Category: Reviews

#BlogTour #BookReview One Day in Winter by Shari Low @Aria_Fiction

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I’m thrilled to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for One Day in Winter by Shari Low. (One glance at the blog tour posters at the bottom of this post will give you an idea of the array of fabulous book bloggers taking part in the tour.)  You can read my review of this engaging, emotional story of one momentous day in the lives of four people below.

Book coverAbout the Book

On a cold December’s morning…

Caro sets off to find the truth: has her relationship with her father been based on a lifetime of lies?

Cammy can’t wait to surprise the woman he loves with a proposal. All he needs is the perfect ring.

Lila can no longer hide her secret. She has to tell her lover’s wife about their affair.

After thirty years, Bernadette knows it’s time. She’s ready to leave her controlling husband… and never look back.

Over the course of twenty-four hours, four lives are about to change forever…

Format: Paperback (302 pp.)          Publisher: Aria
Published: 5th September 2019     Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com  ǀ Kobo ǀ Google Play
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find One Day in Winter on Goodreads

My Review

The story takes place over one day in the city of Glasgow. As it turns out, it will be a momentous day in the lives of four people and those close to them. Events unfold in two-hourly time slots with frequent switches between the different characters. As the action plays out, at times the reader is blessed with more information than the character (creating some “Uh-oh, that’s not going to happen” or “I have a bad feeling about this” moments) and at other times, we learn things alongside the characters (resulting in some “I wasn’t expecting that” moments).

So, let’s get to know the characters…Caro is setting off by train to track down the father who abandoned her and her mother years before. A post on Facebook, that she came across by chance, has led Caro to suspect that her father’s frequent absences on business during the years he and her mother were together may have been cover for something else entirely. Was he in fact leading a double life? Encouraged by her cousin, Todd, she’s determined to find out the truth and confront her father before it’s too late.

Menswear shop owner Cameron, known to his friends as Cammy, is planning to propose to his girlfriend. She’s the first woman he’s fallen for since he lost the love of his life to another man. Helped by pals, Josie and Val (hilarious characters, by the way), he’s chosen the perfect ring, the perfect suit, the perfect restaurant. Now he just needs everything to go to plan.

Lila’s interest is in snaring the married lover with whom she’s been having a passionate affair for years, unbeknownst to his wife. Lila’s determined that today’s the day he’ll tell his wife he’s leaving her – and if not, Lila’s going to do it for him.

Bernadette knows all about leaving because after thirty years of marriage  she’s had enough of her husband’s callous, controlling behaviour and she’s planning her departure for life as a free woman. But if she’s to make her escape, she needs to do it before he returns home.

The author manages the incredible feat of orchestrating the various strands of the plot and frequent changes in points of views so you never lose track of the story as the tension builds. I really liked the geographical near misses during the day as characters unknowingly pass close to each other – in shops, restaurants and streets.

I found myself particularly drawn to Caro and Bernadette. They seemed fully realised characters; like people you might meet in real life. I don’t believe anyone with an ounce of humanity can read this book without rooting for Bernadette and I liked how the author had Caro grow as a character, even with the period of one day.  Other characters seemed a little less finely drawn and the men in the book aren’t a terribly good advertisement for fatherhood! Although I couldn’t like Lila – self-obsessed, shallow and mercenary – I could admire her spirit and her ability to land on her feet (metaphorically only, as it turns out).

Even if I wasn’t drawn to all the characters, I was completely gripped by the complex threads of the story and intrigued to see how the author was going to pull everything together. Safe to say, she succeeded brilliantly. I’ll also admit I shed tears at one point and I’m not a sentimental person.  I can now see why Shari Low’s books are so popular.

Great storylines, clever plotting and engaging characters make One Day in Winter a very satisfying read.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Aria. (One Day in Winter was previously published under the title One Day in December.)

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In three words: Emotional, engaging, moving

Try something similar…It Was Only Ever You by Kate Kerrigan (click here to read my review)

ShariLowAbout the Author

Shari Low is the No.1 best-selling author of over 20 novels, including One Day In Winter, A Life Without You, The Story Of Our Life, With Or Without You, Another Day In Winter and her latest release, This Is Me. And because she likes to over-share toe-curling moments and hapless disasters, she is also the shameless mother behind a collection of parenthood memories called Because Mummy Said So. Once upon a time she met a guy, got engaged after a week, and twenty-something years later she lives near Glasgow with her husband, a labradoodle, and two teenagers who think she’s fairly embarrassing except when they need a lift.

