Category: Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Books On My Spring 2021 TBR.  Here are just a few of mine. Links from the titles will take you to the full book description on Goodreads.

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March publications

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn – a heart-stopping World War II story of three female code breakers at Bletchley Park and the spy they must root out after the war is over.

A Book of Secrets by Kate Morrison – the story of a West African girl hunting for her lost brother through an Elizabethan underworld of spies, plots and secret Catholic printing presses. 

April publications

The Heretic’s Mark (The Jackdaw Mysteries #4) by S. W. Perry – The Elizabethan world is in flux. Radical new ideas are challenging the old. But the quest for knowledge can lead down dangerous paths. 

The Deception of Harriet Fleet by Helen Scarlett – dark and brimming with suspense, an atmospheric Victorian chiller set in brooding County Durham

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton – An idol of Afro-punk. A duo on the brink of stardom. A night that will define their story for ever.

The Drowned City by K. J. Maitland – 1606. A year to the day that men were executed for conspiring to blow up Parliament, a towering wave devastates the Bristol Channel. Some proclaim God’s vengeance. Others seek to take advantage.

The Metal Heart by Caroline Lea – Orkney, 1940. On a remote island, a prisoner-of-war camp is constructed to house five hundred Italian soldiers. Upon arrival, a freezing Orkney winter and divided community greets them.

Together by Luke Adam Hawker – A gentle and philosophical look at what we can learn from difficult times, paired with beautiful illustrations

May publications

A Ration Book Daughter (East End Ration #5) by Jean Fullerton – When a telegram arrives declaring that her husband is missing in action, Cathy can finally allow herself to hope – she only has to wait 6 months before she is legally a widow and can move on with her life.

The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl, trans. by Don Bartlett – A stunningly sophisticated, tension-packed thriller – the darkest of hard-boiled Nordic Noir – from one of Norway’s most acclaimed crime writers.

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is a freebie on the theme of Spring Cleaning which we are invited to interpret in any way we like. My list is a combination of books in which cleaners turn detective and books in which characters get an opportunity for a metaphorical ‘spring clean’ of their lives.

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In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy – Hungarian cleaner, Lena Szarka, suspects one of her clients is to blame when her friend Timea disappears but with the police unwilling to share her suspicions it’s left to Lena to turn sleuth and find her friend.
A Clean Canvas by Elizabeth Mundy – when a valuable painting goes missing, Lena becomes embroiled in the art world which turns out to be a place of thwarted talents, unpaid debts and elegant fraudsters
A Messy Affair by Elizabeth Mundy – when Lena’s cousin Sarika and Sarika’s reality TV star boyfriend Terry receive threatening notes Lena is forced to explore the grubby world of reality television, and online dating.  
The Playground Murders (The Detective’s Daughter #7) by Lesley Thomson – When cleaner, Stella Darnell, isn’t tackling dust and dirt, and restoring order to chaos, she’s solving murders.

The  Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin – Four very different women respond to an advertisement in The Times appealing to ‘those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine’ to rent a small medieval Italian castle for a month. The climate and the castle eventually start to have an effect on the four women, shifting their perceptions shift and waking them up to the love in their lives.
Summer  in Provence by Lucy Coleman – Married couple Fern and Aiden embark on a ‘marriage gap year’ but is a change as good as a rest, and will their time apart transform their marriage or drive them further apart?
The House That Alice Built by Chris Penhall – A postcard from Buenos Aires turns Alice’s life upside down and, before she knows it, she’s in Cascais, Portugal beginning to learn how to ‘go with the flow’.
A Wedding in the Olive Garden by Leah Fleming – Sara Loveday flees to the beautiful island of Santaniki vowing to change her life. Spotting a gap in the local tourist market, she sets up a wedding plan business specialising in ‘second time around’ couples.
The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers – No one quite knows where Agnès Morel, the woman who cleans the cathedral of Chartres each morning, came from. And yet everyone she encounters agrees she is subtly transforming their lives, even if they can’t quite say how. 
Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson – Three women thrown together by chance discover a sense of purpose they hadn’t possessed before during a canal journey on a narrowboat.