On What Cathy Read Next last week
Monday – I published my review of The Other Princess by Denny S. Bryce.
Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was on the theme of nature and my list was Books with Animals in the Title.
Wednesday – I celebrated publication day of thriller, Those Who Fear Us with a Q&A with its author, Anthony Estrada. And 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.
Friday – Slowly working my way through the oldest approvals on my NetGalley shelf, I published my review of historical novel, A Tapestry of Treason by Anne O’Brien.
Saturday – I took part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme, forging a chain from Tom Lake by Ann Patchett to Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household.
New arrivals
Four books on the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2024 and three ARCs
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury) Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize 2024
Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras – from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity.
Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage – their dreams, desires, connections and communities.
In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas (John Murray) Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize 2024
In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by people fleeing enslavement in the American south, young Lensinda Martin works for a crusading Black journalist.
One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman who recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before she can be condemned for the crime.
But the old woman doesn’t want to confess. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of tales that reveal an interwoven history of Black and Indigenous peoples in a wide swath of what is called North America.
As time runs out, Lensinda is challenged to uncover her past and face her fears in order to make good on the bargain of a story for a story. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda’s destiny.
Mister Timeless Blyth: A Biographical Novel by Alan Spence (Tuttle Publishing) Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize 2024
Imprisoned during World War I as a conscientious objector and interned during World War II as an enemy alien, Reginald Horace Blyth was a poet, a scholar, a musician, a linguist and a student of Zen who ultimately became teacher to the Japanese Emperor. His pivotal works were published in Japan even during his internment. He ultimately became the key link and mediator between the Imperial Household and the occupying American forces, whom many credit with saving Japan from chaos after the war.
His fingerprints are everywhere today in the study of Zen, Haiku and Japanese culture, and his work has influenced some of the most important writers of the 20th century – including Huxley, Oshi, Aiken, Watts, Salinger, Kerouac, Ginsberg and others. He was, in many ways, a man who changed the world. Mister Timeless Blyth is his story.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein (Review copy, Bloomsbury) Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize 2024 and The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2024
1940, Rural Trinidad. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognisable to those who reside in the farm’s shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building of wood and tin, divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops – Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, who live hard lives of backbreaking work, grinding poverty and devotion to faith.
When Dalton Changoor goes missing and Marlee’s safety is compromised, farmhand Hans is lured by the promise of a handsome stipend to move to the farm as watchman. But as the mystery of Dalton’s disappearance unfolds their lives become hellishly entwined, and the small community altered forever.
Clear by Carys Davies (eARC, Granta via NetGalley)
1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.
Dark Frontier by Matthew Harffy (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)
A man can flee from everything but his own nature.
1890. Lieutenant Gabriel Stokes of the British Army left behind the horrors of war in Afghanistan for a role in the Metropolitan Police. Though he rose quickly through the ranks, the squalid violence of London’s East End proved just as dark and oppressive as the battlefield.
With his life falling apart, and longing for peace and meaning, Gabriel leaves the grime of London behind and heads for the wilderness and wide open spaces of the American West.
He soon realises that the wilds of Oregon are far from the idyll he has yearned for. The Blue Mountains may be beautiful, but with the frontier a complex patchwork of feuds and felonies, and ranchers as vicious as any back alley cut-throat in London, Gabriel finds himself unable to escape his past and the demons that drive him. Can he find a place for himself on the far edge of the New World?
Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant (eARC, BookGuild)
Meike is seventeen and she uses a wheelchair. Already in life she’s accepted that she’ll always somehow be ‘different’. But overnight, different becomes dangerous after the government announces disabled youngsters under the age of eighteen must spend the war in specially designated institutions.
Suddenly Meike is on the run in the rural lanes she calls home, bordering Berlin. It is 1939 and the whole of Germany, it seems, wants to fight the world.
Quietly, members of Meike’s family distance themselves, but two unlikely allies stand by her. One is an elderly woman and a lifelong Catholic, forced to question her faith; the other is a fifteen-year-old boy Meike hardly knows. They begin a search for answers as they scramble to find Meike and, in a country they no longer recognise, themselves.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Book Review: All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman
- Book Review: Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler
- Book Review: Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
- Book Review: Sufferance by Charles Palliser
On What Cathy Read Next last week
What Cathy Read Next... 