Wednesday, the 30th of June, and time for Shelf Control once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it--what…
Keli Cat’s Book Corner
I've just added a new page to my blog on all things 'cats and books', find it here; if you are a book lover as well as a cat lover, I'm sure you'll like it
Book Review: Death and Croissants by Ian Moore
My thanks to Farrago Books and NetGalley for a review copy of this book. Death and Croissants is the first of the Follet Valley Mysteries and is a crazy, quirky, comic, and slightly over the top cosy mystery. In the book, we meet Richard Ainsworth, a middle-aged Englishman who has moved to the bucolic Loire…
Upcoming NetGalley Reads/Reviews for July 2021
After a NetGalley break of sorts last year (I read I think 5 books totally in the year and put in some requests only towards the end of the year), this year I've done somewhat the opposite with a slew of requests and a nice big pile. So in this post I thought of just…
Book Review: The Secret Life of the Savoy by Olivia Williams
My thanks to Headline and NetGalley for a review copy of this book. This absolutely fascinating and engrossing read is the story of the Savoy (theatre and hotel) but more so (as other reviews also mention) of the D’Oyly Carte family, three generations of which ran the two for over a century, each with their…
Book Review: The Belfore Void by Joey Rogers
My thanks to the author Joey Rogers and Booktasters for a review copy of the book. The Belfore Void is a sci-fi story with an element of mystery. Out story opens thirty years in the past in Belfore University where PhD students Jenny and Daniel are setting up for a televised experiment for a battery…
Book Review: The Semi-detached House by Emily Eden
Over April and May I revisited Emily Eden’s The Semi-detached House with a Goodreads group. This is Eden’s second novel, though published first in 1859. Emily Eden (1797–1869) was born into an aristocratic family (her father William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland was a diplomat and politician (also author of a book on Penal Law) while…
Book Review: Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britan’s Empire by Graham Seal
My thanks to Yale University Press, London and NetGalley for a review copy of this book. Condemned is an account, as its subtitle pretty much reveals, of the men, women and children who were ‘transported’ in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries (also of ‘migrant’ children sent ostensibly for better opportunities in life even in…
Book Review: Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
My thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for a review copy of this one. A book with ghosts in the plot may not be my usual fare but what interested me in this one was its setting—Malaysia. I don’t think I’ve read anything set there before, which made me pretty keen to pick this one…
Book Review: Still Life by Sarah Winman
My thanks to NetGalley and Fourth Estate for a review copy of this one. Still Life is a heart-warming novel about art, Italy, and really, about life and its many colours. The book opens towards the end of the Second World War, when art historian (and perhaps, spy?) Evelyn Skinner, in her sixties, meets young…
Literary Potpourri 