Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 23rd July 2023

whatcathyreadnext

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published my review of Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With One Word Titles.

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 published my review of The Unheard by Anne Worthington as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I took part in the My Six in Six: 2023 meme. 

Saturday – I shared my review of Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman. 

New arrivals

HeldHeld by Anne Michaels (eARC, Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts whose messages he cannot understand .

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Wolves of WinterWolves of Winter (Essex Dogs #2) by Dan Jones (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

1347. Bruised and bloodied by an epic battle at Crécy, six soldiers of fortune known as the Essex Dogs pick through the wreckage of the fighting – and their own lives.

Now a new siege is beginning, and the Dogs are sent to attack the soaring walls of Calais. King Edward has vowed no Englishman will leave France til this city falls. To get home, they must survive a merciless winter in a lawless camp deadlier than any battlefield.

Obsessed with tracking down the vanished Captain, Loveday struggles to control his own men. Romford is haunted by the reappearance of a horrific figure from his past. And Scotsman is spiralling into a pit of drink, violence and self-pity.

The Dogs are being torn apart – but this war is far from over. It won’t be long before they lose more of their own…

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang
  • Book Review: A Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor
  • Book Review: A Stranger in my Grave by Margaret Millar

#WWWWednesday – 19th July 2023

whatcathyreadnext6 Comments

WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

Before We Were InnocentBefore We Were Innocent by Ella Berman (Aria via NetGalley)

The truth depends on who you ask…

Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their best friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from calling them everything under the sun.

Now Joni is tangled up in a crime in LA eerily similar to that one fateful night, and when she turns up at her old friend’s doorstep asking for an alibi, Bess has no choice. She still owes her.

They say the truth will set you free but can Bess face up to what happened that night?

She should know by now… you can’t be an innocent woman when everyone wants you to be guilty.

A Fenland GardenA Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

A Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape – the Fens of southern Lincolnshire – by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England’s earliest field systems.

It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of ground for nature and wildlife – of repairing the damage done to a small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming.

A Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practising gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis’s account of the development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the plantsman’s trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally demanding plot of land. Above all, this is the story of bringing something beautiful into being; of embedding a garden in the local landscape; and thereby of deepening and broadening the idea of home.

Unnatural EndsUnnatural Ends by Christopher Huang (eARC, Inkshares)

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered — savagely beaten to death in his own study with a mediaeval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children: Alan, an archeologist; Roger, an engineer; and Caroline, a journalist. But his heirs soon find that his last testament contains a strange proviso — that his estate shall go to the heir who solves his murder.

To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into the past. As their suspicion mounts — of each other and of peculiar strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow — they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth.

Recently finished

Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt (Raven Books)

Para Bellum by Simon Turney (Head of Zeus)

The Unheard by Anne Worthington (Confingo)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Margaret Millar Vanish In An Instant A Stranger in My Grave The Listening WallsA Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar (Pushkin Press)

A nightmare is haunting Daisy Harker.

Night after night she walks a strange cemetery in her dreams, until she comes to a grave that stops her in her tracks. It’s Daisy’s own, and according to the dates on the gravestone she’s been dead for four years.

What can this nightmare mean, and why is Daisy’s husband so insistent that she forget it? Driven to desperation, she hires a private investigator to reconstruct the day of her dream death. But as she pieces her past together, her present begins to fall apart…