Connect with Shari

Website ǀ Facebook ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads

 

#WWWWednesdays 4th September ’19

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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

A Single ThreadA Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier (eARC, courtesy of Harper Collins and NetGalley)
It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone.

A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything…

Warm, vivid and beautifully orchestrated, A Single Thread reveals one of our finest modern writers at the peak of her powers.

the mathematical bridgeThe Mathematical Bridge by Jim Kelly (hardcover, review copy courtesy of Allison & Busby)
Cambridge, 1940. It is the first winter of the war, and snow is falling. When an evacuee drowns in the river, his body swept away, Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sets out to investigate what seems to be a deliberate attack. The following night, a local electronics factory is attacked, and an Irish republican slogan is left at the scene. The IRA are campaigning to win freedom for Ulster, but why has Cambridge been chosen as a target?

And when Brooke learns that the drowned boy was part of the close-knit local Irish Catholic community, he begins to question whether there may be a connection between the boy’s death and the attack at the factory. As more riddles come to light, can Brooke solve the mystery before a second attack claims a famous victim?

Chanels RivieraChanel’s Riviera: The Cote d’Azur in Peace and War, 1930-1944 by Anne De Courcy (audio book)

Far from worrying about the onset of war, the burning question on the French Riviera in 1938 was whether one should curtsey to the Duchess of Windsor.

Featuring a sparkling cast of historical figures, writers and artists including Winston Churchill, Daisy Fellowes, Salvador Dalí, the Windsors, Aldous Huxley and Edith Wharton – and the enigmatic Coco Chanel at its heart – Chanel’s Riviera is a sparkling account of a period where such deep extremes of luxury and terror had never before been experienced.

From the glamour of the pre-war parties and casinos, to Robert Streitz’s secret wireless transmitter in the basement of La Pausa – Chanel’s villa that he created – while Chanel had her German lover to stay during the war, Chanel’s Riviera explores the fascinating world of the Cote d’Azur elite in the 1930s and 1940s, enriched with original research that brings the lives of both rich and poor, protected and persecuted, to vivid life.

Recently finished (click on title for review)

NadineNadine by John Steinberg (ebook)

London 1972 – and Peter Greenberg is riding high. Thanks to his magic touch, every play he puts on in Theatreland is a hit and the money is rolling in. The young man’s empire feels secure – but then everything changes. One evening, he calls in to see a rival’s musical and falls head over heels in love.

The beautiful Paris-born dancer who catches his eye is Nadine – a major star in the making. Like Greenberg, the young dancer too is in love – but with someone else. The eternal triangle is complicated by the birth of a child, and by tragic secrets that go back before World War Two; slowly, those secrets reveal themselves in a drama that out-performs anything on the West End stage or Broadway.

Nadine is a poignant story of unrequited love, a love that will one day be returned – and in a most unexpected way…

The Courts of the MorningThe Courts of the Morning by John Buchan (hardcover)

South America is the setting for this adventure from the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. When Archie and Janet Roylance decide to travel to the Gran Seco to see its copper mines they find themselves caught up in dreadful danger; rebels have seized the city. Janet is taken hostage in the middle of the night and it is up to the dashing Don Luis de Marzaniga to aid her rescue. (Review to follow)

20190824_143008Welcome to America by Linda Bostrom Knausgard (paperback, review copy courtesy of World Editions)

Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother’s barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We’re a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness.

Welcome to America is an exquisite portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart. (Review to follow)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Secrets We KeptThe Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (eARC, courtesy of Cornerstone)

At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak’s magnum opus make its way into print around the world. Glamorous and sophisticated Sally Forrester is a seasoned spy who has honed her gift for deceit all over the world–using her magnetism and charm to pry secrets out of powerful men. Irina is a complete novice, and under Sally’s tutelage quickly learns how to blend in, make drops, and invisibly ferry classified documents.

The Secrets We Kept combines a legendary literary love story — the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Zhivago’s heroine, Lara— with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. From Pasternak’s country estate outside Moscow to the brutalities of the Gulag, from Washington, D.C. to Paris and Milan, The Secrets We Kept captures a watershed moment in the history of literature—told with soaring emotional intensity and captivating historical detail. And at the center of this unforgettable debut is the powerful belief that a piece of art can change the world.