On What Cathy Read Next last week
Monday – I shared my proposed reading list for the 20 Books of Summer 2022 reading challenge.
Tuesday – I published my review of time-slip novel The Witch’s Tree by Elena Collins as part of the blog tour. This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books I Was Excited To Get But Haven’t Read Yet.
Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is my 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 crime thriller The Murder Rule by Dervla McTiernan as part of the blog tour.
Friday – I shared my review of The Healing Power of Nature by Vincent van Gogh, an illustrated book of inspirational quotations, paintings and sketches.
Saturday – I indulged my other love – gardening – by participating in the Six on Saturday meme.
New arrivals
A Is For Atlas by Megan Barford (ARC, National Maritime Museum Greenwich)
A sumptuous, lavishly illustrated celebration of cartography, featuring charts, maps, globes, and atlases from the map collections at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. This volume explores the variety of stories hidden within the collections, including materials, techniques, makers, users, genres, and features to understand more about the different worlds in which maps were produced and consumed. From imperial rule to labor solidarity, and from sumptuous display to scrap paper, A is for Atlas presents the map collections of the National Maritime Museum as never seen before.
The Death of Remembrance by Denzil Meyrick (ARC, Polygon)
It’s 1983, and a beat constable walks away from a bar where he knows a crime is about to be committed.
In the present, an old fisherman is found dead by the shoreline and a stranger with a mission moves into a shabby Kinloch flat.
Meanwhile, D.C.I. Jim Daley is trying to help Brian Scott stay sober, and the good people of Kinloch are still mourning the death of one of their own.
As past and present collide, Daley finds himself face to face with old friends and foes. Memories can only last as long as those who keep them, and ghosts will not be silenced.
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (W&N)
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha – on the edge of 40 – friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?
Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe – as she has long believed – there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Viking)
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.
Years later, a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited – her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.
On What Cathy Read Next this week
Currently reading
Planned posts
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Only May by Carol Lovekin
- Blog Tour/Book Review: The White Girl by Tony Birch
- Promo: The Dark Earth by Gordon Doherty
- Blog Tour/Book Review: Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings by Tony Fairweather
- Book Review: Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
About the Book
Connection
Colour and Form
Simplicity
Peace
The Healing Power of Nature is a work of art in itself. It’s a beautifully produced book with wonderful reproductions of some of van Gogh’s paintings, sketches and letters. (My photographs don’t do them justice.) It’s a book sure to appeal to admirers of Vincent van Gogh’s work or art in general. It also taps into the current awareness of the beneficial impact on physical and mental health of exposure to the natural world. It would make a perfect gift, best enjoyed sitting in the sunshine listening to birds singing, bees buzzing and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees.
What Cathy Read Next... 