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 Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023
‘When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology …’
It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’.
Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.
The Wall (City of Victory #3) by Adrian Goldsworthy (eARC, Aries via NetGalley)
Britannia, AD 117: Roman centurion Flavius Ferox is trying to live a quiet life of dignified leisure, overseeing his wife’s estate and doing his best to resist the urge to murder an annoying neighbour – until someone else does it for him. Dragged back into a life of violence, Ferox finds himself chasing raiders, fighting chieftains and negotiating with kings, journeying far into the north just as war breaks out.
With the new emperor, Hadrian, sending agents from Rome, the whole world seems to be changing: old friends become enemies, enemies claim they are friends, and new and deadly threats lurk in the shadows.
When, five years later, Hadrian himself comes to Britannia to inspect his great wall, a new war erupts suddenly, dividing tribes and families. Ferox is the only one who can save the emperor – but with his family, and his own life, in danger, Ferox must first decide whose side he is on…
Recently finished
Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas (Head of Zeus)
Ancestry : A Novel by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)
The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor (HarperCollins)
What Cathy (will) Read Next
The Voluble Topsy, 1928-1947 by A. P. Herbert (ARC, Handheld Press)
The Voluble Topsy collects A P Herbert’s The Trials of Topsy (1928), Topsy MP (1929) and Topsy Turvy (1947) in one volume for the pleasure and admiration of a new generation.
It is the late 1920s. Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. She deploys her native acumen and remarkable talent for kindness as well as being a doughty fighter for what she thinks is right (she hides a fox from the Hunt in her car). Then Topsy is unexpectedly drawn into politics, and to her amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.
Topsy’s extensive social life, her adventures in and out of the House of Commons (and her audacious attempts to legislate for the Enjoyment of the People), and her wartime activity as the mother of twins were recorded faithfully by the great comic writer A P Herbert as a series of satires in Punch.
What Cathy Read Next... 