Category: Read

#WWWWednesday – 21st January 2026

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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

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.

Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson (Macmillan Business)

“They declined his offer too, not realizing how much the thin-skinned Musk didn’t like it when people said no. Soon enough though, Hassabis got another email. This time, it was from Google.”

When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.

It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence – Open AI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) – started their journeys determined to solve humanity’s greatest problems. But they couldn’t develop their technologies without huge amounts of money – money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table.

From award-winning journalist Parmy Olson, Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they’re now going in. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel, Supremacy is a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and of ruthless, relentless human progress – progress that will impact all of us for years to come.

Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier ( Victor Gollancz)

She set men’s hearts on fire and scandalized a country.

In Regency London, the only way for a woman to succeed is to beat men at their own game. So when Mary Anne Clarke seeks an escape from her squalid surroundings in Bowling Inn Alley, she ventures first into the scurrilous world of the pamphleteers. Her personal charms are such, however, before long she is noticed by the Duke of York.

With her taste for luxury and power, Mary Anne, now a royal mistress, must aim higher. Her lofty connections allow her to establish a thriving trade in military commissions, provoking a scandal that rocks the government and brings personal disgrace.

A vivid portrait of overweening ambition, Mary Anne is set during the Napoleonic Wars and based on the life of du Maurier’s own great-great-grandmother.

What I’ve Just Read

The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)

Kill the pretender. Do not let it be known that there was a pretender to kill.

The year is 1483 and England is in peril. The much-despised Richard III is not long for the throne, and the man who will become Henry VII stands poised to snatch the crown for himself. But for twelve-year-old John Collan, living in a remote village with his widowed father, these matters seem far away.

But history has other plans for John.

Stolen from his family, exiled – first to Oxford, then to Burgundy, and then Ireland – and apprenticed to a series of unscrupulous political operators, he finds himself groomed for power; not as John Collan, but as Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick – and rightful heir to the throne.

Far from home at the Irish court, preparing for a war that will see him become king or die trying, John has just his wits – and the slippery counsel of his host’s daughter, the unconventional Joan – to navigate the choppy waters ahead. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson (Headline)

Kate stretches her legs and turns on the TV while James washes away the traces of their morning. She watches in horror at the unfolding news: the hotel they are staying in has been taken under siege.

She should be making her way home, working on appearing normal, getting ready to re-enter family life with her loving husband Vic and their two adored children. Instead, she is trapped somewhere she shouldn’t be, with a man she definitely doesn’t love.

How will she begin to tell Vic what she is doing here? If her body is found, will it give up the secret of what she’s been up to? She’s been so careful hiding the evidence of her affair: write nothing down, leave no trace. Will he begin to understand why?

For now, Kate can only hide, take a deep breath, and reflect on the series of choices she’s made that have brought her to this moment.

What will her marriage and her life look like, if she makes it out?

Book Review – Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor

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About the Book

It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself.

The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island’s shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island’s harsh, salt-stung landscape.

When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, keen to study the island’s people, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been yearning for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.

Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 25th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Whale Fall on Goodreads

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My Review

Shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025, Whale Fall is a quietly seductive novel that immerses you in the life of a small, remote community. Even twenty years after the end of the First World War, the islanders are still living in its shadow. Many young men left the island to join up but never returned, either killed in action or because they have made a new life on the mainland. Remnants of the war – uniforms, helmets, fragments of naval mines – even still wash up on the shore.

Those that remain on the island scrape a living from traditional activities such as farming and fishing. The island, although beautiful, is a harsh environment in which to live especially when winter storms pummel its coastline and it is cut off from the mainland. The beached whale decaying on the shoreline seems a metaphor for the island’s decline.

Manod has spent her whole life on the island. Her father is a fisherman and the uncertain nature of his occupation means they lead a hand-to-mouth existence. Following the death of their mother, Manod has taken on the role of caring for her young sister. Although she is devoted to her, it’s something that ties her to the island leaving her increasingly frustrated that life is passing her by. Days unfold much as they always have. ‘Reverend Jones’s sermon took its usual path. Prosperous fishing must be prayed for, a trade with a proper godly life, then the shipping forecast for the coming week.’

Because of its remoteness, the outside world barely impinges on island life, until that is the prospect of war looms once again, as well as the arrival of two anthropologists, Joan and Edward, who want to study the islanders’ way of life. As one of the few English speakers on the island, Manod is employed to translate the stories they collect from the islanders. The relationship she forms with them leads her to believe this is the opportunity she has longed for: to make a new life for herself away from the island, to experience things she has only read about in books, and perhaps to find love.

Increasingly, though, she gains the impression they are not interested in portraying the reality of island life but some imagined, sanitised version they’d arrived at even before they set foot on the island. As she says to Joan, ‘The island that’s in your head. I don’t think it exists.’ Irritation at their dismissive attitudes, factual inaccuracies and staged photographs turns to disillusionment and, ultimately, a feeling of betrayal.

There is a haunting quality to Whale Fall in its depiction of a way of life slowly dying in the face of the intrusion of the modern world. I found the conflict Manod feels between her responsibilties and her quiet desperation for a more fulfilling life intensely moving.

In three words: Intimate, atmospheric, evocative
Try something similar: The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford

About the Author

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2020. She has a Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Birmingham on the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Whale Fall is her first novel. (Photo: Instagram profile)

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