Category: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 25th June 2025

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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

I’m (still) listening to the audiobook of the first of my 20 Books of Summer 2025, I’m reading a book from my NetGalley shelf and a book from my TBR pile.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster, telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D cup that he wasn’t married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but there she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica, aged five; greedy, cross-patch Gillian, who refused to be ignored; and Ruby…

Ruby tells the story of the family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby’s own life.

One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter (Allison & Busby via NetGalley)

Ferrara, Italy. 1940. Lili Passigli is studying at the University of Ferrara when Mussolini’s Racial Laws deem her of ‘inferior’ Jewish descent, blindsiding her completely. As Hitler’s strength grows across Europe, Lili’s world begins to shrink around her, with the papers awash in Fascist propaganda and the city walls desecrated with anti-semitic slurs. When Germany invades northern Italy, Lili and her best friend Esti find themselves on their own in Nazi-occupied territory.

With the help of the Resistance, Lili and Esti flee with Esti’s two-year-old son Theo, in tow, facing a harrowing journey south toward the Allies and freedom. On this trek through war-torn Italy, they will face untold challenges and devastating decisions.

Green Ink by Stephen May (Swift Press)

David Lloyd George is at Chequers for the weekend with his mistress Frances Stevenson, fretting about the fact that his involvement in selling public honours is about to be revealed by one Victor Grayson. Victor is a bisexual hedonist and former firebrand socialist MP turned secret-service informant. Intent on rebuilding his profile as the leader of the revolutionary Left, he doesn’t know exactly how much of a hornet’s nest he’s stirred up. Doesn’t know that this is, in fact, his last day.

No one really knows what happened to Victor Grayson – he vanished one night in late September 1920, having threatened to reveal all he knew about the prime minister’s involvement in selling honours. Was he murdered by the British government? By enemies in the socialist movement (who he had betrayed in the war)? Did he fall in the Thames drunk? Did he vanish to save his own life, and become an antiques dealer in Kent?

Whatever the truth, Green Ink imagines what might have been with brio, humour and humanity; and is a reminder that the past was once as alive as we are today.

What I’ve Just Read

SPIT by David Brennan (epoque press)

Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion.

Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything – nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village’s half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled.

As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit?

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid (Polygon)

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions – a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her – because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.

As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee (William Heinemann) #20BooksOfSummer25

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt.

Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past – a journey that can be guided only by one’s conscience.

Book Review – Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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About the Book

Front cover of Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: feckless, jobless, in need of a distraction.

Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.

They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.

And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.

It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.

What could possibly go wrong?

Format: Paperback (288 pages) Publisher: Fig Tree
Publication date: Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Glorious Exploits on Goodreads

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My Review

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025, Glorious Exploits transports the reader to Syracuse in Sicily in the 5th century BC during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and its allies. (I knew next to nothing about the Peloponnesian War but, to be honest, you don’t really need to know anything about it to enjoy the book.)

At the point the book opens an Athenian expedition to Sicily has ended in disaster with its fleet sunk and thousands of Athenians taken prisoner. With nowhere else to house them they’ve been imprisoned in a quarry in the baking sun barely surviving on the meagre rations they’re given. Sounds like a grim backdrop to a book doesn’t it? But somehow the author manages to find the humanity and the humour, albeit dark humour, in the situation through two brilliantly imagined characters: Lampo and Gelon.

Lampo is our narrator, telling the story with a delightful Irish lilt and wry humour. Somehow the modern dialogue doesn’t seem out of place, it’s just really funny. Shopping for supplies for an outing, he says, ‘I also grab an Italian white which the vintner says is “causing quite the stir”.’

Gelon has a passion for Greek plays, in particular those of the Athenian playwright Euripides and, fearing the defeat of Athens may mean his work being lost forever, comes up with the seemingly crazy notion of staging Euripides’ play Medea, and his new work The Trojan Women, using some of the prisoners as cast and the quarry as a theatre. Because perhaps it’s possible to be at war with another nation and still appreciate their art? Ironic then that Medea and The Trojan Women are about revenge and the consequences of war.

Lampo and Gelon hold casting sessions (with the promise of more generous rations for the successful) and set out to obtain financial backing for the enterprise, sets and costumes. They succeed in finding a patron who is an avid collector of objects from across the world. One object in his collection is particularly curious.

Their bold undertaking is fraught with problems but as Gelon says, ‘It’s poetry we’re doing… It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy’. Although they do meet with success, it quickly turns to tragedy as what’s being portrayed on stage is played out in real life, showing that, although art can convey universal emotions, unfortunately one of those is hate. It results in Lampo and Gelon embarking on an even more onerous task but one that shows a finer side of humanity.

Lampo and Gelon have been friends since childhood and their friendship is heartwarming. Lampo finds comfort in Gelon’s certainty, whilst Gelon depends on Lampo’s seemingly endless ability to get them out of sticky situations. But there’s sadness beneath the surface in both their lives. Gelon has lost his wife and son. Heartbreakingly, he often thinks he glimpses her but it always turns out to be just an illusion. Lampo, lame in one leg, is looking for love but the woman who’s captured his heart isn’t free to choose her own destiny. His efforts to rectify the situation are endearing.

Glorious Exploits is a terrifically entertaining story of friendship, and of optimism; the belief that ‘something’ will turn up. As Lampo says, ‘Anything is possible, and it always has been. For the world was once just a dream in a god’s eye, and the man who gives up on himself makes that very same god look away’.

In three words: Imaginative, funny, immersive

About the Author

Author Ferdia Lennon

Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. (Photo: Amazon author page)

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