Tag: Reviews

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared an extract from The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe which will be published on 25th June 2024.  

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Bookish Wishes and I shared a list of books I’ve recently added to my wishlist. 

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 celebrated the announcement of the winner of this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction – Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein.   

Friday – I subjected the oldest books on my To-Read shelf on Goodreads to Down the TBR Hole Revisited. 

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New arrivals

Three NetGalley ARCs, a proof copy and a book from the Women’s Prize Live goodie bag.

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans (eARC, Transworld via NetGalley)

It’s 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home. But ‘home’ is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever. And worst of all – following the death of his heroic older brother – Valentine is now Sir Valentine, and is responsible for the whole bloody place.

To Valentine, it’s a millstone; to Zena Baxter, who has never really had a home before being evacuated there with her small daughter, it’s a place of wonder and sentiment, somewhere that she can’t bear to leave. But Zena has been living with a secret, and the end of the war means she has to face a reckoning of her own…

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (eARC, Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

Venice. 1704. In this city of glittering splendour, desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted every through a tiny gap in the wall every day.

Eight-year-old Anna Maria is just one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà’s walls – but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted, she is on a mission to become Venice’s greatest violinist and composer, and in her remarkable world of colour and sound, it seems like nothing with stop her.

But the odds are stacked against an orphan girl – so when the maestro selects her as his star pupil, Anna Maria knows she must do everything in power to please this difficult, brilliant man. But as Anna Maria’s star rises, threatening to eclipse that of her mentor, the dream she has so single-mindedly pursued is thrown into peril…

From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals, this is a story of one woman’s irrepressible ambition and rise to the top, of loss and triumph, and of who we choose to remember and leave behind on the path to success.

Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (eARC, Viking via NetGalley)

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes ‘her spy’, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story. . .

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman (ARC, Raven Books)

You. Yes, you, reading this. Get in the car.

Sit in the back – you’re joining the detective and the other guy who’s driving. They’re both in the front. Don’t think about the other guy. He’s not important.

You’re going to the West Heart clubhouse. The country club that’s so swanky it’s in the title of this book. Kill. It’s not that kind of kill. Or maybe it is, after all.

You arrive, it’s the Fourth of July weekend and look – there’s cocktails on the lawn. What’s your poison?

Don’t flick forward. You just have to wait. Especially for the part when you find out what happens on page XX.

Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time by Helen Molesworth (Doubleday)

Travelling through moments in history and layers of soil and sediment, this is the glittering history of our world through a totally new lens.

Discover the fragile emerald watch that survived cross-continental journeys and centuries under the floorboards of a London house, uncovered in 1912 by workmen who might have destroyed it with one wrong placement of a pick axe. Unearth the immense ritualistic significance of jade to ancient cultures across China, Central America and the Pacific, where it has been considered a symbol of life and a bridge to the afterlife for thousands of years. Learn of the Burmese warriors who believed so strongly in the connection between rubies and lifeblood that they embedded them into their skin before battle to protect them from harm. Journey back through the generations of women who wore pearls as a signifier of femininity and marvel at the role these glistening objects have played in changing depictions of feminism – from Marie Antoinette to Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor to Coco Chanel.

In this sumptuous and sweeping history of humanity’s love affair with jewels, the V&A’s Senior Jewellery Curator Helen Molesworth takes you behind the curtain of what you see in a museum or fetching vast sums on the auction floor, illuminating the deeply human stories that lie behind them.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

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Planned posts

• Book Review: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
• Book Review: Alvesdon by James Holland
• Book Review: A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray