My Week in Books – 22nd October 2023

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published an extract from Until September by Harker Jones.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books with Weather Events in the Title.

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. 

Saturday – As part of the #1962Club, I published my review of science fiction classic, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick


New arrivals

Back TroubleBack Trouble by Clare Chambers (Arrow)

On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he’d reached an all-time low.

It only needed a discarded chip on a South London street to lay him literally flat. So, bedbound and bored, Philip naturally starts to write the story of his life.

But between the mundane catalogue of seaside holidays and bodged DIY, broken relationships and unspoken truths, more surprises are revealed, both comic and touching, than Philip or his family ever bargained for.

Perhaps there will even be a happy ending . . .

The Slowworm's SongThe Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)

An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a fragile bond with Maggie, the daughter he barely knows, when he receives a summons – to an inquiry in Belfast about an incident during the Troubles, which he hoped he had long outdistanced. Now to testify about it could wreck his fragile relationship with Maggie. And if he loses her, he loses everything.

He decides instead to write her an account of his life – a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. But as time runs out, the day comes when he must face again what happened in that distant summer of 1982.


On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading


Planned posts

  • Book Review: The Socialite Spy by Sarah Sigal
  • Book Review: In Two Minds by Alis Hawkins

#WWWWednesday – 18th October 2023

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 Book of FireThe Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri (Manilla Press via Readers First)

This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him. I left him and now he may be dead.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life in a tiny Greek Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the region’s natural beauty wiped out.

In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation.

The Man in the High CastleThe Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (Penguin)

It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war — and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.


Recently finished

The Socialite SpyThe Socialite Spy by Sarah Sigal (Lume Books)


What Cathy (will) Read Next

In Two MindsIn Two Minds (Teifi Valley Coroner #2) by Alis Hawkins (Dome Press)

Harry Probert-Lloyd, a young barrister forced home from London by encroaching blindness, has begun work as the acting coroner of Teifi Valley with solicitor’s clerk John Davies as his assistant.

When a faceless body is found on an isolated beach, Harry must lead the inquest. But his dogged pursuit of the truth begins to ruffle feathers. Especially when he decided to work alongside a local doctor with a dubious reputation and experimental theories considered radical and dangerous.

Refusing to accept easy answers might not only jeopardise Harry’s chance to be elected coroner permnantly but could, it seems implicate his own family in a crime.