What Cathy Read Next...

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!

What I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading The Matchbox Girl from my NetGalley shelf, The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile and listening to the audiobook of Swan Song, also from my TBR pile.

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend.

Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.

But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.

Why are the clinic’s children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger’s games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.

The Assassin of Verona by Benet Brandreth (Zaffre)

Venice, 1586. William Shakespeare is disguised as a steward to the English Ambassador. He and his friends Oldcastle and Hemminges possess a deadly secret: the names of the catholic spies in England who seek to destroy Queen Elizabeth. Before long the Pope’s agents will begin to close in on them and fleeing the city will be the players’ only option.

In Verona, Aemelia, the daughter of a Duke, is struggling to conceal her passionate affair with her cousin Valentine. But darker times lie ahead with the arrival of the sinister Father Thornhill who is determined to seek out any who don’t conform to the Pope’s ruthless agenda . . .

Events will converge in the forests around Verona as a multitude of plots are hatched and discovered, players fall in and out of love and disguises are adopted and then discarded. Will Shakespeare and his friends escape with their secrets – and their lives?

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott (Windmill)

To the outside world, they were the icons of high society – the most glamorous and influential women of their age. To Truman Capote they were his Swans: the ideal heroines, as vulnerable as they were powerful. They trusted him with their most guarded, martini-soaked secrets, each believing she was more special and loved than the next…

Until he betrayed them.

What I’ve Just Read

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie (Bloomsbury)

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

When a young man’s girlfriend vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the city, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Rage of Swords by David Gilman (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

1368. Amidst the Hundred Years’ War, alliances must be brokered. The Duke of Clarence, second son of King Edward III, journeys from Paris to marry the daughter of the powerful Lord of Milan. Little does he know that he is heading into a trap.

Luckily the Duke is preceded on the road to Milan by Sir Thomas Blackstone, Master of War, on an urgent mission of his own. Blackstone must get his hands on the gold the Prince of Wales needs to wage successful war in France.

But there is a price on Blackstone’s head, and assassins willing to risk everything to claim it before he even gets to Milan. He must outwit a succession of ever deadlier enemies, and the Master of War has other foes to the ambitions of his son Henry, who has inherited his father’s knack of getting into scrapes. Scrapes that could end in a hangman’s noose…

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 Top Ten Tuesday topic is a freebie on the theme of Hallowe’en. My list contains ten books or short stories that have a touch of the supernatural. Links will take you to my review.

H – (The) Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – ‘The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.’
A – A Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan – Five country-house guests, trained by an Einsteinian mathematician who has devised a way of seeing into the future, each gain one piece of knowledge from the experiment and have to decide how to act on it
L – ‘Lost Hearts’ in Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James – ‘Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moonlit woods was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mere.’
L – Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker – A monstrous worm secreted for thousands of years in a bottomless well is able to metamorphose into a seductive woman who survives on her victim’s life blood
O – ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ in Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James – ‘The light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. Then, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a moment more, and it was a man running, jumping, clambering over the groynes, and every few seconds looking eagerly back.
W – Witch Wood by John Buchan – ‘The Black Wood could tell some tales if the trees could talk.’
E – ‘(An) Evening’s Entertainment’ in Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James – ‘Oh, it was a terrible sight; not one there but turned faint and ill with it, and had to go out into the fresh air.’
‘ Apostrophe – ‘A Warning to the Curious’ in Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James – ‘So we did go, first peering out as we opened the door, and fancying (I found we both had the fancy) that a shadow, or more than a shadow – but it made no sound – passed from before us to one side as we came out into the passage.’
E – ‘(The) Experiment’ in Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James – ‘It was a very dark night, and the spring wind blew loud over the black fields: loud enough to drown all sounds of shouting or calling. If calling there was, there was no voice, nor any that answered, nor any that regarded – yet.’
N – ‘No-Man’s-Land’ in The Strange Stories of John Buchan, edited by James Machin – Whilst on a walking holiday, a young man stumbles upon a hidden tribe of Picts who have survived for centuries in a cave