Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 29th May 2022

whatcathyreadnext

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my review of Only May by Carol Lovekin as part of the blog tour.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Bookish Quotes. 

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is my 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 an extract from historical novel The Dark Earth by Gordon Doherty to celebrate publication day. I also published my review of The White Girl by Tony Birch as part of the blog tour. 

Friday – I shared my review of Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings by Tony Fairweather as part of the blog tour.

Saturday – I indulged my other love – gardening – by participating in the Six on Saturday meme.  

New arrivals

Thea and DeniseThea and Denise by Caroline Bond (ARC, Corvus via Readers First)

Two women. An open road. The trip of a lifetime.

Thea is confident, sorted, determined to have fun, but there are sorrows beneath the surface of her life. Denise is struggling under the weight of her many commitments and in desperate need of some excitement. When these polar opposites meet, and unexpectedly become friends, they realise they’re both looking to escape.

So begins a road trip that leads them far from home and yet closer to their true selves.

But they can’t outrun their pasts forever and when things start to become complicated, both women have an important decision to make. Do they give up or keep going? Turn around or drive on?

KatastropheKatastrophe by Graham Hurley (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

January, 1945. Wherever you look on the map, the Thousand Year Reich is shrinking. Even Goebbels has run out of lies to sweeten the reckoning to come. An Allied victory is inevitable, but who will reap the spoils of war?

Two years ago, Werner Nehmann’s war came to an abrupt end in Stalingrad. With the city in ruins, the remains of General Paulus’ Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets and Nehmann was shipped to Russia’s arctic gulags. But now he’s riding on the back of one of Marshal Zhukov’s T-35 tanks, heading home with a message for the man who consigned him to the Stalingrad Cauldron.

With the Red Army about to fall on Berlin, Stalin fears his sometime allies are conspiring to deny him his prize. He needs to speak to Goebbels – and who better to broker the contact than Werner Nehmann, Goebbels’ one-time confidante?

Swapping the ruins of Stalingrad for the wreckage of Berlin, swapping Joseph Goebbels for Joseph Stalin, Nehmann’s war has taken a turn for the worse. The Germans have a word for it.

Katastrophe.

The White HareThe White Hare by Jane Johnson (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

In a valley steeped in legend lies an abandoned house where Edens may be lost, found and remade…

The White Valley in the far west of Cornwall cuts deeply through bluebell woods down to the sea. The house above the beach has lain neglected since the war. It comes with a reputation, which is why Mila and her mother Magda acquire it so cheaply in the fateful summer of 1954.

Magda plans to restore the house to its former glory: the venue for glittering parties, where the rich and celebrated gathered for bracing walks by day and sumptuous cocktails by night. Mila’s ambitions, meanwhile, are much less grand; she dreams of creating a safe haven for herself, and a happy home for her little girl, Janey.

The White Valley comes with a long, eventful history, laced with tall tales. Locals say that a white hare may be seen running through the woods there; to some she’s an ill omen, to others a blessing. Feeling fragile and broken-hearted, Mila is in need of as many blessings as she can get. But will this place provide the fresh start she so desperately needs?

The Bone FlowerThe Bone Flower by Charles Lambert (ARC, Gallic Books)

On a grey November evening in Victorian London, Edward Monteith, a moneyed but listless young man, stokes the fire at his local gentleman’s club, listening to its members: scientists, explorers and armchair philosophers discussing their supernatural experiences and their theories of life after death.

Edward is taken under the wing of some sceptics and attends a supposed seance where he is captivated by a beautiful young woman selling flowers outside the theatre.

What follows is a quintessential Gothic novel, a ghost story, and an uncanny love story. 

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Young Women by Jessica Moor
  • Book Review: The Death of Remembrance by Denzil Meyrick
  • My Five Favourite May 2022 Reads
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Fire Killer by Ross Greenwood
  • #6Degrees of Separation
  •  

#WWWWednesday – 25th May 2022

whatcathyreadnext7 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

Twenty Eight Pounds Final CoverTwenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings: A Windrush Story by Tony Fairweather (eARC, HopeRoad Publishing)

After World War Two the call went out to the British Empire for volunteers to help rebuild the ‘Mother Country’. Young men and women from different Caribbean islands were quick to respond, paying the considerable sum of £28.10s to board HMT Empire Windrush – the ‘ship of dreams’ that would take them to their new lives.

The motives and back-stories of these West Indian people is a key part of the Windrush story, one that has never been fully told. This powerful narrative reveals what happened on board that ship, was packed with young, excited people who had never before left their parents, their parishes – let alone their islands. In the course of the memorable two-week voyage there were parties, friendships, fights, gambling, racism, sex – and discussions of God and love.

Portable MagicPortable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith (Allen Lane)

Most of what we say about books is really about their contents: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. In this thrilling new history, Emma Smith shows us why.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting, iconoclastic and ambitious new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over humankind. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith compellingly argues that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, Smith uncovers how this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways. She celebrates the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; she reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes a new definition of a ‘classic’. Ultimately, Smith illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine: for better or worse, books do not simply reflect humankind, but have also defined who we are, turning us into the readers they would like to have.

Recently finished

Only May by Carol Lovekin (Honno)

The White Girl by Tony Birch (HarperCollins)

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Vintage)

Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape. (Review to follow)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Young Women CoverYoung Women by Jessica Moor (eARC, Zaffre)

Everyone’s got that history, I guess. Everyone’s got a story.

When Emily meets the enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin’s world of Soho living, boozy dinners, and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily’s life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable. Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life – her work assisting vulnerable women, her old friend Lucy – to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past. Something that threatens to unravel everything . . .