Tag: Reviews

My Week in Books – 29th March 2026

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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.

Look out for…

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

Book Review – The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope @ourclassicsclub #ccspin

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About the Book

English gentleman Rudolph Rassendyll bears a striking resemblance to Rudolf Elphberg who is about to be crowned King of Ruritania. When the rival to the throne, Black Michael of Strelsau, attempts to seize power by imprisoning Elphberg in the Castle of Zenda, Rassendyll is obliged to impersonate the King to uphold the rightful sovereignty and ensure political stability.

Rassendyll endures a trial of strength in his encounters with the notorious Rupert of Hentzau, and a test of a different sort as he grows to love the Princess Flavia.

Format: Audiobook (5h 31m) Publisher: Audible
Publication date: 24th August 2008 [1894] Genre: Classics

Find The Prisoner of Zenda on Goodreads

My Review

The Prisoner of Zenda was the book chosen for me in the latest Classics Club Spin. First published in 1894, the book has been filmed five times. The Prisoner of Zenda is set in the fictional country of Ruritania, located somewhere in Central Europe. It actually spawned a genre, the ‘Ruritanian romance’, inspiring many similar books.

English gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll, distantly related to the ruling house of Ruritania, and having nothing better to occupy himself with, travels from London to witness Rudolf Elphberg being crowned King of Ruritania. Rassendyll bears an uncanny resemblence to the King, notably his shock of red hair, and when the King is drugged and kidnapped by his brother, the Duke of Strelsau (known by the soubriquet ‘Black Michael’), Rassendyll takes the King’s place. He carries it off with aplomb, no-one noticing the swap, not even the Princess Flavia whom the King has been expected to wed. Black Michael of course knows about the deception but cannot reveal it without exposing himself as the kidnapper of the King.

Despite his best efforts, Rassendyll falls in love with Princess Flavia but there is a rival for her affections – Black Michael. When Michael’s mistress learns of this, she reveals to Rassendyll the location where the King is being kept prisoner – the Castle of Zenda. Rassendyll and his compatriots embark on a mission to free the King from the seemingly impregnable castle. To do this they must overcome ‘The Six’, highly skilled mercenaries employed by Black Michael. One of these is the dashing Rupert of Henzau, the subject of the book’s sequel.

The Prisoner of Zenda is an enjoyably swashbuckling adventure. It’s a story in which the women are beautiful, the villains are dastardly and there are narrow escapes galore. I was reminded of John Buchan’s description of what he referred to as his ‘shockers’, such as The Thirty-Nine Steps, as tales ‘where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’.

As it happens Buchan wrote his own homage to The Prisoner of Zenda, his 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds, set in the fictional country of Evallonia. Ursula Buchan, Buchan’s granddaughter and biographer, described it as ‘probably JB’s worst novel’ and as ‘Ruritania without the charm’. I’m afraid I felt much the same when I read it.

I listened to the audiobook version ably narrated by James Wilby.

About the Author

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was born in 1863 and was a prolific writer of adventure novels although he is best known for The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Henzau (1898).

Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister but eventually turned to writing. His short pieces appeared in periodicals but he was forced to self-publish his first novel. It is said the idea for The Prisoner of Zenda came to him whilst walking in London, completing the first draft in just a month.

Hope wrote and co-wrote many plays and political non-fiction during the First World War, some for the Ministry of Information. He died in 1933.