Tag: myweekinbooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published an extract from The Garfield Conspiracy by Owen Dwyer as part of the blog tour. 

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books On My Autumn 2021 To-Read List.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to have a good nose around what others are reading. I also published my review of historical novel Daughters of War by Dinah Jefferies as part of the blog tour.

Thursday – I shared a progress update on the Bookbloggers 2021 Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Lynne at Fictionophile.  

Friday – I published my review of World War 2 naval adventure Splinter on the Tide by Phillip Parotti.

Saturday – I shared my review of supernatural short story The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings by Dan Jones.

Sunday – I published my review of The Improbable Adventures of Miss Emily Soldene by Helen Batten as part of the blog tour.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media.

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New arrivals

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray (eARC, Harvill Secker via NetGalley)

The gins are silent. The dead are not.

1919. On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial. Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.

Amy Vanneck’s fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. Defying convention, hardship and impossible odds, she heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.

It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

Lily by Rose Tremain (eARC, Chatto & Windus via NetGalley)

Nobody knows yet that she is a murderer…

Abandoned at the gates of a London park one winter’s night in 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is saved by a young police constable and taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Lily is fostered by an affectionate farming family in rural Suffolk, enjoying a brief childhood idyll before she is returned to the Hospital, where she is punished for her rebellious spirit. Released into the harsh world of Victorian London, Lily becomes a favoured employee at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium, but all the while she is hiding a dreadful secret…

Across the years, policeman Sam Trench keeps watch over the young woman he once saved. When Sam meets Lily again, there is an instant attraction between them and Lily is convinced that Sam holds the key to her happiness – but might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death? 

Violets by Alex Hyde (eARC, Granta via NetGalley)

A young woman, Violet, lies in a hospital bed in the closing days of the war. Her pregnancy is over and she is no longer able to conceive. With her husband deployed to the Pacific Front and her friends caught up in transitory love affairs, she must find a way to put herself back together.

In a small, watchful town in the Welsh valleys, another Violet contemplates the fate she shares with her unborn child. Unwed and unwanted, an overseas posting offers a temporary way out. Plunged into the heat and disorder of Naples, her body begins to reveal the responsibility it carries even as she is drawn into the burnished circle of a charismatic new friend, Maggie.

Between these two Violets, sung into being like a babe in a nursery rhyme: a son. As their lives begin to intertwine, a spellbinding story of women’s courage emerges, suffused with power, lyricism and beauty, from an exhilarating new voice in British fiction.

The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe, translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites (eARC, Pan MacMillan)

Writer. Romantic. Pilot. Hero.

All Antoine de Saint Exupéry wants to do is be a pilot. But flying is a dangerous dream and one that sets him at odds with his aristocratic background and the woman he loves. Despite attempts to keep him grounded, Antoine is determined to venture forwards into the unknown. Together with his friends, Jean and Henri, he will pioneer new mail routes across the globe and help change the future of aviation. In the midst of his adventures, Antoine also begins to weave a children’s story that is destined to touch the lives of millions of readers around the world. A story called The Little Prince . . . Fame and fortune may have finally found Antoine, but as the shadow of war begins to threaten Europe, he’s left to wonder whether his greatest adventure is yet to come…

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

• Book Review: House of Beauty by Melba Escobar
• Top Ten Tuesday
• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Shanghai Wife by Emma Harcourt
• WWW Wednesday
• Book Review: The Redeemed (West Country Trilogy #3) by Tim Pears 
• My Five Favourite September Reads
• #6 Degrees of Separation

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of historical mystery The Wrecking Storm (Thomas Tallant #2) by Michael Ward as part of the blog tour. 

Tuesday –  I shared my review of Ghosts of the West (Drabble & Harris #3) by Alec Marsh as part of the blog tour. And this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With Numbers In Their Title.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to have a good nose around what others are reading. 

Thursday – I published my review of police procedural A Better Part of Valor (Valorie Dawes #3) by Gary Corbin.  

Friday – I reviewed Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister as part of the blog tour organised by Sandstone Press. 

Saturday – I published my review of the Booker Prize shortlisted The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed.

Sunday – I shared my review of A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson as part of the blog tour organised by Gallic Books.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media.

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New arrivals

What you might call a bumper week!

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (audiobook)

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves.

Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband’s authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil.

As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom’s iron rule threatening Vardø’s very existence.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials, The Mercies is a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization. 

Down a Dark River (Inspector Corravan #1) by Karen Odden (eARC, Crooked Lane Books)

London, 1878. One April morning, a small boat bearing a young woman’s corpse floats down the murky waters of the Thames. When the victim is identified as Rose Albert, daughter of a prominent judge, the Scotland Yard director gives the case to Michael Corravan, one of the only Senior Inspectors remaining after a corruption scandal the previous autumn left the division in ruins. Reluctantly, Corravan abandons his ongoing case, a search for the missing wife of a shipping magnate, handing it over to his young colleague, Mr. Stiles.

An Irish former bare-knuckles boxer and dockworker from London’s seedy East End, Corravan has good street sense and an inspector’s knack for digging up clues. But he’s confounded when, a week later, a second woman is found dead in a rowboat, and then a third. The dead women seem to have no connection whatsoever. Meanwhile, Mr. Stiles makes an alarming discovery: the shipping magnate’s missing wife, Mrs. Beckford, may not have fled her house because she was insane, as her husband claims, and Mr. Beckford may not be the successful man of business that he appears to be.

