My Week in Books – 12th October 2025

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On the blog last week

Tuesday – I went off-piste for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday with Books Featuring Storms.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Thursday – I shared my publication day review of Dominion of Dust by Matthew Harffy.

Friday – I published my review of Tombland by C. J. Sansom.

New on my shelves

Henley Literary Festival and the town’s Oxfam bookshop have a lot to answer for…

Ravenglass by Carolyn Kirby (Northodox Press)

In 18th century Whitehaven, Kit Ravenglass grows up in a house of secrets. A shameful mystery surrounds his mother’s death, and his formidable, newly rich father is gambling everything on shipping ventures. Kit takes solace in his beloved sister Fliss, and her sumptuous silks, although he knows better than to reveal his delight in feminine fashion. As the family’s debts mount, Kit’s father turns to the transatlantic slave trade – a ruthless and bloody traffic to which more than a fortune might be lost.

Adventures will see Kit turn fugitive and begin living as ‘Stella,’ before being swept into the heady violence of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion. Driven by love, revenge and a desire to live truly and freely, Kit must find a way to survive these turbulent times – and to unravel the tragic secrets of the Ravenglass family.

The Other Side of Paradise by Vanessa Beaumont (Magpie)

London 1921. Jean Buckman, a young and innocent American heiress arrives in England to find a society decimated by war but resolutely clinging to the status quo. She marries Edward Warre an engaging but complex man and the owner of a once great but now struggling estate.

As the marriage falters, Jean spends her summers in the South of France where she embarks on a passionate affair that will have repercussions for the rest of her life.

Two sons arrive, the oldest, heir to the estate, is not the true bloodline. But Edward needs Jean’s money to survive, and she needs her husband’s silence.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (Canongate)

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice’s estranged daughter (or is she?), Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there.

This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles, rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today.

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson (ARC, Headline Review)

When asked what matters to her the most, Kate would, of course, say her children and her husband. Because she loves her life. Even when it involves making a costume late into the night, scouring the supermarket for the only bread rolls her children will eat, and working during any spare moment in between. And she has found the way to hang onto her sanity in the Hours stolen away, once every few months, to have sex with another man.

Until one such rendezvous when Kate turns on the television to discover that the very London hotel they’re in has been taken under siege. And with that, she knows that nothing will ever be the same.

In the confines of a room with everything at stake, Kate is left to contemplate what has led her here, in hiding with a man who is not her husband while her beloved family waits at home.

Female, Nude by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (ARC, Tinder Press)

Sophie, a painter, is holidaying with friends in a stunning villa in Greece – her best friend Helena is shortly to be married, and this is the last time she and her friends will be together as single women. But life has treated them so differently since their university days, that Sophie is questioning everything about their friendship. Meanwhile her partner, Greg, is desperate for them to try for a baby, but she wants to devote herself to her art – and there are other, deeper forces, pulling the two of them in opposite directions.

In the course of the holiday, Sophie paints a nude portrait of her friend Alessia, and becomes involved in an intense affair with Ky, who lives and works on the island. Both the painting, and the affair, will challenge everything Sophie thinks she knows, about art, about motherhood, about sex – and about how and with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life.

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.

The Prime Ministers: Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson (Swift Press)

Harold Wilson was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. Prime Minister from 1964-70, and again from 1974-76, he won four elections as well as a referendum on UK membership of the European Community. The achievements of the Wilson Era – from legalising homosexuality to protecting ethnic minorities, from women’s rights to the Open University – radically improved ordinary people’s lives for the better.

In Harold Wilson, former Labour cabinet minister and bestselling author Alan Johnson presents a portrait of a truly twentieth-century man, whose ‘white heat’ speech proclaimed a scientific and technological revolution – and who was as much a part of the sixties as the Beatles and the Profumo scandal.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.

When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading Our London Lives from my NetGalley shelf, The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile and I’m listening to the audiobook of Transcription.

Look out for…

  • Book Review: Andropov’s Cuckoo by Owen Jones
  • Book Review: The Mare by Angharad Hampshire

Book Review – Tombland by C. J. Sansom

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About the Book

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady?

Format: Audiobook (37h 41m) Publisher: Mantle
Publication date: 18th October 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Tombland on Goodreads

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My Review

I’ve been trying to read all the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since I first started following the prize in 2017. This, the seventh book in the author’s Matthew Shardlake series, was longlisted in 2019.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading Tombland, not least because it’s a whopper. I listened to the audiobook which would take you three days to complete if you did it continuously. Needless to say I didn’t, so it took me more like three weeks. The Matthew Shardlake series is one of the few series where I’ve read all the books and – crucially – in the right order, starting back in 2013 with Dissolution. Having said that, it’s coming up for ten years since I read the previous book in the series, Lamentation, and it’s the first time I’ve consumed one as an audiobook. (Although very good, I did find Steven Crossley’s narration on the slow side so chose to increase the reading speed.)

The book starts off as a crime mystery with Shardlake tasked by Henry VIII’s younger daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to investigate the gruesome murder of Edith, the wife of John Boleyn, a distant relation of Elizabeth’s mother Anne. John Boleyn has been accused of the crime and is set to stand trial at Norwich Assizes. He appears to have means, motive and opportunity, especially since his alibi for the night of the murder is questionable. But as Shardlake and his young assistant Nicholas Overton discover, there are others who might want Boleyn’s wife dead or want Boleyn found guilty of her murder, executed and his land forfeited. There’s also the mystery of Edith’s unexplained disappearance nine years earlier. Just where did she go and why did she return after all that time?

At this point, the story goes off at a tangent, a rather lengthy tangent it has to be said. Shardlake, Nicholas and Shardlake’s former assistant Jack Barak find themselves caught up in an uprising taking place in protest against the enclosure of common land and other grievances against the landowners. In Norfolk it’s led by the charismatic Robert Kett and the rebels soon establish a large camp outside Norwich, at the time England’s second largest city. Barak throws in his lot with the rebels while Nicholas, opposed to them, becomes a prisoner in Norwich Castle and Shardlake finds himself legal advisor to Kett, trying to mitigate the penalties inflicted on the gentry tried at the rebel’s makeshift court. Inwardly he has sympathy with the rebels’ cause but dare not make it public and, as he constantly reminds himself, he must ensure John Boleyn receives justice.

The events of the so-called Kett’s Rebellion are described in detail and is obviously the result of much research. I confess my interest waned at this point and I was eager to get back to the murder mystery, which the book eventually does.

There are also secondary plots involving Shardlake’s former servant Josephine and her husband, Barak’s wife’s continuing animosity towards Shardlake, and the increasing frailty of Shardlake’s longtime friend Guy.

The Shardlake of Tombland is feeling his age. There are frequent references to his aching back and the exhaustion he feels after days of travel. There is an elegaic quality to the book, although apparently the author was working on the next book at the time of his death. Although not my favourite of the series, Tombland definitely demonstrates the author’s ability to combine historical fact and fiction.

In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, immersive
Try something similar: Sacrilege by S. J. Parris

About the Author

C J Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He achieved a BA and then a PhD in History from Birmingham University. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – which took readers into the dark heart of Tudor England in a gripping novel of monastic treachery and death. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reigns of Henry VIII and young Edward VI, and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. C J Sansom died on 27th April 2024 aged 71.