My Week in Books – 4th April 2021

MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I published my review of A Book of Secrets by Kate Morrison as part of the blog tour. 

Tuesday –  This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Places In Books I’d Love to Live but I decided there were some Authors’ Homes I’d Have Loved To Live In.  I also publication day spotlight on Courage Without Grace, the new book by Jeannie Zokan, author of The Existence of Pity.

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…as well as have a good nose around to see what books others have plucked from their shelves.  

Thursday – I shared my publication day review of the first in a new historical mystery series, The Drowned City by K. J. Maitland.  

Friday – I published a spotlight feature about The Cotillion Brigade, the new book by Glen Craney, author of The Virgin of the Wind Rose.

Saturday – I celebrated the first Saturday of a new month by taking part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme.  See where my chain led me from this month’s starting book, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media.


New arrivals

The Cotillion BrigadeThe Cotillion Brigade by Glen Craney  (ebook, courtesy of the author)

Georgia burns. Sherman’s Yankees are closing in. Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?

1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.

Five years later, secession and total war against the homefronts of Dixie hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history. Nannie defies the traditions of Southern gentility by forming a women’s militia and drilling it four long years to prepare for battle. With their men dead, wounded, or retreating with the Confederate armies, only Captain Nannie and her Fighting Nancies stand between their beloved homes and the Yankee torches.

Hardened into a slashing Union cavalry colonel, Hugh duels Rebel generals Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest across Tennessee and Alabama. As the war churns to a bloody climax, he is ordered to drive a burning stake deep into the heart of the Confederacy. Yet one Georgia town – which by mocking coincidence bears Hugh’s last name – stands defiant in his path.

Read the remarkable story of the Southern women who formed America’s most famous female militia and the Union officer whose life they changed forever.

A Corruption of Blood (Raven, Fisher, and Simpson, #3) by Ambrose Parry (eARC, courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley)A Corruption of Blood

Edinburgh. This city will bleed you dry.

Dr Will Raven is a man seldom shocked by human remains, but even he is disturbed by the contents of a package washed up at the Port of Leith. Stranger still, a man Raven has long detested is pleading for his help to escape the hangman.

Back at 52 Queen Street, Sarah Fisher has set her sights on learning to practise medicine. Almost everyone seems intent on dissuading her from this ambition, but when word reaches her that a woman has recently obtained a medical degree despite her gender, Sarah decides to seek her out.

Raven’s efforts to prove his erstwhile adversary’s innocence are failing and he desperately needs Sarah’s help. Putting their feelings for one another aside, their investigations will take them to both extremes of Edinburgh’s social divide, where they discover that wealth and status cannot alter a fate written in the blood.

Unsettled GroundUnsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (hardcover)

What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.


On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Deception of Harriet Fleet by Helen Scarlett
  • Book Review: There’s No Story There & Other Wartime Writing by Inez Holden
  • Top Ten Tuesday
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Tuscan House by Angela Petch
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • My Five Favourite March Reads

#6Degrees 6 Degrees of Separation: From Shuggie Bain to Imperfect Alchemist

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.


Shuggie BainThis month’s starting book is Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. It’s a book I’ve not read but heard a lot about not least of which because it was the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize. Douglas Stuart was only the second Scottish writer to win the Booker Prize in its 51-year history.

The first was James Kelman in 1994 for How Late It Was, How Late. I haven’t read that one either but I know from the blurb that Sammy, its protagonist, becomes completely blind.

The leading character in Alis Hawkins’ historical crime novel None So Blind, Harry Probert-Lloyd, is also coming to terms with encroaching sight loss, putting paid to his career as a barrister.

The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly also features a leading character with damaged sight but in this case it hasn’t stopped him pursuing his career solving crimes in World War 2 Cambridge. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke’s experiences at the hands of the enemy during World War One has left him extremely sensitive to light.

Corpus by Rory Clements is also set in Cambridge, just before the outbreak of World War 2.  History professor, Tom Wilde, an expert on Tudor spymasters Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Robert Cecil, finds himself drawn into the investigation of a murder.

Sir Francis Walsingham turns up in The Incendium Plot, the first in A. D. Swanston’s historical mystery series featuring lawyer, Christopher Radcliff.

Another real life historical figure to make an appearance in The Incendium Plot is Sir Philip Sidney. His sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, is the focus of Naomi Miller’s historical novel, Imperfect Alchemist.

This month my chain has embraced blindness, spies and alchemy.  Where did your chain take you this month?