What Cathy Read Next...

On the blog last week

Monday – I shared my wrap-up of the 20 Books of Summer 2025 reading challenge.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With Occupations in the Title.

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.

Saturday – I took part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme forging a book chain from Ghosts Cities by Siang Lu to Shelter by Sarah Franklin.

New on my shelves

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.

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation.

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own #6Degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post. You can also check out links to posts on X using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is Ghost Cities by Siang Lu, winner of The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2025, a literary prize awarded annually to “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. As is often the case, it’s a book I haven’t read. Links from each title will take you to my review .

The blurb states Ghost Cities is inspired by ‘the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China’. This provided me with inspiration for my first link – Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn, a nonfiction book also about abandoned places – ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim them.

Continuing the theme of abandoned places, historical novel The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford is set on the remote Scottish island group of St. Kilda whose few remaining inhabitants were evacuated to the mainland in 1930 when life there became untenable.

Clear by Carys Davies is also set on a remote Scottish island now inhabited by one man, its last remaining occupant. The landowner wants to evict him in order to turn the island into grazing land for sheep.

The need to abandon your homeland also features in Exit West by Mohsin Hamid which tells the story of two young people forced to flee the war-torn city in which they live and seek safety in another country.

From west I’m heading north to North Woods by Daniel Mason. Set around a single house deep in the woods of New England, the book relates the stories of the various people who have occupied and then abandoned the house over the centuries.

Shelter by Sarah Franklin is also set in a forest, the Forest of Dean in WW2. Connie has joined the Women’s Timber Corps to escape bombed out of Coventry whilst Seppe has found a degree of safety even though confined in a Prisoner of War camp.

My chain has taken me from abandoned cities to a place of refuge. Where did your chain take you?