Tag: new arrivals

On the blog last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books On My Spring 2026 To-Read List.

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 Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky by Mary O’Donnell.

Friday – I shared my review of The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, the book chosen for me in the latest Classics Club Spin.

Saturday – I joined other gardeners for the #SixonSaturday meme, sharing six things happening in my garden this week.

New on my shelves

Two NetGalley approvals, my book club’s pick for next month and a couple of other books that followed me home.

Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday via NetGalley)

It’s the summer of 1951 and everyone is looking to put the dark days of the war behind them. The government’s solution: The Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s creativity, grit and ingenuity.

For foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn, it might offer the chance of redemption after a bad war in the Far East and a peace that is proving no easier to negotiate. Having failed to resume his journalistic career, he reluctantly joins an oddball team of misfits, ne’er-do-wells and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch.

Flynn’s attempts to resume some semblance of a romantic life also founder when one of his dates goes missing and he is deemed to be the last person to have seen her alive. Could he have been in some way responsible for her disappearance?

The Eagle & The Wolf (Age of Attila #1) by Gordon Doherty (HarperCollins via NetGalley)

As Hun hordes and Germanic tribes maraud through Imperial lands, two legendary men – Attila the Hun and the “Last of the Romans” General Flavius Aetius find their fortunes entangled with the chaos.

Flavius Aetius, a noble Roman son, is an outsider in a savage land. He has been banished, given as hostage to the barbaric Huns and sent to the edge of the world.

What the Huns do not know, however, is that his father and mother have been murdered in a coup. He is an orphan, with no value at all. His life hangs on a lie. In this new harsh world, he manages to find one grudging ally, a young boy named Attila.

A brotherhood is formed. One that, the shamans foretell, will shatter the world.

Flashlight by Susan Choi (Vintage)

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk’s disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels. . .

A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor (Hemlock Press)

England, May 1945.In the last days of World War II, Monkshill Park School for Girls stands far apart from the violence in Europe. Yet a woman has been murdered in its grounds.

Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a secretive past, has disappeared. The teachers and girls whisper that she’s run away, but in fact she has met a violent end.

Replacement tutor and amateur crime writer Alec Shaw arrives to find a school riven with bitter rivalries and dangerous tensions. He begins to suspect there is a real-life mystery waiting to be solved… and these echoing halls hide a killer.

Under A Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder by Philip Marsden (Granta)

The discovery of minerals beneath our feet has transformed our species: tin and copper ushered in the Bronze Age, silver kick-started the engines of global trade, and lithium is integral to much of today’s technology. Each of these substances generated a leap forward in science and culture, opening our imagination a little further.

Here, Philip Marsden takes us on a revelatory journey from the tin mines of Cornwall to the gold-rich mountains of Georgia, in search of the minerals that have shaped not just our history but our entire troubled relationship with the natural world.

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading review copies of The River Days of Rosie Crow and The Perfect Circle.

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Look out for…

• Book Review: A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia
• Book Review: Love Lane by Patrick Gale

On the blog last week

With the distraction of being a member of the judging panel for the Winston Graham Historical Prize over, I applied myself to catching up with reviews. Still some to go though…

Monday – I published my reviews of Words for Patty Jo by Jill Arlene Culiner and The Pretender by Jo Harkin, shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2026.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With Green Covers in honour of it being St. Patrick’s Day.

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. I also published my review of short story collection What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2026.

Friday – I shared my review of Ravenglass by Carolyn Kirby.

Saturday – I joined other gardeners for the #SixonSaturday meme, sharing six things happening in my garden this week.

New on my shelves

Bane of Bernicia (The Bernicia Chronicles #11) by Matthew Harffy (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

Returning from a dangerous mission to Rome, warlord Beobrand looks forward to peace at home, but bloodshed remains his constant companion.

While bringing criminals to justice Beobrand believes he has discovered a secret alliance between two of Bernicia’s the Picts and the Mercians.

He hastens to warn his king, but finds Oswiu distracted, preparing to marry his eldest son to the daughter of former adversary Penda of Mercia, who remains as slippery as ever.

Dismayed, Beobrand finds himself blamed for breaking the truce with the Mercians, and must fight once more for his life. Worse, Penda insists on taking Oswiu’s young son as a hostage.

Beobrand is surprised when Queen Eanflæd concocts a plot to rescue her son and orders him to take part. It will take all their guile to achieve their goal… and keep their heads, when half the kingdoms of Albion want Bernicia destroyed.

Prey (Spoils of War #11) by Graham Hurley (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

1943. The war is turning against the Third Reich, but the Luftwaffe are eagerly exploiting a lethal blind spot in the RAF’s Lancaster bombers with their innovative upward-firing cannon.

MI5’s Tam Moncrieff lobbies ceaselessly for a solution in the face of officials’ indifference. His quest sees him accompanying a bombing raid deep into Nazi Germany that will change the course of the war.

The target is the Nazis’ flagship city of Nuremberg. With bright moonlight and clear visibility, the conditions are perfect… for the enemy. The Luftwaffe are jubilant as they take out plane after plane.

With so many men dead or captured, can RAF Bomber Command overcome their darkest hour, when the predators have become the prey?

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan (Doubleday)

In 1973 Moll Gladney goes missing from the Tipperary hillside where she was born. Slowly her parents, Paddy and Kit, begin to accept that she’s gone forever. But she returns, changed, and with a few surprises for her family and neighbours.

Nothing is ever the same again for the Gladneys, who learn that fate cares little for duty, that life rarely conforms to expectation, that God can’t be relied upon to heed any prayer.

A story of exile and return, of loss and discovery, of retreat from grief and the saving power of love.

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack (Canongate)

1957. Sonny is working on a whaling ship in the South Atlantic, reckoning with the most vicious storms he has ever seen. It’s a brutal way to make a living. When he finally returns to his Shetland home to build a life with his wife and young son, the legacy of his time at sea is felt by all of them.

In present day Shetland, Jack is an old man, living alone in the cottage where he grew up, in the shadow of a hill. And it is here, one evening, that something appears on his doorstep. Something that throws off the rhythm of his solitary existence in the most profound way.

This is a story of unlikely friendship, longing, the power of music and the pull of home. It is about a life revisited – and reimagined.

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading a review copy of Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky and listening to the audiobook of The Wasp Trap, my book club’s pick for March

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Look out for…

• Book Review: Love Lane by Patrick Gale
• Book Review: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
• Book Review: A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia
• Book Review: Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky by Mary O’Donnell
• Book Review: The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards