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 The 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 Books With My Favourite Colour on the Cover/Title. Now, I don’t really have a favourite colour so I thought I’d take a slightly left-field approach to this topic and go with the colours of the rainbow. And everyone knows what’s reputed to be at the end of the rainbow.
Clicking on the title will take you to the book’s description on Goodreads or my review.
The Rainbow by D H Lawrence
Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.
In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structures of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. A visionary novel, considered one of Lawrence’s finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world.
The Red Rock Wilderness by Elspeth Huxley
Why has the great biologist and Nobel prize-winner, Ewart Calusen, retired to a remote settlement in the French Congo? What is the real Clausen behind the myth? It is to answer those questions that a stubborn young Scotsman, Andrew Colquhoun, undertakes the arduous pilgrimage to Luala. He finds motive within motive, mystery behind mystery, as he explores the relationships between Clausen, the African scientist Dr Roland, the lawyer James Gichini, the with-doctor Vuko, Zuckermann, head of a powerful international company, and his secretary Gemma. He discovers finally that Clausen has submitted himself as a guinea-pig to the most appallingly dangerous experiment a man can undergo – an experiment which leads to horror and tragedy under the sacred rock of Bamili.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God’s elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Based on the author’s own experiences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the chilling tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the ‘rest cure’ prescribed after the birth of her child. Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden
On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages…. The faded elegance of Les Oeillets, with its bullet-scarred staircase and serene garden bounded by high walls; Eliot, the charming Englishman who became the children’s guardian while their mother lay ill in hospital; sophisticated Mademoiselle Zizi, hotel patronne, and Eliot’s devoted lover; 16 year old Joss, the oldest Grey girl, suddenly, achingly beautiful. And the Marne river flowing silent and slow beyond them all…. They would merge together in a gold-green summer of discovery, until the fruit rotted on the trees and cold seeped into their bones….
The Greengage Summer is Rumer Godden’s tense, evocative portrait of love and deceit in the Champagne country of the Marne – which became a memorable film starring Kenneth More and Susannah York. In the preface, Rumer Godden explains how it came to be written.
Prussian Blue by Phillip Kerr
It’s 1956 and Bernie Gunther is on the run. Ordered by Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, to murder Bernie’s former lover by thallium poisoning, he finds his conscience is stronger than his desire not to be murdered in turn. Now he must stay one step ahead of Mielke’s retribution.
The man Mielke has sent to hunt him is an ex-Kripo colleague, and as Bernie pushes towards Germany he recalls their last case together. In 1939, Bernie was summoned by Reinhard Heydrich to the Berghof: Hitler’s mountain home in Obersalzberg. A low-level German bureaucrat had been murdered, and the Reichstag deputy Martin Bormann, in charge of overseeing renovations to the Berghof, wants the case solved quickly. If the Fuhrer were ever to find out that his own house had been the scene of a recent murder – the consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about.
And so begins perhaps the strangest of Bernie Gunther’s adventures, for although several countries and seventeen years separate the murder at the Berghof from his current predicament, Bernie will find there is some unfinished business awaiting him in Germany.
The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd
The year is 1739. Eliza Lucas is sixteen years old when her father leaves her in charge of their family’s three plantations in rural South Carolina and then proceeds to bleed the estates dry in pursuit of his military ambitions. Tensions with the British, and with the Spanish in Florida, just a short way down the coast, are rising, and slaves are starting to become restless. Her mother wants nothing more than for their South Carolina endeavor to fail so they can go back to England. Soon her family is in danger of losing everything.
Upon hearing how much the French pay for indigo dye, Eliza believes it’s the key to their salvation. But everyone tells her it’s impossible, and no one will share the secret to making it. Thwarted at nearly every turn, even by her own family, Eliza finds that her only allies are an aging horticulturalist, an older and married gentleman lawyer, and a slave with whom she strikes a dangerous deal: teach her the intricate thousand-year-old secret process of making indigo dye and in return — against the laws of the day — she will teach the slaves to read.
So begins an incredible story of love, dangerous and hidden friendships, ambition, betrayal, and sacrifice.
March Violets by Phillip Kerr
Ex-Berlin cop and private detective Bernie Gunther has seen his share of bad guys. But when the worst guys of all are the ones running the show, it’s much harder to stay out of their reach.
Hired by a wealthy industrialist to investigate the murder of his daughter and her husband in an apparent botched robbery, Bernie soon finds himself drawn into the complex – not to mention lethal – internal politics and corruption of the Nazi party. When Herman Goering himself calls Bernie in with a task for him that throws his existing case into a whole new light, he must weigh up his hatred of the Nazis against his desire to stay alive.
To lessen the pain of his wife’s death, Keith Michaels headed cross-country. Yet though he had reached the Pacific Northwest, he still felt broken, empty and alone. When a sudden storm stranded him on Orcas Island, he sought refuge with the local widow, who was no elderly matron, but a reclusive young woman.
What was it about shy Jill Whelan and her charming cottage that made Keith want to stop his wandering ways? Did faith and love await him at Rainbow’s End?
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
This month’s starting book is 
The mention of ‘Bible’ made me think of the title of one of M.R. James’ ghost stories, ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’ (which can be found in his 
M.R. James was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge and it was in his rooms there that he first recited his ghost stories to a select audience. Therefore, I’m staying in Cambridge for my next connection, to a book set there but in 1939, in the opening weeks of the Second World War – 
The theme of darkness brought to mind its opposite – light – and damaged sight made me think of the blind Marie-Laure in Anthony Doerr’s bestseller, 
To my mind, for just about every book there is a connection to a John Buchan book. In this case, the mention of a jewel immediately made me think of the name of the gang of evil foreign agents against which Richard Hannay pits his wits in 
Another famous author who found Broadstairs an excellent place for writing was Charles Dickens. Dickens was a frequent summer visitor to Broadstairs in the 1850s and 1860s, staying at Fort House (now known as 
Dickens was married to Catherine for twenty-two years and fathered ten children with her. Yet she was forced from the family home when he became enamoured of a young actress. 
What Cathy Read Next... 