Tag: Reviews

My Week in Books – 9th January 2022

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my Five Favourite December 2021 Reads.  

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Most Anticipated Books Releasing In The First Half of 2022. 

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 to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Thursday – I shared my publication day review of historical romance, The Cornish Captive by Nicola Pryce.

Friday – I published my review of Wahala by Nikki May as part of the blog tour.

Saturday – I published my review of spy thriller, Betrayal by David Gilman, as part of the blog tour and, to mark its publication in paperback, I shared my review of The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves. 

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

New arrivals

Sell Us The RopeSell Us The Rope by Stephen May (eARC, Sandstone Press via NetGalley)

May 1907. Young Stalin – poet, bank-robber, spy – is in London for the 5th Congress of the Russian Communist Party. As he builds his powerbase in the party, Stalin manipulates alliances with Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg under the eyes of the Czar’s secret police.

Meanwhile he is drawn to the fiery Finnish activist Elli Vuokko and risks everything in a relationship as complicated as it is dangerous.

The Mirror Game CoverThe Mirror Game by Guy Gardner (eARC, The Book Guild)

London 1925. When Adrian Harcourt, a politician and captain in the army believed dead with his company on the battlefield of Flanders, is sighted looking like he’s been living rough, Harry Lark, a war veteran and journalist, is enlisted by his friend and benefactor Lady Carlise to investigate.

As he becomes drawn further into the case and the deaths mount up, he can see that things don’t add up. Where has Adrian been for so many years? Why can’t he remember parts of his past?

Looking further into Adrian’s previous life, even as his own dark past and addiction to laudanum threatens to overwhelm him, Harry begins to fall for Lady Carlise’s beautiful daughter Freddy, who was also Adrian’s fiancé.

Chasing the leads as they continue to unravel, can Harry solve the mystery behind what really happened to Adrian before it’s too late?

The StreetsThe Streets by Anthony Quinn (Vintage)

In 1882, David Wildeblood, a 21-year-old from rural Norfolk, arrives in London to start work at the offices of a famous man. As an ‘inspector’ for Henry Marchmont’s hugely successful weekly The Labouring Classes of London, his job is to investigate the notorious slum of Somers Town, near the new St Pancras Station, recording house by house the number of inhabitants, their occupations and standard of living. By mapping the streets in this way, Marchmont intends to show the world the stark realities of poverty in its greatest city.

Befriended by Jo, a young coster, and his sister Roma, David comes to learn the slang of the hawkers and traders, sharpers and scavengers, magsmen and mobsmen, who throng the teeming byways of Somers Town. It is a place of Darwinian struggle for survival. And the deeper he penetrates the everyday squalor and destitution the more appalled he is by mounting evidence that someone is making a profit from people’s suffering.

A dinner at the Kensington home of his godfather Sir Martin Elder introduces him to Kitty, Elder’s only daughter, and to a cabal of prominent citizens who have been plotting a radical solution to the problem of London’s poor. David belatedly realises that a conspiracy is afoot. Passionate but reckless in his urge to uncover it he finds his life in danger, sustained only by the faithfulness of a friend and, ultimately, the love of a woman.

YinkaYinka, where is your huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn (ARC, Viking)

Yinka wants to find love. The problem is she also has a mum who thinks she’s better qualified to find it for her.

She also has too many aunties who frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, a preference for chicken and chips over traditional Nigerian food, and a bum she’s sure is far too small as a result. Oh, and the fact that she’s a thirty-one-year-old South-Londoner who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage is a bit of an obstacle too…

When her cousin gets engaged, Yinka commences Operation Find A Date for Rachel’s Wedding. Will Yinka find herself a huzband? And what if the thing she really needs is to find herself?

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • What’s In A Name 2022 Sign-Up
  • Book Review: Jane’s Country Year by Malcolm Saville 
  • Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022 Sign-Up
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Finding Edith Pinsent by Hazel Ward

BlogTour #BookReview The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves @centurybooksuk

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves which was published in paperback on 6th January 2022. My thanks to Laura O’Donnell at Penguin UK for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my review copy.

The Ends of the Earth PBAbout the Book

Some love stories change us for ever.

For the last seven years, Mary O’Connor has waited for her first love. Every evening she arrives at Ealing Broadway station and stands with a sign which simply says: ‘Come Home Jim’.

Commuters might pass her by without a second thought, but Mary isn’t going anywhere. Until an unexpected call turns her world on its head.

It will take the help of a young journalist called Alice, and a journey across the country for Mary to face what happened all those years ago, and to finally answer the question: where on earth is Jim?

Format: Paperback (404 pages)       Publisher: Century
Publication date: 6th January 2022 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find The Ends of the Earth on Goodreads

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My Review

The book alternates between 2018 and the six years from Mary and Jim’s first meeting in 2005 and his disappearance.

I don’t think I’m alone in being touched by Mary’s determination to continue her nightly vigil, holding her handwritten, and by now rather tattered, sign or by her conviction that ‘love is nothing if not patient’. ‘She will not give up. No. She will wait and wait and then wait some more.’ Alice Keaton, a young journalist on the local newspaper, is certainly struck by Mary’s story. ‘COME HOME JIM. Who knew that three little words could be suffused with such yearning, such pain?‘ It’s a pain Alice can identify with because of her own experiences and this, along with her journalistic ambitions, is what motivates her to befriend Mary and then embark on the search for Jim.  In the process, Alice hopes to lay to rest some personal ghosts and perhaps find some peace of mind through helping Mary.

As we learn, it was love at first sight for Mary and Jim, and their early years together were idyllic. Although every couple have their ups and downs, there are soon signs that everything is not quite right with Jim. Mary can’t – or won’t – see the warning signs because she’s so in love with Jim and so grateful she’s found someone who says she is the centre of his world, someone who would go ‘to the ends of the earth’ for her. For a long time, Mary believes it was Jim who rescued her from an otherwise lonely life but in fact it’s the other way around and it was she who rescued him.

When the evidence of Jim’s struggles can no longer be ignored, Mary is determined to help him through it. After all, as she tells herself, ‘Love wasn’t about the moments when you were dancing on the ceiling, it was about picking one another up from the floor‘.  And Mary does try, even blaming herself for Jim’s low mood, and seizing on the brief moments when he seems like the ‘old Jim’ as a sign things are getting better.  But they’re not. Mary’s guilt only increases following Jim’s sudden disappearance and it is this that fuels her lonely vigil, placing her life effectively on hold.  As she remarks to Alice, sometimes not knowing is better than knowing.

The Ends of the Earth is described as ‘at once a love story and a mystery’ but the way those two elements play out may be not quite what you were expecting. As the author demonstrates, sometimes there are no easy answers and life must go on, albeit on a different path than you might have hoped for.

In three words: Tender, insightful, poignant

Try something similar: Lost Property by Helen Paris

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Abbie GreavesAbout the Author

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. Abbie lives in Brighton.

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