Tag: Currently Reading

My Week in Books – 1st October 2023

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MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared five books I’ve read that were shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Secondary Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book. My ten have already had theirs.

Wednesday – I published my review of the brilliant North Woods by Daniel Mason. And 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 shared my publication day review of action-packed historical novel, A Day of Reckoning by Matthew Harffy.

Saturday – I published my review of The Merchant’s Dilemma by Carolyn Hughes.

New arrivals

Everything Is EverythingEverything is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate & Hope by Clive Myrie (Hodder & Stoughton)

As a Bolton teenager with a paper round, Clive Myrie read all the newspapers he delivered from cover to cover and dreamed of becoming a journalist. In this deeply personal memoir, he tells how his family history has influenced his view of the world, introducing us to his Windrush generation parents, a great grandfather who helped build the Panama Canal, and a great uncle who fought in the First World War, later to become a prominent police detective in Jamaica.

He reflects on how being black has affected his perspective on issues he’s encountered in thirty years reporting some of the biggest stories of our time (most recently from Ukraine), showing us how those experiences gave him a better idea of what it means to be an outsider. He tells of his pride in his roots, but his determination not to be defined by his background in dealing with the challenges of race and class to succeed at the highest level.

Moving, engaging, revealing, Everything is Everything is a story of love and hate – but also hope.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: Adama by Lavie Tidhar
  • Book Review: Byron and Shelley: Stories by Glenn Haybittle

#WWWWednesday – 27th September 2023

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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 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.

Byron and ShelleyByron and Shelley by Glenn Haybittle (eARC, Cheyne Walk via NetGalley)

The characters in Glenn Haybittle’s first collection of short stories are all caught in moments of life that bring about a revelation of identity.

A young woman who, after the war, catches sight of the guard who knocked to the ground her blind grandfather on the platform at Auschwitz. The backstory of the man accused of murdering Martin Luther King. The experience of a young girl on Kristallnacht and the subsequent tragic upheavals in her life. A dance teacher accused of sexually abusing one of his young students. A man constrained to return to his mother and look after her while she goes through dementia. A CIA operative grooming a patsy to take the blame for an assassination.

Recently finished

Night Train to Marrakech (Daughters of War #3) by Dinah Jefferies (HarperCollins)

North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray Press)

A Day of Reckoning (A Time for Swords #3) by Matthew Harffy (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

The Merchant’s Dilemma by Carolyn Hughes (eARC, Riverdown 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.