My Six in Six 2023

I came across this on Susan’s A Life in Books blog but it was created by Jo at The Book Jotter. The idea is to arrange some of the books you’ve read so far this year into six categories: either categories from Jo’s list, categories of your own or a combination of both. I’ve done the latter. It’s more difficult than you might think! Confession: I had to cheat and use a few books twice. Links from titles will take you to my review (I haven’t yet worked out how to add links from images in a gallery, if that’s even possible. The block editor is doing my head in as it is…)

Six authors new to me

Six Non-US/UK authors

A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfar (Czech Republic)
Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou (Canada)
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu (Nigeria)
I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam (Brunei)
The Settlement by Jock Serong (Australia)
Where Roses Never Die by Gunnar Staalesen (Norway)

Six mysteries, thrillers or crime novels NOT by Agatha Christie

Six books featuring LGBT characters

The New Life by Tom Crewe
Becoming Ted by Matt Cain
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery
Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas

Six books nominated for literary prizes

Six books set in a country other than my own

The Paris Sister by Adrienne Chinn (France, Canada & Egypt)
Ponti by Sharlene Teo (Singapore)
The Emperor’s Shield by Gordon Doherty (Roman province of Thracia)
The Lace Weaver by Lauren Chater (Estonia)
The Witches of Vardo by Anya Bergman (Norway)
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland)

#WWWWednesday – 19th July 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

Before We Were InnocentBefore We Were Innocent by Ella Berman (Aria via NetGalley)

The truth depends on who you ask…

Ten years ago, after a sun-soaked summer spent in Greece, Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their best friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from calling them everything under the sun.

Now Joni is tangled up in a crime in LA eerily similar to that one fateful night, and when she turns up at her old friend’s doorstep asking for an alibi, Bess has no choice. She still owes her.

They say the truth will set you free but can Bess face up to what happened that night?

She should know by now… you can’t be an innocent woman when everyone wants you to be guilty.

A Fenland GardenA Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor (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.

Unnatural EndsUnnatural Ends by Christopher Huang (eARC, Inkshares)

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered — savagely beaten to death in his own study with a mediaeval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children: Alan, an archeologist; Roger, an engineer; and Caroline, a journalist. But his heirs soon find that his last testament contains a strange proviso — that his estate shall go to the heir who solves his murder.

To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into the past. As their suspicion mounts — of each other and of peculiar strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow — they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth.


Recently finished

Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt (Raven Books)

Para Bellum by Simon Turney (Head of Zeus)

The Unheard by Anne Worthington (Confingo)


What Cathy (will) Read Next

Margaret Millar Vanish In An Instant A Stranger in My Grave The Listening WallsA Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar (Pushkin Press)

A nightmare is haunting Daisy Harker.

Night after night she walks a strange cemetery in her dreams, until she comes to a grave that stops her in her tracks. It’s Daisy’s own, and according to the dates on the gravestone she’s been dead for four years.

What can this nightmare mean, and why is Daisy’s husband so insistent that she forget it? Driven to desperation, she hires a private investigator to reconstruct the day of her dream death. But as she pieces her past together, her present begins to fall apart…