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
So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières (hardcover)
A sweeping, heartbreaking novel following Daniel in his troubled marriage with Rosie as they navigate the unsettled time between the World Wars.
Rosie and Daniel have moved to Ceylon with their little daughter to start a new life at the dawn of the 1920s, attempting to put the trauma of the First World War behind them, and to rekindle a marriage that gets colder every day. However, even in the lush plantation hills it is hard for them to escape the ties of home and the yearning for fulfilment that threatens their marriage.
Back in England, Rosie’s three sisters are dealing with different challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and they find themselves using unconventional means to achieve their desires. Around them the world is changing, and when Daniel finds himself in Germany he witnesses events taking a dark and forbidding turn.
By turns humorous and tragic, gripping and touching, So Much Life Left Over follows a cast of unique and captivating characters as they navigate the extraordinary interwar years both in England and abroad.
Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic (paperback)
At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She falls in love with Manhattan, and becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own.
As Alice closes in on Mizuko, her ‘internet twin’, realities multiply and fact and fiction begin to blur. The relationship between the two women exposes a tangle of lies and sexual encounters. Three families collide as Alice learns that the swiftest answer to an ancient question – where do we come from? – can now be found online.
Recently finished (click on title for review)
The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp by Sarra Manning (paperback)
Beautiful, brilliant, ruthless – nothing can stop Becky Sharp.
Determined to leave her poverty-stricken roots behind her, Becky Sharp is going to take every opportunity offered to her to climb to the top. Whether it’s using her new BFF Amelia Sedley to step up into the rarified world of London’s upper classes, or seducing society’s most eligible bachelors, Becky Sharp is destined for great things – at any cost..
From London to Paris and beyond, the world is there for Becky’s taking – even though some people are determined to stop her along the way…
A hilarious contemporary retelling of the classic society novel, Vanity Fair, featuring the irrepressible Becky Sharp.
Lying in Vengeance by Gary Corbin (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author)
In this sequel to award-winning courtroom thriller Lying in Judgment, Peter Robertson must choose between two horrible options. Both involve death and revenge.
Peter Robertson, 33, once fought a man on a remote forested road and left him to die. Six months later, he served on the jury that freed a wrongfully accused man – and let his own secret slip to a beautiful but manipulative fellow juror, Christine Nielsen. Two months later, Christine wakes him in the middle of the night with a threat: kill Kyle, the man who stalks and abuses her, or have his own murderous past exposed. (Review to follow.)
White Water, Black Death by Shaun Ebelthite (ebook, review copy courtesy of the author)
Magazine editor Geneva Jones has been sent on a trans-Atlantic cruise to help secure a major advertising agreement from the CEO of the cruise line, Rachel Atkinson, but her efforts to win her over are curtailed by a mysterious crew death. Geneva suspects foul play. Rachel insists its suicide.
A former investigative journalist, Geneva can’t resist digging deeper, but what she finds is far more devastating. (Review to follow.)
What Cathy (will) Read Next
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (paperback)
Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancé and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn’t count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can’t stomach…
The Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional cannibalism, men and women, and the desire to be consumed.
Stories We Tell Ourselves by Sarah Francoise (paperback)
Frank and Joan’s marriage is in trouble. Having spent three decades failing to understand each other in their unfinished house in the French alps, Joan’s frustrations with her inattentive husband have reached breaking point. Frank, retreating ever further into his obscure hobbies, is distracted by an epistolary affair with his long-lost German girlfriend. Things are getting tense. But it’s Christmas, and the couple are preparing to welcome home their three far-flung children.
The children, though, are faring little better in love themselves. Maya, a gender expert mother-of-two, is considering leaving her family and running off with a woman; Wim is considering leaving his girlfriend; and Lois, who spends her time turning war documentaries into love poems, is facing a change of heart.
Written with a rare precision and insight, the author explores the thorniness of familial love and its capacity to endure with warmth, wit and disarming honesty.
