Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 4th June 2023

whatcathyreadnext

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared the 5 Star Books I’ve Read So Far This Year.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Things That Make Me Instantly Not Want To Read A Book. 

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 psychological thriller, Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I shared my Five Favourite May 2023 Reads. 

Saturday – I took part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme.

New arrivals

Moscow ExileMoscow Exile (Joe Wilderness #4) by John Lawton (Grove Press)

Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in Washington, D.C. with her second husband, but enviable dinner parties aren’t the only thing she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is surprised to cross paths with Charlotte, an old flame of his, who, thanks to her gossipy parties, has a packed pocketbook full of secrets she is eager to share.

Two decades later, in 1969, Joe Wilderness is stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, held captive by the KGB, a chip in a game way above his pay grade – but his old friends Frank and Eddie are going to try to spring him out of the toughest prison in the world. All roads lead back to Berlin, and to the famous Bridge of Spies…

A Bitter RemedyA Bitter Remedy by Alis Hawkins (Canelo)

Amongst the scholars, secrets and soporifics of Victorian Oxford, the truth can be a bitter pill to swallow….

Jesus College, Oxford, 1881. An undergraduate is found dead at his lodgings and the medical examination reveals some shocking findings. When the young man’s guardian blames the college for his death and threatens a scandal, Basil Rice, a Jesus college fellow with a secret to hide, is forced to act and finds himself drawn into Sidney Parker’s sad life.

The mystery soon attracts the attention of Rhiannon ‘Non’ Vaughan, a young Welsh polymath and one of the young women newly admitted to university lectures. But when neither the college principal nor the powerful ladies behind Oxford’s new female halls will allow her to become involved, Non’s fierce intelligence and determination to prove herself drive her on.

Both misfits at the university, Non and Basil form an unlikely partnership, and it soon falls to them to investigate the mysterious circumstances of Parker’s death. But between the corporate malfeasance and the medical quacks, they soon find the dreaming spires of Oxford are not quite what they seem.…

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Ancestry by Simon Mawer
  • Book Review: Hokey Pokey by Kate Macarenhas

#WWWWednesday – 31st May 2023

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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

Hokey PokeyHokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas (eARC, Apollo via NetGalley) 

February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the hotel’s red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.

In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn’t see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she’s determined not to let her out of her sight.

But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur…

AncestryAncestry : A Novel by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever, we look back in fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it?

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea… Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city… George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. They lived, loved, felt joy and fear, and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread binds them together?

Simon Mawer’s compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. He has created stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

Recently finished

The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph ) 

Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou (Verve Books) 

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Geometer LobachevskyThe Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

‘When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology …’

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.