memes – Page 215 – What Cathy Read Next…

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is a freebie on the theme of Spring Cleaning which we are invited to interpret in any way we like. My list is a combination of books in which cleaners turn detective and books in which characters get an opportunity for a metaphorical ‘spring clean’ of their lives.

In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy – Hungarian cleaner, Lena Szarka, suspects one of her clients is to blame when her friend Timea disappears but with the police unwilling to share her suspicions it’s left to Lena to turn sleuth and find her friend.
A Clean Canvas by Elizabeth Mundy – when a valuable painting goes missing, Lena becomes embroiled in the art world which turns out to be a place of thwarted talents, unpaid debts and elegant fraudsters
A Messy Affair by Elizabeth Mundy – when Lena’s cousin Sarika and Sarika’s reality TV star boyfriend Terry receive threatening notes Lena is forced to explore the grubby world of reality television, and online dating.
The Playground Murders (The Detective’s Daughter #7) by Lesley Thomson – When cleaner, Stella Darnell, isn’t tackling dust and dirt, and restoring order to chaos, she’s solving murders.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin – Four very different women respond to an advertisement in The Times appealing to ‘those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine’ to rent a small medieval Italian castle for a month. The climate and the castle eventually start to have an effect on the four women, shifting their perceptions shift and waking them up to the love in their lives.
Summer in Provence by Lucy Coleman – Married couple Fern and Aiden embark on a ‘marriage gap year’ but is a change as good as a rest, and will their time apart transform their marriage or drive them further apart?
The House That Alice Built by Chris Penhall – A postcard from Buenos Aires turns Alice’s life upside down and, before she knows it, she’s in Cascais, Portugal beginning to learn how to ‘go with the flow’.
A Wedding in the Olive Garden by Leah Fleming – Sara Loveday flees to the beautiful island of Santaniki vowing to change her life. Spotting a gap in the local tourist market, she sets up a wedding plan business specialising in ‘second time around’ couples.
The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers – No one quite knows where Agnès Morel, the woman who cleans the cathedral of Chartres each morning, came from. And yet everyone she encounters agrees she is subtly transforming their lives, even if they can’t quite say how.
Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson – Three women thrown together by chance discover a sense of purpose they hadn’t possessed before during a canal journey on a narrowboat.

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post. You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark by Julia Baird. It’s a book I’d not heard of before this, let alone read. Perhaps not surprising because it isn’t published in the UK until May 2021. However, from the blurb, I understand it poses the question: when we’re overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom?

The concept of the world going dark, if only metaphorically, made me think of The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd which tells the story of the year an ash cloud from a volcanic eruption covered the sun causing a more literal darkness. The book is on the recently announced longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2021. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry was the winner of The Walter Scott Prize in 2017. Last year, the author produced an unexpected sequel to his prize-winning book, A Thousand Moons. Another unexpected but no less warmly greeted sequel was Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout set in the same fictional coastal town in Maine as its predecessor, Olive Kitteridge. The recently published The Northern Reach by W. S. Winslow is also set in a fictional coastal town in Maine where many of the inhabitants rely on fishing, in particular lobster fishing, for their income. Staying with lobsters, The Coral Bride by Roxanne Bouchard involves the search for the missing female captain of an abandoned lobster trawler founding drifting off the coast of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula.