#WWWWednesday – 5th February 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!

Currently reading

A Cold Wind From Moscow by Rory Clements (Zaffre) 

Front cover of A Cold Wind From Moscow by Rory Clements

Winter, 1947. Britain’s secret services have been penetrated. The country is more vulnerable than ever – and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin knows it. He decides it is time to send his master of ‘Special Tasks’ to create extra chaos.

But Stalin has a more important motive than mere disruption. He has a man on the inside who must be protected at all costs – a communist super-spy who has the secrets of the atomic bomb at his fingertips.

Freya Bentall, a senior MI5 officer, no longer knows who to trust and is left with one to bring in an outsider whose loyalty is beyond question – Cambridge professor Tom Wilde. His task: to find the traitor in MI5.

Bentall has three main suspects and Wilde must get close to them all. That means delving deep into the criminal underworld, attaching himself to the cultural elite of the arts and finding a way into the extreme reaches of British politics.

As winter bites and violence erupts, Wilde faces an uphill battle to protect those he loves from merciless killers. And he knows that one slip will spell disaster for the country – and his family.

The Ghosts of Paris (Billie Walker Mystery #2) by Tara Moss (Verve Books) 

Front cover of The Ghosts of Paris by Tara Moss

It’s 1947. The world continues to grapple with the fallout of the Second World War, and former war reporter Billie Walker is finding her feet as an investigator.

When a wealthy client hires Billie and her assistant Sam to track down her missing husband, the trail leads Billie back to London and Paris, where Billie’s own painful memories also lurk. Jack Rake, Billie’s wartime lover and, briefly, husband, is just one of the millions of people who went missing in Europe during the war. What was his fate after they left Paris together?

As Billie’s search for her client’s husband takes her to both the swanky bars at Paris’s famous Ritz hotel and to the dank basements of the infamous Paris morgue, she’ll need to keep her gun at the ready, because something even more terrible than a few painful memories might be following her around the City of Lights…

A Year in a Small Garden by Frances Tophill (BBC Books)

A Year in a Small Garden follows Frances Tophill as she creates her new garden in a terraced house in Devon. Working in a small space, the book documents her journey to bring life to her garden, including tips and tricks for you to achieve similar results in whatever spaces you have at home.

The book is structured around the stages of building her small garden, and branches out to include small community gardens Frances works with, as well as projects to create in small spaces at home – with a focus on growing food and planting in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way.

Featuring new photography shot throughout the year, as well as Frances’s own journal and garden notebooks, this book will not only give you an insight into Frances’s journey creating her first garden – but will help you create a beautiful, productive, garden at home.

Recently finished

The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill Secker)

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome.

Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.

During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him – one where the consequences could be lethal. (Review to follow)

The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

What Cathy Will Read Next

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (Fourth Estate) 

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer”, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Book Review – The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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About the Book

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

Format: Audiobook (22h 4m) Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: 30th September 2010 [1992] Genre: Thriller

Find The Secret History on Goodreads

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My Review

I first read this when it was published in paperback in 1993 but I was given an opportunity to reread it when it was picked by my book club as a change from the new releases we usually choose. Like me, many book club members came along clutching their own battered copies of the book. I decided to listen to the audiobook as it is narrated by the author. I have to say she does a brilliant job of bringing the characters she created to life.

The Secret History is a long book and it isn’t until about the half way point that the murder (which we know pretty much from the beginning will take place) occurs. But somehow the author manages to keep the tension going through those first three hundred pages as our narrator, Richard Papen, describes the events that lead up to the murder and then its aftermath.

Newly arrived at Hampden College in Vermont, Richard becomes part of a group of students studying Ancient Greek under the tutelage of classics professor Julian Morrow, who limits enrolment in his classes to a hand-picked coterie. Unlike Richard, the other five – Henry, Francis, Bunny and twins, Camilla and Charles – come from privileged backgrounds. Richard is dazzled by them but finds himself amongst people who, unlike him, don’t have to worry where the next dollar will come from. This results in him having to tell elaborate lies about his background and hide his penury, even if that means nearly freezing to death during a Vermont winter. Bunny, although his parents are rich, has been cast adrift as a kind of challenge to make his own way in the world, his response to which is to sponge off his well-off friends.

This is not a story where you find yourself rooting for any of the characters; they’re all pretty unlikeable, including the victim. If I had to pick the least unlikeable it would be Francis who does act most like a true friend to Richard. The group indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle of wild parties, drink and drugs. Not much study seems to go on. Their willingness to see themselves as outside normal moral boundaries results in a series of shocking events which finds them increasingly needing to lie and deceive others. Richard willingly goes along with them because of his desire to remain part of the group. The author shows us how their actions leave them, in different ways, irrevocably damaged by the act of having taken another’s life.

Immersive is an often overused word but it’s fully justifiable as a description of The Secret History, the book which effectively gave rise to the dark academia literary genre.

In three words: Dark, suspenseful, compelling
Try something similar: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

About the Author

Author Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch. (Photo: Goodreads)