Category: Reviews

My Week in Books – 30th August 2020

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I shared my review of The Night of Shooting Stars by Ben Pastor as part of the blog tour.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Questions I’d Ask My Favourite Authors. Also, as part of Women In Translation Month, I shared my review of The Bitchby Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman. 

Wednesday – It wouldn’t be “hump day” without WWW Wednesday, the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…as well as have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.

Thursday – I published my review of my Buchan of the Month for August,  A Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan.

Friday –  I published my review of The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville as part of the blog tour. I also shared an extract from Son of Escobar: First Born by Roberto Sendoya Escobar.

Saturday – I shared my Henley Literary Festival 2020 Reading List, a selection of books by authors appearing (in virtual form) at this year’s Festival.

Phew! Another busy blogging week… As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or so shared my blog posts on social media.

New arrivals

9781912423262Green Hands by Barbara Whitton (ARC, courtesy of Imperial War Museum and Random Things Tours) 

It is 1943, and a month into their service as Land Girls, Bee, Anne and Pauline are dispatched to a remote farm in rural Scotland. Here they are introduced to the realities of ‘lending a hand on the land’, as back-breaking work and inhospitable weather mean they struggle to keep their spirits high. Soon one of the girls falters, and Bee and Pauline receive a new posting to a Northumberland dairy farm.

Detailing their friendship, daily struggles and romantic intrigues with a lightness of touch, Barbara Whitton’s autobiographical novel paints a sometimes funny, sometimes bleak picture of time spent in the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War.

9780241401460The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn (eARC, courtesy of Michael Joseph via NetGalley) 

Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but against all medical odds, he seems revitalized in nature. Together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible.

Now, life beyond The Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult – until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow.

The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit’s instinctive connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.

9781786331403V2 by Robert Harris (eARC, courtesy of Cornerstone via NetGalley)

The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second.

Rudi Graf has dreamt since childhood of sending a rocket to the moon.I nstead, along with his friend Werner von Braun, he has helped create the world’s most sophisticated weapon – the V2 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton warhead that travels at three times the speed of sound. In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat, Hitler orders 10,000 to be built.

Now, in the winter of 1944, Graf finds himself in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland. Haunted and disillusioned, he’s tasked with firing the V2s at London. Nobody understands the volatile, deadly machine better than he does.

Kay Caton-Walsh is an officer in the WAAF. She has experienced at first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. As the rockets rain down, she joins a unit of WAAFs on a mission to newly-liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, the hope is that Kay and her colleagues can locate and destroy the launch sites. But at this stage in the war it’s hard to know who, if anyone, you can trust. For every action on one side, there is an equal and opposite reaction on the other.

As the death toll soars, the separate stories of Graf and Kay ricochet off one another, until in a final explosion of violence their destinies are forced together.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Museum Makers by Rachel Morris
  • Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Make Me Hungry
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: V For Victory by Lissa Evans
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • My Five Favourite August Reads
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Talland House by Maggie Humm
  • Six Degrees of Separation

 

#BookReview The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville @HoZ_Books

whatcathyreadnext

NightoftheFlood Blog TourWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville, which will be published in hardback on 3rd September 2020. My thanks to Lauren at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my proof copy.

Somerville_The Night of the Flood_HBAbout the Book

Summer, 1952. Verity Frost, stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast, is caught between two worlds: the devotion of her childhood friend Arthur, just returned from National Service, and a strange new desire to escape it all. Arthur longs to escape too, but only with Verity by his side.

Into their world steps Jack, a charismatic American pilot flying secret reconnaissance missions off the North Sea coast. But where Verity sees adventure and glamour, Arthur sees only deception. As the water levels rise to breaking point, this tangled web of secrets, lies and passion will bring about a crime that will change all their lives.

Taking the epic real-life North Sea flood as its focus, The Night of the Flood is at once a passionate love story, an atmospheric thriller, and a portrait of a distinctive place in a time of radical social change.

Format: Hardcover (352 pages)              Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 3rd September 2020 Genre: Historical fiction

Find The Night of the Flood on Goodreads

Pre-order/Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Night of the Flood involves not one but several love triangles. And we all know that three into two doesn’t go, that there’s always one left over.

The four main characters all to some extent feel as if they are outsiders. Arthur arrived at Howe Farm, home of the Frost family, as a child evacuee but feels he no longer belongs there. Peter Frost feels isolated by his inability to express his true nature and his sister, Verity, finds the expectations that she will marry and start a family alien to her nature. The most obvious outsider is Jack Doherty, a pilot stationed at the nearby American air base. However, he exudes a confidence and easy charm that enables him to be absorbed into local society in a way someone like Arthur can only dream of. A fifth character, Muriel, floats on the periphery. Once a playmate of the Frost children, she now feels distanced from them by her family’s poverty and social status.

Many of the characters also share a sense of thwarted ambition. Arthur has returned from National Service disappointed with the experience. He has aspirations to be a writer or journalist but finds himself instead acting as delivery boy in his mother’s grocery shop. It doesn’t help that he harbours doubts about his relationship with Verity, his childhood sweetheart. His frustration at times manifests itself in violent thoughts. Peter finds himself landed with the task of trying to rescue the family farm from financial ruin caused by his father’s profligacy, unwillingness to embrace change and descent into despair following a family tragedy. Verity’s hopes of studying and travel seem likely to be thwarted at the first hurdle.

In creating such a complex web of relationships, the author has skilfully created the ingredients for a dramatic and enthralling story. At the centre of the web is Verity, although she seems unaware of this and the effect she has on men who, as one character puts it, circle her like dogs on heat.

Starting the story in the months before the flood creates a sense of tension and expectation. Added to this is the backdrop of fear of nuclear war and the beginnings of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. When the flood does finally occur it is both actual and metaphorical. There are dramatic scenes as people try to escape the rising seawater, rescue others and salvage homes and possessions. But the night of the flood also sees events that will have long-lasting repercussions. Like an ebb tide, it leaves Peter and others trying to piece together what, if anything, is left from the wreckage and come to terms with what has lost been forever.

The Night of the Flood is an absorbing story of secrets, obsession and thwarted desire.

In three words: Atmospheric, compelling, dramatic

Try something similar: Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

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Zoe SomervilleAbout the Author

Zoë Somerville is a writer and English teacher. Having lived all over the world – Japan, France, Washington – she now lives in Bath with her family. After completing a creative writing MA at Bath Spa, Zoë started writing her debut novel, which is inspired by her home county, Norfolk, and the devastating North Sea flood of the 1950s.

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