Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 9th April 2023

whatcathyreadnext

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared My Five Favourite March 2023 Reads.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic put a spotlight on self-published/indie press books and I selected Ten Books From Independent Publishers. 

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 short story collection, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu, one of the books shortlisted for the Swansea University Dyland Thomas Prize 2023.

Friday – I shared my review of historical mystery, The Drums of War (Thomas Tallant #3) by Michael Ward. 

New arrivals

Family LoreFamily Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

The Marte women are preparing for a gathering that will change their lives forever

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides to host her own living wake – bringing together her family and community to celebrate her long life – her sisters Matilde, Pastora and Camila are concerned. What has she foreseen?

But Flor isn’t the only one with a secret. Matilde has tried to hide the extent of her husband’s infidelity for years, and now must confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora – always on a mission to solve her sisters’ problems – needs to come to terms with her past. And Camila, the youngest sibling, has decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted. Alongside their struggles, the next generation of Marte women face their own tumult of family obligations, infertility, and heartache.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the intertwining stories of these sisters and cousins, mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, to ask the ultimate question: what does it take to live a good life, for yourself and those you love?

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
  • Book Review: The Sinner’s Mark by S. W. Perry
  • Book Review: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry 

#WWWWednesday – 5th April 2023

whatcathyreadnext2 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

The ChosenThe Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry (riverrun) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

One Wednesday morning in November 1912, the aging Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she is gone.

The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?

He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy’s pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen – the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry – hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.

The Sinner's MarkThe Sinner’s Mark by S. W. Perry (eARC, Corvus via NetGalley)

Treason, heresy and revolt in Queen Elizabeth’s England . . .

The year is 1600. With a dying queen on the throne, war raging on the high seas and famine on the rise, England is on the brink of chaos. And in London’s dark alleyways, a conspiracy is brewing. In the court’s desperate bid to silence it, an innocent man is found guilty – the father of Nicholas Shelby, physician and spy. As Nicholas races against time to save his father, he and his wife Bianca are drawn into the centre of a treacherous plot against the queen.

When one of Shakespeare’s boy actors goes missing, and Bianca discovers a disturbing painting that could be a clue, she embarks on her own investigation. Meanwhile, as Nicholas comes closer to unveiling the real conspirator, the men who wish to silence him are multiplying. When he stumbles on a plan to overthrow the state and replace it with a terrifying new order, he may be forced to make a decision between his country and his heart . . .

Recently finished

God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson) 

The Drums of War (Thomas Tallant #3) by Michael Ward (Sharpe Books)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Rivers of TreasonRivers of Treason (Daniel Pursglove #3) by K. J. Maitland (eARC, Headline via NetGalley) 

London, 1607. As dawn breaks, Daniel Pursglove rides north, away from the watchful eye of the King and his spies.

He returns, disguised, to his childhood home in Yorkshire – with his own score to settle. The locals have little reason to trust a prying stranger, and those who remember Daniel do so with contempt.

When a body is found with rope burns about the neck, Daniel falls under suspicion. On the run, across the country, he is pursued by a ruthless killer whose victims all share the same gallows mark. Are these the crimes of someone with a cruel personal vendetta – or has Daniel become embroiled in a bigger, and far more sinister, conspiracy?

A new river of treason is rising, flowing from the fields of Yorkshire right to the heart of the King’s court . . .