Tag: Read

One Day In Summer by Shari Low #BookReview @BoldwoodBooks

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One Day in SummerWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for One Day In Summer by Shari Low. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to participate in the tour and to Boldwood Books for my review copy via NetGalley.

You can read my review below. Do also check out the posts by my tour buddies, Pam at Books, Life and Everything and Tizi’s Book Review.

One Day In SummerAbout the Book

One day in summer, three lives are about to change forever.

After two decades of looking after others, this is the day that Agnetha McMaster is reclaiming her life. It’s her turn, her time but will she have the courage to start again?

Ten years ago, Mitchell McMaster divorced Agnetha and married her best friend, Celeste. Now he suspects his second wife is having an affair. This is the day he’ll discover if karma has come back to bite him.

Thanks to a DNA test, this is the day that Hope McTeer will finally meet her biological father. But will the reunion bring Hope the answers that she’s looking for?

Three people. Twenty-four hours. A lifetime of secrets to unravel.

Format: ebook (324 pages)         Publisher: Boldwood Books
Publication date: 11 June 2020 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find One Day In Summer on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon UK| Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

With books such as This Is Me, Shari Low has perfected the art of the multi-character storyline and achieves the same feat with One Day in Summer. It has the same structure as previous novels, such as One Day in Winter, with the events taking place over the space of one eventful day, albeit with the occasional trip back into the past.

Set in Glasgow, like many of the author’s other books, readers familiar with the city will have fun spotting places and landmarks mentioned in the book. Those who have read previous books will be pleased to see return appearances by a few characters. And all readers should look out for a couple of  ‘close encounters’ between characters in the different storylines.

After recent traumatic events, Agnetha has many reasons to be thankful for the situation in which she finds herself. She has two lovely daughters, a successful business, a support group who understand exactly what she’s been through and the possibility of a new man in her life. She deserves today, her forty-fifth birthday, to be a good one.

One would have to be in a generous mood to wish her ex-husband, Mitchell, the same, although I did start to feel less hostile towards him as the book progressed. At least, he has the humility to be aware of his own shortcomings and to recognise the concept of karma. I wish I could say the same about Mitchell’s current wife, Celeste. You may, like me, have a wish to develop the superpower that enables you to shoot invisible laser darts that will set hair extensions on fire, explode face fillers and pierce silicon boob implants.

More serious issues are woven into the storyline, such as family breakdown, illness and bereavement, but never in such a way as to overwhelm the message that you should never give up the hope of second chances in life.

As the day draws to a close, like pieces of a jigsaw, things finally slot into place. But will it show the picture you were expecting? In the epilogue, which cleverly echoes the prologue, the reader finds out whether Agnetha decides to forgive the mistakes of the past and respond positively to the plea, “take a chance on me”.

As one character observes, “This was the most bizarre day. One minute stressful, one minute sad, then funny, then loving, then easy, then hard…” One Day in Summer is the ideal one day binge read; a skilfully crafted story of love, loss and new beginnings.

In three words: Romantic, engaging, heart-warming

Try something similar: A Wedding in the Olive Garden by Leah Fleming

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Shari Headshot Dec 4About the Author

Shari Low is the #1 bestselling author of over 20 novels, including One Day In Winter and My One Month Marriage, and a collection of parenthood memories called Because Mummy Said So. She lives near Glasgow.

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My Week in Books – 14th June 2020

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday –  I shared my review of The Sea Gate  by Jane Johnson as part of the blog tour.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books Added To My TBR.

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…and have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.

Thursday – I published my review of Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob as part of the blog tour.

Friday –  I introduced my Buchan of the Month for June – Homilies and Recreations. 

Saturday – I published my review of The Bell in the Lakeby Lars Mytting. 

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

New arrivals

9780241404799Belladonna by Anbara Salam (eARC, courtesy of Fig Tree)

It is summer, 1954, when fifteen-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma.

When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and – better still – a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend.

There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move toward a passionate but fragile intimacy. As the year rolls on, Bridget grows increasingly fearful that she will lose Isabella’s affections – and the more desperate she gets, the greater the lengths she will go to keep her.

Belladonna is a hypnotizing coming-of age story set against the stunning and evocative backdrop of rural Northern Italy. Anbara Salam tells a story of friendship and obsession, desire and betrayal, and the lies we tell in order to belong.

9780241441329The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon (eARC, courtesy of Penguin UK)

Sitting in his cramped basement room in Brixton, Battersby dreams of money, women, a T-bone steak – and a place to call his own.

So he and a group of friends decide to save up and buy a house together. But amid grasping landlords, the temptations of spending money and the less-than-welcoming attitude of the Mother Country, can this motley group of hustlers and schemers, Trinidadians and Jamaicans, men and women make their dreams a reality?

‘Selvon’s meticulously observed narratives of displaced Londoners’ lives created a template for how to write about migrant, and postmigrant, London for countless writers who have followed in his wake, including Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith’ Caryl Phillips.

9780857523617V for Victory by Lissa Evans (eARC, courtesy of Doubleday)

It’s late 1944. Hitler’s rockets are slamming down on London with vicious regularity and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. Allied victory is on its way, but it’s bloody well dragging its feet.

In a large house next to Hampstead Heath, Vee Sedge is just about scraping by, with a herd of lodgers to feed, and her young charge Noel ( almost fifteen ) to clothe and educate. When she witnesses a road accident and finds herself in court, the repercussions are both unexpectedly marvellous and potentially disastrous – disastrous because Vee is not actually the person she’s pretending to be, and neither is Noel.

The end of the war won’t just mean peace, but discovery…

With caustic wit and artful storytelling, Lissa Evans elegantly summons a time when the world could finally hope to emerge from the chaos of war. As sharply comic as Old Baggage and emotionally poignant as Crooked Heart, V For Victory once again shows Lissa Evans to be one of our most brilliant and subtle writers.

9780715653555The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes (proof copy courtesy of Duckworth)

What if everyone you loved was suddenly taken away?

When Germany invades France in the Second World War, the five Laskowski children lose everything: their home, their Jewish community and, most devastatingly, their parents who are abducted in the night. There is no safe place left for them to evade the Nazis, but they cling together – never certain when the authorities will come for what is left of them.

Inspired by the poignant, true story of the author’s mother, this moving historical novel conveys the hardship, the uncertainty and the impossible choices the Laskowski children were forced to make to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.

20200613_094839-1The Englishman by David Gilman (proof copy, courtesy of Head of Zeus and Midas PR)

A clandestine war on the desert border of Mali and Algeria; murder and kidnap on the suburban streets of West London; a Moscow CID police inspector investigating the assassination of four of her fellow officers by the Russian mafia; a young MI6 officer facing the possibility that a long-running operation has been fatally compromised: connecting them all is the Englishman – Dan Raglan, outsider, exile, one-time member of the French Foreign Legion, fully trained killer.

Raglan’s quest for answers will become a quest for vengeance. It will lead him to the winter-ravaged wasteland of the Sverdlovskaya Oblast and Penal Colony #74, a place that holds Russia’s most brutal murderers. A place of death and retribution.

How will he get in? More importantly, how will he get out?

 

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: One Day in Summer by Shari Low
  • Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Summer 2020 TBR
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • Audio Book Review: Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton