What Cathy Read Next...

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories edited by Margaret Jull Costa.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Most Anticipated Releases of the Second Half of 2021.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to have a good nose around what others are reading. I also shared an extract from The Lady in the Veil by Allie Cresswell and published my review of The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi as part of the blog tour.

Thursday – I shared my Five Favourite June 2021 Reads.

Friday – I published my review of This Shining Life by Harriet Kline as part of the blog tour.

Saturday – I took part in this month’s #6Degrees of Separation meme creating a chain of books starting from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media.

The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories

New arrivals

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks (eARC, courtesy of Hutchinson via NetGalley)

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

In Baxter Beach, Barbados, moneyed ex-pats clash with the locals who often end up serving them: braiding their hair, minding their children, and selling them drugs.

Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the Baxter Beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences.

A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

Book Review: Business as Usual by Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford
Top Ten Tuesday
WWW Wednesday
Blog Tour/Book Review: Those I Have Lost by Sharon Maas
Book Review: Songbirds by Christy Lefteri
Audiobook Review: A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

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 six degrees 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 Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees

This month’s starting book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Subtitled ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’, in the book the author argues that it is time to look at commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are.

Gyles Brandreth takes a similarly non-nonsense attitude in his book Have You Eaten Grandma? which is described as a ‘brilliantly funny tirade on grammar…[and] the linguistic horrors of our times’.

Gyles’ son, Benet Brandreth, as well as being an authority on Shakespeare is also a novelist. His series of historical novels that started with The Spy of Venice and continued with The Assassin of Verona imagine what William Shakespeare might have got up to in his so-called “lost years”.

I’m not going to go for the obvious link to Hamnet as I used that last month. Instead, my next link is to another book set in Venice, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The film version starred Dirk Bogarde (as pictured below on the cover of the Penguin edition). Bogarde, as well as being an award-winning actor, was an accomplished author and in his book, Great Meadow, he recalls his idyllic childhood in Sussex in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Also set in the years before the Second World War is All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison. Set on a farm in Suffolk it features a girl on the cusp of adulthood. It made the ‘Academy Recommends’ list but not the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

A book that did make the longlist was The Wanderers by Tim Pears, the second book in his West Country trilogy featuring young Leo Sercombe who falls in with a band of gypsies and travels the countryside with them, and then later on his own.

My chain has taken me from proponents of precision in punctuation to a book featuring a much less rules-based way of life. Where did your chain take you?