisms of customers and able to predict their needs before they express them.

Although the sections set in the war were descriptively the most compelling parts of the book for me, of course there is no sense of jeopardy for Nick himself, only for others around him; we know Nick will survive to appear in The Great Gatsby. What the author can do is explore the experiences that may have shaped him. Farris Smith does so by imagining a love affair between Nick and a woman called Ella he meets while on leave in Paris, and by having Nick haunted in the years to come by traumatic wartime memories that manifest themselves in nightmares and panic attacks.

There is very little reference to Nick’s early life in the Midwest, except for some brief childhood memories of his father’s despair at Nick’s mother’s periods of depression. Rather than returning home after the war, there is a long section of the book in which Nick travels to New Orleans. The destination is chosen on a whim reflecting the restlessness at the heart of his character. There he becomes involved with Judah, a wounded veteran of the Great War. ‘And if there is one thing the lost are able to recognise it is the others who are just as wounded and wandering.’  Some of the melodramatic events that follow felt a little out of character with the rest of the book for me although the atmosphere of the period is vividly recreated.

Nick is not so much a prequel to The Great Gatsby as a homage to Fitzgerald’s novel. Indeed, it’s only in the very final pages that Nick arrives at the location of the opening scenes of that book. This means readers unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby will find themselves at no disadvantage and can base their judgment of Nick solely on how successfully they feel Farris Smith has created a story about a young man who just happens to be called Nick.  For readers like myself who have read Fitzgerald’s original, it has definitely made me curious to read The Great Gatsby again and pay more attention to its narrator.

My thanks to Lisa at No Exit Press for my proof copy of Nick. You can watch a replay of the online launch of Nick during which Michael Farris Smith talked about the book with Alison Flood of The Guardian by clicking on the following link:  https://www.crowdcast.io/e/book-launch-of-nick-by 

In three words: Dramatic, intriguing, assured

Try something similar: The Road To Grantchester by James Runcie

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Michael Farris SmithAbout the Author

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and numerous others, and have been named Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has been a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

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