On What Cathy Read Next last week
Blog posts
Monday – I shared my review of crime novel A Quiet Death in Italy by Tom Benjamin as part of the blog tour.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Authors I’ve Read The Most Books By.
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 have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.
Thursday – As part of the blog tour, I published my review of The Englishman by David Gilman.
Friday – I shared a progress update on my 2020 Reading Challenges.
Saturday – I published my review of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.
New arrivals
The Second Marriage by Gill Paul (ebook, courtesy of Avon and Random Things Tours)
JACKIE – When her first marriage ends in tragedy, Jackie Kennedy fears she’ll never love again. But all that changes when she encounters…
ARI – Successful and charming, Ari Onassis is a man who promises her the world. Yet soon after they marry, Jackie learns that his heart also belongs to another…
MARIA – A beautiful, famed singer, Maria Callas is in love with Jackie’s new husband – and she isn’t going to give up. Little by little, Jackie and Maria’s lives begin to tangle in a dangerous web of secrets, scandal and lies.
But with both women determined to make Ari theirs alone, the stakes are high. How far will they go for true love?
This Is Happiness by Niall Williams (paperback)
Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn’t changed in a thousand years.
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can’t explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy’s past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.
Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community – its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs – and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.
To Calais, In Ordinary Time by James Meek (paperback)
Three journeys. One road.
England, 1348. A gentlewoman is fleeing an odious arranged marriage, a Scottish proctor is returning home to Avignon and a handsome young ploughman in search of adventure is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.
Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.
A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek’s extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire—set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Buchan of the Month: Introducing…The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan
- Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Make Me Smile
- Waiting on Wednesday
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Rags of Time by Michael Ward
- Book Review: The Horseman by Tim Pears
What Cathy Read Next... 