Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:
- What are you currently reading?
- What did you recently finish reading?
- What do you think you’ll read next?
Why not join in too? Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!
What I’m Currently Reading
I’m alternating between a physical copy of Odin’s Game and A Granite Silence on my Kindle in a probably doomed attempt to reach my Goodreads challenge target.
Odin’s Game (The Whale Road Chronicles #1) by Tim Hodkinson (Head of Zeus)
Not everyone will survive, but who will conquer all in Odin’s game?
AD 915. In the Orkney Isles, a young woman flees her home to save the life of her unborn child. Eighteen years later, a witch foretells that evil from her past is reaching out again to threaten her son.
Outlawed from his home in Iceland, Einar Unnsson is thrown on the mercy of his uncle, the infamous Jarl Thorfinn ‘Skull Cleaver’ of Orkney, who wants nothing to do with him. With few other options, Einar joins forces with a band of wolfskin-clad warriors, becoming a player in a deadly game for control of the Irish sea.
Together they embark on a quest where Einar must fight unimaginable foes, forge new friendships, and discover what it truly means to be a warrior. But as the clouds of war gather, betrayal follows betrayal and Einar realises the only person he can really trust is himself.
A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (riverrun)
A Granite Silence is an exploration – a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father.
Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen’s the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts.
Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again.
Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen’s disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood – where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight – and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history.
What I’ve Just Read
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Penguin)
In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond; mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia Danes; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer.
As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant. (Review to follow)
What I’ll Be Reading Next
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor (Picador)
It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island’s shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island’s harsh, salt-stung landscape.
When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.
What Cathy Read Next... 