#WWWWednesday – 27th September 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.

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.

#TopTenTuesday Secondary Characters Who Got Their Own Book #TuesdayBookBlog

Top Ten Tuesday new

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 Secondary/Minor Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book. I’ve taken the easy way out and, instead of inventing my own, I’ve listed secondary characters from literature who have starred in their own novels.


Bertha Mason from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Charlotte Lucas from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Charlotte by Helen Moffett
Abel Magwitch (sort of) from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
Clara Marley from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Miss Marley by Vanessa Lafaye & Rebecca Mascull
Mrs Ahab mentioned in Moby Dick by Herman Melville in Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
Flashman from Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days in Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
Lear’s unnamed wife from Shakespeare’s King Lear in Learwife by JR Thorp

And finally, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels:

Professor Moriarty in Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
Irene Adler in Goodnight, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas
Mrs Hudson in Mrs Hudson and the Spirit’s Curse by Martin Davies