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 joined other gardeners for #SixonSaturday sharing six things from my garden this week.
New on my shelves
Maria, Maria by Jennifer Galvão (Proof copy courtesy of Penguin and Women’s Prize)
Amidst the vast, sunlit cornfields of Portugal, Maria Lucilia receives a letter. The note is from her husband, Benedito da Silva, who is in exile – serving a punishing seven-year sentence as a fisherman with the White Fleet. But Bene cannot read or write.
In the icy port town of St John’s, Newfoundland, another woman welcomes Bene into her life and composes a letter to a stranger across the sea. Maria Alvares, a widowed shopkeeper, knows the uneasy power she wields – the other woman, lending a voice for the man she loves to reach the wife he left behind.
Though thousands of miles stand between them, the two Marias are drawn irresistibly to know each other. Slowly, in the margins and footnotes of the letters, a deep connection emerges: fears, hopes, and secrets neither woman has spoken aloud. What grows between them has the power to sustain – or undo – them both.
What I’m currently reading
I’ve nearly finished Country Peopleby Daniel Mason and Deception by Alan Parks, both from my NetGalley shelf and out next month. And I’m reading an ARC of Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. All three are on my list for 20 Books of Summer. Now I just need to get up to date with writing reviews…
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
Country People by Daniel Mason (John Murray via NetGalley)
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.
So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.
Deception by Alan Parks (Baskerville via NetGalley)
New York, December 1941. Joseph Gunner, former soldier, is off the front lines and on the streets of New York, tasked with helping tip America into the Second World War.
Working for a section of the British Secret Service, Gunner spends his days covertly encouraging pro-war sentiment through planted news stories, radio broadcasts and even blackmail.
But when a honeytrap mission with a prominent US politician goes wrong and the young woman involved is found dead, Gunner realises he has a target on his back. Who silenced her? Who knew their plan? And who has betrayed Gunner?
As he investigates, Gunner is plunged into the secretive world of Nazis in America, the NYPD and the mobs of New York, as the body count quickly stacks up. With world events accelerating, Gunner finds himself in a race against time before he becomes the next victim. Soon, he’ll uncover a conspiracy that goes beyond what he thought was possible.
An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and the human race has just over two months to live. But twenty-three-year-old Haru, stargazer and chronic worrier, is still trying to pass her driving test.
Then she finds a body in the boot of her car: a woman, stabbed and tortured. There’s a murderer on the loose. And it turns out that Haru’s driving instructor is an ex-cop with a manic devotion to justice.
So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the two women team up to catch the culprit, no matter where it takes them.
January 1919. A new gardener at a snowbound boys’ boarding school catches everyone’s attention. There is a rumour that he is a war hero.
Nineteen-year-old Albert is haunted by his experiences in The Great War, and fighting the temptation of one particular prefect. What they want is illegal. Being caught would ruin them both.
When Albert’s past catches up to him, their quest for a place where love can safely dwell comes under even greater threat. (Review to follow)
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?
What Cathy Read Next... 