Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 2nd June 2024

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My Week in Books

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published my review of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books I Was Excited To Get But Still Haven’t Read. 

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 Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. 

Friday – I made another visit Down The TBR Hole as a result of which my TBR pile is three (yes, a whole three!) books lighter.

Saturday – The first Saturday of the month means it’s time for #6Degrees of Separation. My book chain took me from Butter by Asako Yuzuki to The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.

New arrivals

Two book club picks…

Normal Rules Don't ApplyNormal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson (Penguin)

In this first full collection since Not the End of the World, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him.

With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Kate Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.

The HousekeepersThe Housekeepers by Alex Hay (Headline)

UPSTAIRS, MADAM IS PLANNING THE PARTY OF THE SEASON.

All eyes are on the grandest house in Mayfair as the countdown to their lavish summer ball begins. Everything must be perfect. But with the chandeliers gleaming and the cellars stocked, loyal housekeeper Mrs King is suddenly dismissed.

DOWNSTAIRS, THE SERVANTS ARE PLOTTING THE HEIST OF THE CENTURY.

As the clock strikes twelve on the night of the ball, Mrs King will return to strip the house of its riches – right under the nose of her former employer. And she knows just who to recruit to pull off the impossible: a bold alliance of women with nothing left to lose and every reason for revenge.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • My Five Favourite May 2024 Reads
  • Book Review: The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear 
  • Book Review: Estella’s Revenge by Barbara Havelocke

#WWWWednesday – 29th May 2024

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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

The Comfort of GhostsThe Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs #18) by Jacqueline Winspear (eARC, Allison & Busby via NetGalley) 

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Soon after a demobilized British soldier, ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, takes shelter with the group, Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners.

Maisie is deeply puzzled by the children’s reticence. Their stories are evasive and, more mysteriously, they appear to possess self-defense skills one might expect of trained adults in wartime. Her quest to bring comfort and the promise of a future to the youngsters and to the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie’s first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental aircraft. As Maisie picks apart the threads of her dead husband’s life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.

Book cover A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter MurrayA Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Property might be theft. But the housing market is murder.

My name is Al. I live in wealthy people’s second homes while their real owners are away. I don’t rob them, I don’t damage anything. I’m more an unofficial house-sitter than an actual criminal.

Life is good. Or it was – until last night, when my friends and I broke into the wrong place, on the wrong day, and someone wound up dead.

And now … now we’re in a great deal of trouble.

Recently finished

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)

Estella’s Revenge by Barbara Havelocke (Hera) 

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis (Vintage)

What Cathy Will Read Next

The Heart in WinterThe Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers.

Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast . . .