Tag: books

My Week in Books – 7th April 2024

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My Week in Books

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared My Top 5 March 2024 Reads.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was on the rain-related theme of April Showers (perhaps February, March and April showers would be more apt if you’re in the UK) 

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 Q&A with author Angel Dionne about her debut short story collection, Sardines.

Friday – I published my review of The Wager by David Grann.

Saturday – The first Saturday of the month means it’s time for the #6Degrees of Separation meme. My chain had a distinctly Shakespearean theme.

New arrivals

Strange Sally DiamondStrange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent (Penguin) 

Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died.

Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media and worried police, but also a sinister voice from a past she has no memory of. As she begins to discover the horrors of her childhood, recluse Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends, finding independence, and learning that people don’t always mean what they say.

But when messages start arriving from a stranger who knows far more about her past than she knows herself, Sally’s life will be thrown into chaos once again . . .

The Zone of InterestThe Zone of Interest by Martin Amis (Vintage)

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul — it showed you who you really were.

The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.

The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are?

The Ministry of TimeThe Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (eARC, Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley)

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

French WindowsFrench Windows by Antoine Laurain (eARC, Gallic Books)

Nathalia, a young photographer, has been seeing a therapist. Having accidentally photographed a murder, she finds that she can no longer do her job. 

Instead, Doctor Faber suggests that she write about the neighbours she idly observes in the building across the street. But as these written snapshots become increasingly detailed, he starts to wonder how she can possibly know so much about them.

With each session, Doctor Faber and his mysterious patient will get closer and closer to the truth. But are the stories Nathalia submits each week as she claims…

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Bonjour, Sophie by Elizabeth Buchan
  • Author Q&A: The Callas Imprint by Sophia Lambton
  • Author Q&A: A Place Without Pain by Simon Bourke
  • Book Review: Sword of the War God by Tim Hodkinson
  • Book Review: Girl Friends by Alex Dahl

Book Review – The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

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About the Book

Book cover of The Wager by David Grann

1742: A ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washes up on the coast of Brazil. Inside are thirty emaciated men, barely alive. Survivors from the Wager, a British vessel wrecked while on a secret mission to raid a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, they have an extraordinary tale to tell.

Six months later, an even more decrepit boat comes ashore on the coast of Chile, containing just three castaways with their own, very different account of what happened. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil, they maintain, were not heroes – they were mutineers.

As accusations of treachery and murder fly, who is telling the truth? The stakes are life-and-death – for whoever is guilty could hang.

Format: Paperback (368 pages) Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 18th April 2023 Genre: Nonfiction, History

Find The Wager on Goodreads

Purchase The Wager from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.]

My Review

This was a book club pick and a rare non-fiction read for me. I really enjoyed it, as did the majority of my fellow readers. It’s a thrilling story of endurance and the will to survive with, it has to be said, some harrowing scenes in parts. It’s also a thought-provoking exploration of human behaviour under extreme circumstances.

The author’s meticulous research is obvious; you only have to look at the extensive notes and bibliography which make up nearly one hundred pages of the book to see that. Although the book is overflowing with maritime facts, including the origin of some commonly used phrases, it’s not a dry read. For example, this description of the toll on the Wager‘s structure of the rough seas they encounter: ‘Every day she was being devoured… She was pelted and gouged. She pitched, she heaved, she groaned, she splintered.’ Or this, when the ship is finally pitched onto the rocks of what will come to be known as Wager Island: ‘The bowsprit cleaved, windows burst, treenails popped, planks shattered, cabins collapsed, decks caved in.’

It has to be said that on the voyage the Wager’s crew experienced just about everything nature could throw at them as well as outbreaks of typhus and scurvy that cut a deadly swathe over the ship’s crew. I actually found it surprising that anyone survived the voyage, let along the shipwreck and the period as castaways on an island that provided very little in the way of food or shelter. Only salvaging items from the Wager ensured their survival and, at a crucial moment, assistance from an indigenous tribe much better suited to their environment than the crew.

One other thing that surprised me was the extent of the contemporaneous documents that survived, including the journals kept by sixteen year old midshipman John Byron (grandfather of the poet Lord Byron) and gunner, John Bulkeley.

The Wager is a story based on fact. If it wasn’t the author might have been tempted to create a more exciting ending but he stuck rigidly to the actual events which reveal something of a cover-up by those in power who didn’t care to advertise the breakdown of naval discipline or the parlous state of the country’s fleet.

By way of an afterword, Martin Scorcese (who brought to the screen David Grann’s previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon) and Leonard DiCaprio have acquired the screen rights to The Wager.

In three words: Well-researched, detailed, authentic
Try something similar: Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin

About the Author

David Grann is the author of the international bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s investigative reporting has garnered several honours, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York. (Photo: Goodreads author page)