New Books: Pay Day Treats! #NewBooks #PayDayTreats #tbr

Good morning everyone and happy Bank Holiday Monday. I treated myself to these three books on pay day as they are ones I’ve been wanting to read for ages.

I loved A Man Called Ove when I read it as part of the Tandem Read-along so I’ve been wanting to read more by Frederick Backman. I’ve seen lots of love on here for the Beartown series so wanted to read it. The Night Circus is a book that I’ve been recommended a few times but when one of my new colleagues recommended it I knew I had to get it and Ancestry is a book I’ve been very intrigued by for a while, though again I was finally swayed to get it when I saw the lovely @portybelle ‘s review as I know we have similar taste in books.

What books have you bought recently?

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

In a large Swedish forest Beartown hides a dark secret . . .

Cut-off from everywhere else it experiences the kind of isolation that tears people apart.

And each year more and more of the town is swallowed by the forest.

Then the town is offered a bright new future.

But it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act.

It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who’ll risk the future to see justice done.

Who will speak up?

Could you stand by and stay silent?

Or would you risk everything for justice?

Which side would you be on?

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon an iron gates reads:

Opens at Nightfall
Closes at Dawn

Full of breath-taking amazements and open only at night, Le Cirque des Rêves seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists a fierce competition is underway.

Celia and Marco are two young magicians who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love.

Ancestry by Simon Mawer

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea … Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, imagines a new life in the big city … George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Food, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough.

Simon Mawer puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.