Category: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 11th September 2024

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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

PiranesiPiranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury) 

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Terra IncognitaTerra Incognita by Simon Turney (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

An empire on the edge. A scheme for glory. A plan to control the greatest river in the world.

61 AD. Under Emperor Nero, Rome is rich and powerful, but dissatisfaction is rife. The emperor himself schemes avidly to increase his wealth and indulge his pleasures – and slaughter his many enemies – but also seeks glory.

The great River Nile, life-giver to the Egyptians, the Kushites, and many other kingdoms through the African continent. Nobody from the Roman Empire has ever tracked the Nile to its source… but if it can be done, mastery of the greatest waterway in the known world – and with it, the control of friend and foe alike – may be possible.

But the price of obtaining such knowledge will be terrible. Those soldiers selected to command and serve on the mission will be at risk the moment they pass beyond the Roman borders of Egypt. Kingdoms and tribes hostile to Rome, vast swathes of desert, fierce beasts… and the price of failure hanging over their heads, for Nero is not an easy man to please.

Recently finished

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (Viking)

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy’, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story… (Review to follow)

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans (Transworld)

It’s 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home. But ‘home’ is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever. And worst of all – following the death of his heroic older brother – Valentine is now Sir Valentine, and is responsible for the whole bloody place.

To Valentine, it’s a millstone; to Zena Baxter, who has never really had a home before being evacuated there with her small daughter, it’s a place of wonder and sentiment, somewhere that she can’t bear to leave. But Zena has been living with a secret, and the end of the war means she has to face a reckoning of her own… (Review to follow)

Hemlock Bay (Rachel Savernake #5) by Martin Edwards (Head of Zeus)

Basil Palmer plans to murder a man called Louis Carson. The problem is he doesn’t know anything about his intended victim, not who he is nor where he lives.

After learning that Carson runs a hotel in Hemlock Bay, a playground for the wealthy and privileged, Palmer invents a false identity. Posing as Dr Seamus Doyle, he journeys to the coast plotting murder along the way.

Meanwhile, after hearing a fortune teller has predicted a murder in a place called Hemlock Bay, amateur sleuth Rachel Savernake rents a cottage there, determined to discover for herself the serpent that has slithered into this idyllic Eden.

Murder does occur at the resort, and after meeting a mysterious doctor called Seamus Doyle, Rachel finds herself entering a maze of intricate mysteries – just where she likes to be… (Review to follow for blog tour)

 

What Cathy Will Read Next

Shy CreaturesShy Creatures by Clare Chambers (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson) 

In all failed relationships there is a point that passes unnoticed at the time, which can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park.

Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen’s home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

Book Review – A Place Without Pain by Simon Bourke @Simon_Bourke28

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About the Book

Book cover of A Place Without Pain by Simon Bourke

Aidan Collins has always been an outsider, a weirdo, an oddball. But the arrival of his worldly, urbane cousin Dan, changes his life completely. Dan introduces Aidan to alcohol, to girls, to a life beyond the four walls of his bedroom, and eventually, to the night out to end all nights out in Dublin.

What he sees in the capital, what he’s exposed to, also changes Aidan’s life, but not in a good way. A scene behind a closed door haunts him, torments him, leaving behind scars which may never heal.

Format: ebook (518 pages) Publisher:
Publication date: 30th January 2024 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find A Place Without Pain on Goodreads

Purchase A Place Without Pain from Amazon UK [link provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme]

My Review

Simon Bourke’s first book, And The Birds Kept On Singing published in 2017, is one I frequently recommend as deserving more attention. It’s one of those books that only has a few reviews but those it has are overwhelmingly positive. So I was delighted when Simon got in touch to let me know he had published his second novel. You can read my Q&A with Simon about A Place Without Pain here.

The author really gets under the skin of the book’s narrator, Aidan Collins. It’s fair to say he’s a troubled soul, crippled with anxiety that means he hides away in his bedroom for much of the time, playing computer games, watching films or porn. It’s his way of escaping from a world which frankly frightens him, where he feels he doesn’t fit in. Although intelligent, he’s never had a job, relying instead on welfare payments. His solution to problems or challenging situations is to ignore them or run away from them. ‘Everyone hates you. You’d better not go out. Stay here where it’s safe.’ When opportunities do present themselves he often wastes them, leaving him filled with self-loathing at his own failures.

You’d think from this that Aidan is a pretty unlikeable character but, in the hands of the author, you can’t help rooting for him even if at times you’re left completely exasperated by his actions. My overriding feeling was one of sadness particularly when just as it seems things are looking up something happens to propel him back into misery. There were moments I wanted to cheer and others where I found myself thinking, ‘Oh, Aidan, Aidan, why are you doing that?’. Sadly, the latter were more frequent than the former.

The traumatic event Aidan witnesses on a rare night out is a psychological scar he carries throughout his life. He’s plagued with guilt about what he did, or rather didn’t do. He should have been a hero, instead he knows he was a coward. It sort of epitomises what his life has been like. In an effort to bury the memories of what he witnessed, to find the place without pain of the book’s title, he turns to alcohol and drugs. They welcome him with a warm embrace. ‘I was a child of the drink now’. For a long time his days are one long round of visits to the off-licence and drinking himself into a stupor. His parents are either passively complicit or unable to find a way to modify his behaviour. The drink doesn’t stop the pain or his feelings of despair and utter worthlessness. As he observes, ‘the booze was proving an abusive parent.’

Only a chance encounter stops him from taking an irrevocable step. It sets him on a new path, one which offers the promise of turning his life around if only he can break the cycle of self-destructive behaviour. But maybe believing yourself to be a hero is just as dangerous as believing yourself a failure.

Aidan’s story is an emotional rollercoaster with slow ascents followed by dizzying drops. It will take you to dark places and includes some scenes that are difficult to read. The epitome of a character-led book, A Place Without Pain is a hard-hitting story of loneliness and the struggle to overcome your demons.

My thanks to the author for my digital review copy.

In three words: Powerful, gritty, moving

About the Author

Author Simon Bourke

Simon is a journalist by day and an author by night (and occasionally on the weekends). If given the choice he would be an author by day, night, weekends, and everything in between, but he must persevere with the journalism while he waits for his books to become best-sellers. He currently lives in County Wexford. A Place Without Pain is his second novel.

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