#WWWWednesday – 9th August 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 Seventh SonThe Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (eARC, Penguin)

A child will be born who will change everything

When young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences.

Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.

Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention.

A Fenland GardenA Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor (ebook, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

A Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape – the Fens of southern Lincolnshire – by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England’s earliest field systems.

It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of ground for nature and wildlife – of repairing the damage done to a small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming.

A Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practising gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis’s account of the development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the plantsman’s trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally demanding plot of land. Above all, this is the story of bringing something beautiful into being; of embedding a garden in the local landscape; and thereby of deepening and broadening the idea of home.

TreasonTreason by James Jackson (Zaffre)

Behind the famous rhyme lies a murderous conspiracy that goes far beyond Guy Fawkes and his ill-fated Gunpowder Plot…

In a desperate race against time, spy Christian Hardy must uncover a web of deceit that runs from the cock-fighting pits of Shoe Lane, to the tunnels beneath a bear-baiting arena in Southwark, and from the bad lands of Clerkenwell to a brutal firefight in The Globe theatre.

But of the forces ranged against Hardy, all pale beside the renegade Spanish agent codenamed Realm.


Recently finished

The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan (Head of Zeus)

The Hollow Throne by Tim Leach (Head of Zeus)


What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Night RaidsThe Night Raids (Nighthawk #3) by Jim Kelly (Allison & Busby)

A lone German bomber crosses the east coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long, hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and, following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge’s rail yards. The shell falls short of its mark and lands in a neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the city’s medieval centre.

DI Eden Brooke is first on the scene and discovers the body of an elderly woman, Nora Wylde, in a house on Elm Street, two fingers on her left hand severed, in what looks like a brutal attempt by looters to steal her rings.

When the next day Nora’s teenage granddaughter Peggy, a munitions worker, is reported missing, Brooke realises there is more to the situation than meets the eye.

#TopTenTuesday Books I Eagerly Anticipated #TuesdayBookBlog

Top Ten Tuesday

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 Top Ten Tuesday topic is Books I’ve Read/Want to Read Because of Top Ten Tuesday, a topic suggested by Ellie at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm. It’s a great idea for a topic and I probably have read books or added titles to my wishlist as a result of seeing them mentioned by participants in Top Ten Tuesday but I’d struggle to remember any specific examples. Instead I’ve looked back at one of my previous Top Ten Tuesday posts – Most Anticipated Reads Releasing July to December 2022 – to see how many of the books I said I was itching to read I actually did. Links from each title will take you to my review or the book description on Goodreads.

Katastrophe by Graham Hurley – Read & reviewed
That Bonesetter Woman by Frances Quinn – Read & reviewed
The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh – Read & reviewed
The Night Ship by Jess Kidd – Read & reviewed
The Iron Way by Tim Leach – Read & reviewed
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris – Still sitting on my bookshelf 😦
Essex Dogs by Dan Jones – Read & reviewed
All The Broken Places by John Boyne – Read & reviewed
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson – Still sitting on my bookshelf 😦
Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North by Rachel Joyce – Not only unread but I don’t even own a copy! 😦

So that’s seven books read of the ten I said I wanted to read. What did we learn? I like lists and I like to stick to them…