Good morning everyone and happy Sunday. Here are some of the books I’ve added to my tbr pile this week:
❤️ Black Torn by Sarah Hilary *
🧡 Counting Lost Stars by Kim Van Alkemade
💛What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama
💚The Fraud by Zadie Smith *
💙In Bloom by Eve Verde
🩵A Crime In The Land Of 7,000 Islands by Zephaniah Sole *
💜Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
🩷From A Far And Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith *
The books with stars next to them are books I’ve got from work either from the damages pile or proofs that work colleagues have kindly given me.
All the others are recommendations from my lovely book friends. Counting Lost Stars was from @acottageofbooks and Evil Eye from @bestbookforward so do go check out their reviews.
What was the last book you bought?
Black Thorn by Sarah Hilary
Blackthorn Ashes was meant to be their forever home. For the first six families moving into the exclusive new housing development, it was a chance to live a peaceful life on the cliffs overlooking the Cornish sea, safe in the knowledge that it had been created just for them.
But six weeks later, paradise is lost. Six people are dead. And Blackthorn Ashes is left abandoned and unfinished, its dark shadows hiding all manner of secrets.
One of its surviving residents, Agnes Gale, is determined to find out the truth about what happened. Even if that truth is deadlier than she could have ever believed possible . . .
Counting Lost Stars by Kim Van Alkemade
New York Times bestselling author of Orphan #8, Kim van Alkemade returns with a gripping and poignant historical saga in which an unmarried college student who’s given up her baby for adoption helps a Dutch Holocaust survivor search for his lost mother.
1960, New York City: College student Rita Klein is a pioneering woman in the new field of computer programming—until she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. At the Hudson Home for Unwed Mothers, social workers pressure her into surrendering her baby for adoption. Rita is struggling to get on with her life when she meets Jacob Nassy, a charming yet troubled man from the Netherlands who is traumatized by his childhood experience of being separated from his mother during the Holocaust. When Rita learns that Hitler’s Final Solution was organized using Hollerith punch-card computers, she sets out to find the answers that will help Jacob heal.
1941, The Hague: Cornelia Vogel is working as a punch-card operator at the Ministry of Information when a census of Holland’s population is ordered by the Germans. After the Ministry acquires a Hollerith computer made in America, Cornelia is tasked with translating its instructions from English into Dutch. She seeks help from her fascinating Jewish neighbor, Leah Blom, an unconventional young woman whose mother was born in New York. When Cornelia learns the census is being used to persecute Holland’s Jews, she risks everything to help Leah escape.
After Rita uncovers a connection between Cornelia Vogel and Jacob’s mother, long-buried secrets come to light. Will shocking revelations tear them apart, or will learning the truth about the past enable Rita and Jacob to face the future together?
What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama
What are you looking for?
So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi.
But she is no ordinary librarian.
Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it.
In this uplifting book, we meet five visitors to the library, each at a different crossroads:
– The restless retail assistant eager to pick up new skills
– The mother faced with a demotion at work after maternity leave
– The conscientious accountant who yearns to open an antique store
– The gifted young manga artist in search of motivation
– The recently retired salaryman on a quest for newfound purpose
Can she help them find what they are looking for?
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel.
Kilburn, 1873. The ‘Tichborne Trial’ has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be – or an imposter.
Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of façades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.
Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about how in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what’s true can prove a complicated task.
In Bloom by Eve Verde
A deeply affecting novel, In Bloom tells of strength, survival, forgiveness, resilience and determination, and the fierce love and unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.
Delph has kept herself small and quiet as a form of self-protection, ever since the love of her life Sol’s untimely death left her pregnant and alone at the age of twenty-four. Theirs was such a once-in-a-lifetime love, that the loss of her soulmate broke her heart ‒ and almost broke her, too.
Years on, Delph’s protective bubble bursts when her daughter Roche moves out of the flat Delph shares with her partner Itsy and in with her estranged nan, Moon. Now that it’s just the two of them, the cracks in Delph and Itsy’s relationship begin to grow. Feeling on the outside of the bond between her fierce-yet-flaky tarot-reading mother and volatile martial-arts-champion daughter, Delph begins questioning her own freedom.
Is her life with Itsy all it seems? And has keeping small and safe truly been her choice all these years…?
A Crime In The Land Of 7,000 Islands by Zephaniah Sole
A Crime In the Land of 7,000 Islands is a powerhouse crime thriller fused with folk tales and the influence of anime. This psychological literary fiction tells the tale of Ikigai Johnson, a Special Agent working out of the FBI’s Portland, Oregon field office, who pledges to bring justice to children abused by a monstrous American in the Philippines. Amidst an expertly accurate police procedural, Ikigai recounts her tale to her eleven-year-old daughter through fantastical allegory. Her story exposes the damage that arises from exploitation, inequality, and generational trauma. Exploring the nuances of criminal justice, it enacts the battle between our courage and our submission to fear. It is an important call to act against evil.
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
The powerful and poignant new novel from the author of the much-loved A Woman is No Man.
Raised in a conservative Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur. Now, she has a good job at the local college, and balances that with raising her two daughters and taking care of their home. Yara knows that her life is more rewarding than her mother’s – so why doesn’t it feel like enough?
After Yara responds to a colleague’s racist provocation, she is put on probation at work and must attend mandatory counselling. Her mother blames a family curse for Yara’s troubles, and while Yara doesn’t believe in superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy about falling victim to the same mistakes as her mother.
Yara’s carefully constructed world begins to implode and suddenly she must face up to the difficulties of her childhood, not fully realising how that will impact not just her own future, but that of her daughters too.
From A Far And Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith
The twenty-fourth book in the multi-million copy bestselling and perennially adored No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.
If you are the founder and Managing Director of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency you may expect complete strangers to approach you with their problems when they see you having dinner with your husband in a peri-peri restaurant. And if you are Precious Ramotswe, you are a kind and helpful person who will be willing to take on a quest to find the relatives of a man who, many years ago, left the country for the uncertainties and dangers of a distant conflict.
While that is going on, though, there may be other things that claim your attention – such as the shocking news that a club that calls itself the Cool Singles Evening Club is encouraging married men to pretend to be single and meet women under false pretences. Who can be behind such a distasteful venture? Mma Ramotswe shows great tact in dealing with this situation, and avoids harm to the innocent.
And all the time, she and her assistant, Grace Makutsi, are getting on with their normal lives – which, of course, include birthdays and the buying of birthday presents. A new dress makes a fine present, but not if, when being tried on, it splits in a way that is thought to be irreparable. Mma Potokwani has dealt with situations far worse that, and in dealing with this local emergency she shows her characteristic wisdom. At the end of the day, disaster is averted. Life in Botswana, that far and lovely country of the title, continues smoothly, which is what Mma Ramotswe and her friends want – and most certainly deserve.
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