My Week in Books – 23rd July 2023

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published my review of Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With One Word Titles.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Thursday – I published my review of The Unheard by Anne Worthington as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I took part in the My Six in Six: 2023 meme. 

Saturday – I shared my review of Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman. 


New arrivals

HeldHeld by Anne Michaels (eARC, Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts whose messages he cannot understand .

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Wolves of WinterWolves of Winter (Essex Dogs #2) by Dan Jones (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

1347. Bruised and bloodied by an epic battle at Crécy, six soldiers of fortune known as the Essex Dogs pick through the wreckage of the fighting – and their own lives.

Now a new siege is beginning, and the Dogs are sent to attack the soaring walls of Calais. King Edward has vowed no Englishman will leave France til this city falls. To get home, they must survive a merciless winter in a lawless camp deadlier than any battlefield.

Obsessed with tracking down the vanished Captain, Loveday struggles to control his own men. Romford is haunted by the reappearance of a horrific figure from his past. And Scotsman is spiralling into a pit of drink, violence and self-pity.

The Dogs are being torn apart – but this war is far from over. It won’t be long before they lose more of their own…


On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading


Planned posts

  • Book Review: Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang
  • Book Review: A Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor
  • Book Review: A Stranger in my Grave by Margaret Millar

My Week in Books – 16th July 2023

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was a freebie. My ‘Just The Two Of Us’ list featured books that involve couples.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Thursday – I published my review of historical novel, The Soldier’s Child by Tetyana Denford as part of the blog tour.

Friday – I shared my review of historical novel, The Painter of Souls by Philip Kazan.

Saturday – I published my review of Para Bellum by Simon Turney. 


New arrivals

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.

AdamaAdama by Lavie Tidhar (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

There is no land without blood – no adama without dam.

In 1946, a young Ruth begins building a new life in Palestine, haunted by the death of her family in Europe and driven by youthful ideals in a land hostile to her presence. Her sister, Shoshana, survives in the Displaced Persons camps of Germany and joins her in Palestine, but dreams of escaping to distant America.

Her lovers, Dov and Israel, die in war, and her children try to serve the land Ruth bled for, only to find their own tragic ends or means of escape. As one generation begets another, their lives become entwined into a dark tapestry of secrets and lies, of revenge, forbidden love and murder.

A sweeping historical epic following four generations of a single family as they struggle to hold on to their land and each other.


On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading


Planned posts

  • Book Review: Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Unheard by Anne Worthington
  • Book Review: Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman