Reviews – Page 125 – What Cathy Read Next…

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 Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill Secker)

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.

The Ghosts of Paris (Billie Walker Mystery #2) by Tara Moss (Verve Books)

It’s 1947. The world continues to grapple with the fallout of the Second World War, and former war reporter Billie Walker is finding her feet as an investigator.

When a wealthy client hires Billie and her assistant Sam to track down her missing husband, the trail leads Billie back to London and Paris, where Billie’s own painful memories also lurk. Jack Rake, Billie’s wartime lover and, briefly, husband, is just one of the millions of people who went missing in Europe during the war. What was his fate after they left Paris together?

As Billie’s search for her client’s husband takes her to both the swanky bars at Paris’s famous Ritz hotel and to the dank basements of the infamous Paris morgue, she’ll need to keep her gun at the ready, because something even more terrible than a few painful memories might be following her around the City of Lights…

Recently finished

The House With Nine Locks by Philip Gray (Harvill Secker)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Penguin)

The Endeavour of Elsie Mackay by Flora Johnston (eARC, Allison & Busby via NetGalley)

What Cathy Will Read Next

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.

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place each year on 27th January. It’s a day when people around the world are encouraged to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust as well as the millions more murdered as a result of Nazi persecution of other groups. These include Roma people, Polish and Slavic citizens, the disabled, gay people, political opponents and trade unionists. To find out more, visit the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website.

Here are four novels I’ve read that explore aspects of the Holocaust along with a survivor’s memoir. Links from each title will take you to my full review.

The Draughtsman by Robert Lautner – Ernst Beck has a new job at prestigious engineering firm, Topf & Sons. He is assigned to the Special Ovens Department and tasked with annotating plans for new crematoria that are deliberately designed to burn day and night. Their destination: the concentration camps. Topf’s new client: the SS. Ernst must choose between turning a blind eye, or speaking out for the fate of thousands.

All the Broken Places by John Boyne – The sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the book is an unsparing exploration of how the sins of the past weigh on individuals and the burden of complicity. ‘By doing nothing, you did everything. By taking no responsibility, you bear all responsibility.’

Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant – It’s 1939 and Meike, a young disabled girl, is sent to an institution supposedly designed to safeguard disabled people for the duration of the war. However it’s no sanctuary but a place of depraved cruelty in which the inmates, all either mentally or physically disabled, are treated as less than human. ‘Lumps of flesh, that is all. Worthless, useless idiots, all of them, serving no purpose, of no value.’

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis – Set in Auschwitz, the book is narrated by three characters: a German officer in charge of the construction using camp labour of a factory to produce synthetic rubber; the camp commandant (based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss); and a member of a group of Jewish prisoners tasked with escorting fellow Jews to the gas chamber and disposing of their remains.

Living Among the Dead by Adena Bernstein Astrowsky – Subtitled My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story, the book describes how young Mania Lichtenstein witnessed the massacre of Jews by German death squads in the city of Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) in July 1941, was interned for three years in a labour camp but managed to escape and hide in the forests until the end of the war.