Category: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 11th October 2023

whatcathyreadnext7 Comments

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 Book of FireThe Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri (Manilla Press via Readers First)

This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him. I left him and now he may be dead.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life in a tiny Greek Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the region’s natural beauty wiped out.

In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation.

The Socialite SpyThe Socialite Spy by Sarah Sigal (eARC, Lume Books)

London, 1936. Socialite and journalist Lady Pamela More pens the popular ‘Agent of Influence’ column, writing wittily about fashion and high society. For her latest piece, she interviews Wallis Simpson, the newly crowned king’s American mistress. That’s when she’s approached by MI5.

Her mission: spy on the royal couple and report on their connections with Nazi Germany.

As she navigates the treacherous world of international espionage, Pamela uses her skills of observation and intuition to infiltrate Wallis’ inner circle. But Europe is unstable, and international spies lurk on every corner.

Does Pamela have what it takes to survive the currents of espionage? Or is she in over her head?

Recently finished

Wolves of Winter (Essex Dogs #2) by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus)

The Murder Wheel (Joseph Spector #2) by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus)

Sanctuary Motel (Mess Hopkins #1) by Alan Orloff (Level Best Books)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

In Two MindsIn Two Minds (Teifi Valley Coroner #2) by Alis Hawkins (Dome Press)

Harry Probert-Lloyd, a young barrister forced home from London by encroaching blindness, has begun work as the acting coroner of Teifi Valley with solicitor’s clerk John Davies as his assistant.

When a faceless body is found on an isolated beach, Harry must lead the inquest. But his dogged pursuit of the truth begins to ruffle feathers. Especially when he decided to work alongside a local doctor with a dubious reputation and experimental theories considered radical and dangerous.

Refusing to accept easy answers might not only jeopardise Harry’s chance to be elected coroner permnantly but could, it seems implicate his own family in a crime.

#BookReview Byron and Shelley by Glenn Haybittle

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About the Book

The characters in Glenn Haybittle’s first collection of short stories are all caught in moments of life that bring about a revelation of identity.

A young woman who, after the war, catches sight of the guard who knocked to the ground her blind grandfather on the platform at Auschwitz. The backstory of the man accused of murdering Martin Luther King. The experience of a young girl on Kristallnacht and the subsequent tragic upheavals in her life. A dance teacher accused of sexually abusing one of his young students. A man constrained to return to his mother and look after her while she goes through dementia. A CIA operative grooming a patsy to take the blame for an assassination.

Format: eARC (285 pages) Publisher: Cheyne Walk
Publication date: 16th October 2023 Genre: Short Stories

Find Byron and Shelley on Goodreads

Purchase links 
Hive | Amazon UK 
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The stories in this collection vary in subject matter and location, and, in particular, in length. Initially I found it hard to detect in all of them the underlying theme of identity described in the blurb. However, gradually I did start to see the connections, some of them obvious (but not necessarily apparent at the time of reading an individual story), some more subtle and others just the odd mention of a name or place. An example of the first is the stories entitled ‘The Patsy’ and ‘Raoul’ whose sinister mood only increases when you read the second story.

There were two standout stories for me. The first was the very moving ‘Mother Love’ in which a son who is caring for his mother suffering with dementia, who has become ‘like a puzzling anagram of herself’, struggles to come to terms with the change in his role, the intimacy of the tasks he has to carry out and the difficult decisions he faces.

The second was ‘The Girls of his Youth’ in which the reader witnesses the chaotic thoughts of a man, possibly also suffering from dementia. Written in a style akin to stream of consciousness, he continually harks back to his past punctuated by a refrain that occurs over and over again. ‘The girls of his youth. The girls of youth break his heart. The girls of his youth make his heart whole again.’

I also enjoyed the first story in the collection, ‘Archaeology’, in which a recently widowed man has to deal with feelings of guilt about his wife’s death and his acute sense of loss. ‘Bereavement is sometimes like wading across a succession of snowfields with no landmark in sight. You are a lone small figure in a vast barren landscape. Other times it’s like a Ferris wheel ride. Like being strapped into a swinging spinning bucket. The dizzying dislocation from familiar grounded reality. The brain regrouping, re-coding, re-evaluating, adjusting itself to a bewildering change in the engrained mental landscape.’ He is also coming to terms with the change in his role, that ‘he’s no longer a husband, just a father’, and gradually realising his limitations as a sole parent to his two young daughters.

The story that gives the collection its title is the longest in the book. Subtitled ‘Brits abroad’ it might just as well have be entitled ‘Brits behaving badly’. Jake arrives in Italy and meets Felix, an actor who has recently played Byron in a film and Ivan, who is writing a biography of Shelley. Alongside their drink and drug fuelled escapades they attempt to discover the whereabouts of a young woman who has mysteriously disappeared. The story’s conclusion is a clever echo of events in the lives of the poets of its title.

The book contains some wonderful descriptive writing and imaginative metaphors. ‘The waves embroider the shingled beach with a ragged silvered stitching; the percussive assent they make as they break and the lamentation as they withdraw over the pebbles seems to come from a distance in time as well as space.’

Byron and Shelley is an interesting and varied collection of stories, with a few misses but also with several that would repay rereading.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Cheyne Walk via NetGalley.

In three words: Intriguing, insightful, diverse

Try something similar: The Wooden Hill by Jamie Guiney

About the Author

Glenn Haybittle is a translator and freelance writer from London who lives in Florence. He currently translates academic books for the Florence University and Italian history books for a Florentine publisher. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

Connect with Glenn
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