myweekinbooks – What Cathy Read Next…

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my review of Seek The Singing Fish by Roma Wells.

Tuesday – I published my review of Tasting Sunlight by Ewald Arenz as part of the blog tour.

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 made another visit Down the TBR Hole challenging more books on my Goodreads To-Read shelf to fight for their survival.

Friday – I shared my review of the winner of this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, News of the Dead by James Robertson.

Saturday – I published my review of Kezia and Rosie by Rebecca Burns.

New arrivals

Twelve Nights (The Heavenly Charmers #1) by Penny Ingham (eARC)

London, 1592. When a player is murdered, suspicion falls on the wardrobe mistress, Magdalen Bisset, because everyone knows poison is a woman’s weapon. The scandal-pamphlets vilify her. The coroner is convinced of her guilt.

Magdalen is innocent, although few are willing to help her prove it. Her much-loved grandmother is too old and sick. Will Shakespeare is benignly detached, and her friend Christopher Marlowe is wholly unreliable. Only one man offers his assistance, but dare she trust him when nothing about him rings true?

With just two weeks until the inquest, Magdalen ignores anonymous threats to ‘leave it be’, and delves into the dangerous underworld of a city seething with religious and racial tension. As time runs out, she must risk everything in her search for the true killer – for all other roads lead to the gallows.

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage)

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire.

Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son.

A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull.

Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become.

Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers (4th Estate)

Bridget Hansome and Frances Slater have only one thing in common. And that’s Peter Hansome, who has died suddenly.

Without their husband or lover, the women find that before they can rebuild their lives they must look to themselves and unravel mysteries that they had never before even suspected.

So begins an unlikely alliance between wife and mistress and a voyage of discovery that is as comic as it is profound.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

Blog Tour/Book Review: Nothing Else by Louise Beech
Book Review: Tomboy by Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Blog Tour/Book Review: The Sweetheart Locket by Jen Gilroy
My Five Favourite June Reads
#6Degrees of Separation

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I shared my review of crime novel The Companion by Lesley Thomson.

Tuesday – I published an update on my progress with the When Are You Reading? Challenge 2022.

Thursday – I published my reviews of The Martins by David Foenkinos and crime novel The Death of Remembrance by Denzil Meyrick.

Friday – I shared my review of Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris.

Saturday – I joined other gardeners in sharing my #SixonSaturday update.

New arrivals

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (giveaway prize courtesy of Two Fond of Books)

From her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, from the rugged shores of New Zealand to a lonely iceshelf in Antarctica, Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger.

Determined to live an independent life, she resists the pull of her childhood sweetheart, and burns her way through a suite of glamorous lovers. But it is an obsession with flight that consumes her most.

Now, as she is about to fulfil her greatest ambition, to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole, Marian crash lands in a perilous wilderness of ice.

Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is drawn inexorably to play the enigmatic pilot on screen. It is a role that will lead her to an unexpected discovery, throwing fresh and spellbinding light on the story of the unknowable Marian Graves.

And, as a reward for being selected as Bookmarks’ Member of the Month, the following three:

French Braid by Anne Tyler

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.

Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won’t allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.

Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts’ family life over the decades, whether that’s a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.

And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. It’s the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.

The Autumn of the Ace by Louis de Bernières

Some bonds are hard to break…

Daniel Pitt was an RAF fighter in the First World War and an espionage agent for the SOE in the Second. Now the conflicts he faces are closer to home.

Daniel’s marriage has fractured beyond repair and Daniel’s relationship with his son, Bertie, has been a failure since Bertie was a small boy.

But after his brother Archie’s death, Daniel is keen for new perspectives. He first travels to Peshawar to bury Archie in the place he loved best, and then finds himself in Canada, avoiding his family and friends back in England. Daniel and Bertie’s different experiences of war, although devastating, also bring with them the opportunity for the two to reconnect.

If only they can find a way to move on from the past…

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson

Clara’s sister is missing. Angry, rebellious Rose had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. Seven-year-old Clara, isolated by her distraught parents’ efforts to protect her from the truth, is grief-stricken and bewildered.

Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, moves into the house next door, a house left to him by an old woman he can barely remember, and within hours gets a visit from the police. It seems he’s suspected of a crime.

At the end of her life Elizabeth Orchard is thinking about a crime too, one committed thirty years ago that had tragic consequences for two families and in particular for one small child. She desperately wants to make amends before she dies.

Finally, two NetGalley ARCs for blog tours

The Shimmer on the Water by Marina McCarron (eARC, Head of Zeus)

Three women. Two generations apart. One secret they share.

Maine, 1997. As the people of Fort Meadow Beach celebrate the Fourth of July, four-year-old Daisy Wright disappears and is never seen again.

Maine, 2022. Fired from her job and heart-broken, Peyton Winchester moves back home for the summer. Bored and aimless, she finds a renewed sense of purpose when an ad for a journalism course reminds her of a path not taken. Returning to life in her home town brings back all kind of memories – including Daisy’s disappearance when she was a young girl herself.

As Peyton begins to search for answers about Daisy’s disappearance, she finds that they might be closer to home than she thinks – and their lives become intertwined with irreversible consequences.

Every Shade of Happy by Phyllida Shrimpton (eARC, Aria)

‘He suddenly wished more than anything that he’d lived for today, and for all the thousands of todays he’d had, regardless of what hurdles life had thrown at him.’

Suddenly uprooted from everything and everyone she knows, bubbly fifteen-year-old Anna Maybury and her mother are forced to move in with the grandfather she has never met – a bad-tempered old man who disapproves of her very existence.

At ninety-seven, Algernon breaks his days up into a routine governed by the relentless ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. It gives his life the structure and order he craves, but he’s also incredibly lonely. And soon, so is Anna. Her colourful personality doesn’t seem to fit in at her new school and she begins to feel herself turning as dull and grey as the uniform.

Surprisingly, it’s cranky old Algernon who is determined to do something about it. With a road trip to Cornwall on the cards and important life lessons to learn, it’s going to be a summer neither of them will ever forget.