Slowly, it becomes clear that the river murders and the case of Mrs. Beckford may be linked through some terrible act of injustice in the past – for which someone has vowed a brutal vengeance. Now, with the newspapers once again trumpeting the Yard’s failures, Corravan must dredge up the truth – before London devolves into a state of panic and before the killer claims another innocent victim. 

My Secret Sister by Lauren Westwood (eARC)

Two DNA tests, one big lie…

“As I speed off in the ambulance holding my daughter’s hand, I wonder how I could have been so stupid. I should have made the bargain, paid the price – anything to avoid being right here, right now. A voice whispers in my head that I can’t silence. This is all your fault. You killed her. It’s her voice, the one I hear in my nightmares. The woman who stole my memories, the woman who stole my life. And, this time, I know she’s right.”

How far would you go to save your child?

Claire is living every mother’s worst nightmare. Her daughter, Jess, has been diagnosed with a rare illness and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. With no match on the registry, Claire turns to a charismatic geneticist for help and embarks on a Genetic Journey to seek a familial match for her daughter.

On the other side of the country, Marianne suffers her eighth miscarriage. Her perfect life is rotting underneath, but she is determined to do whatever it takes to have a baby. When DNA test results reveal that Claire and Marianne are half-sisters, Claire must face the dark lies of the past and make impossible choices about the future. Is her secret sister the answer to her prayers, or will she cost her everything?

The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings by Dan Jones (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

One winter, in the dark days of King Richard II, a tailor was riding home on the road from Gilling to Ampleforth. It was dank, wet and gloomy; he couldn’t wait to get home and sit in front of a blazing fire.

Then, out of nowhere, the tailor is knocked off his horse by a raven, who then transforms into a hideous dog, his mouth writhing with its own innards. The dog issues the tailor with a warning: he must go to a priest and ask for absolution and return to the road, or else there will be consequences…

First recorded in the early fifteenth century by an unknown monk, The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings was transcribed from the Latin by the great medievalist M.R. James in 1922. Building on that tradition, now bestselling historian Dan Jones retells this medieval ghost story in crisp and creepy prose.

A Woman Made of Snow by Elisabeth Gifford (eARC, Corvus)

Scotland, 1949: Caroline Gillan and her new husband Alasdair have moved back to Kelly Castle, his dilapidated family estate in the middle of nowhere. Stuck caring for their tiny baby, and trying to find her way with an opinionated mother-in-law, Caroline feels adrift, alone and unwelcome.

But when she is tasked with sorting out the family archives, Caroline discovers a century-old mystery that sparks her back to life. There is one Gillan bride who is completely unknown – no photos exist, no records have been kept – the only thing that is certain is that she had a legitimate child. Alasdair’s grandmother.

As Caroline uncovers a strange story that stretches as far as the Arctic circle, her desire to find the truth turns obsessive. And when a body is found in the grounds of the castle, her hunt becomes more than just a case of curiosity. What happened all those years ago? Who was the bride? And who is the body…?

The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan (Paperback, Handheld Press)

John Buchan (1875-1940), author of over 100 books including The Thirty-Nine Steps, was a stealth writer of supernatural and Weird fiction. From the beginning of his career to his last works, he brought supernatural elements into his narratives to test his characters and thrill his readers.

His 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain was his last full-length work devoted to exploring a supernatural theme: if you were able to see one year into the future, what would you do with that foreknowledge? And what would it do to you? 

A Stranger from the Storm by William Burton McCormick (eARC)

The year is 1900. The port city of Odessa on the Black Sea is being terrorized by a brutal killer called the Specter. With five people already dead, the murderer promises more.

One family, the Karadopoulinas, run a boarding house. Sisters Tasia and Eleni feel certain the killer is a scarred, shambling Londoner who took lodging with them one night during a thunderstorm. Furtive and threatening, Henry Humble, stalks Odessa’s labyrinth of interlocking courtyards and foggy docks at night, armed with weapons and skeleton keys. As the body count rises, so do the questions…

Who is the mysterious figure haunting the catacombs below the streets of Odessa? Why won’t Eleni’s police constable sweetheart investigate? Who will be the next to die?

Cold As Hell by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, translated by Quentin Bates (eARC, Orenda Books)

Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren’t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realizes that her sister isn’t avoiding her … she has disappeared, without trace.

As she confronts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours – who have their own reasons for staying out of sight – Áróra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.

Baffled by the conflicting details of her sister’s life, and blinded by the shiveringly bright midnight sun of the Icelandic summer, Áróra enlists the help of police officer Daníel, as she tries to track her sister’s movements, and begins to tail Björn – but she isn’t the only one watching…

The Girl from Bletchley Park by Kathleen McGurl (eARC)

1942. Three years into the war, Pam turns down her hard-won place at Oxford University to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. There, she meets two young men, both keen to impress her, and Pam finds herself falling hard for one of them. But as the country’s future becomes more uncertain by the day, a tragic turn of events casts doubt on her choice – and Pam’s loyalty is pushed to its limits…

Present day. Julia is struggling to juggle her career, two children and a husband increasingly jealous of her success. Her brother presents her with the perfect distraction: forgotten photos of their grandmother as a young woman at Bletchley Park. Why did her grandmother never speak of her time there? The search for answers leads Julia to an incredible tale of betrayal and bravery – one that inspires some huge decisions of her own…

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

• Blog Tour/Book Extract: The Garfield Conspiracy by Owen Dwyer
• Top Ten Tuesday
• Blog Tour/Book Review: Daughters of War by Dinah Jefferies
• WWW Wednesday
• Book Review: Splinter on the Tide by Phillip Parotti 
• Blog Tour/Book Review: The Improbable Adventures of Miss Emily Soldene by Helen Batten