Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog. The topic this week is: My Ten Most Recent Reads The links are to my reviews, where they exist.

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A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville – historical fiction inspired by the lives of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, who settled in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. 

The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor – historical fiction set in 1670, the 5th book in the Marwood and Lovett series, murder, spies and conspiracies.

A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future by David Attenborough, in which he writes about the spiralling decline of our planet’s diversity and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.

Ice Bound: One Woman’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole by Jerri Nielsen – autobiography of Dr Jerri Nielsen, a doctor working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station in Antarctica, who discovered a lump in her breast.

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie – a Poirot murder mystery on an archaeological dig. A seemingly impossible murder.

The Mirror Dance by Catriona McPherson – a Dandy Gilver mystery set in 1937, in which a Punch and Judy man is killed, told with plenty of red herrings and impossibilities.

The Pact by Sharon Bolton – novel about a group of five teenagers. It’s summer and they are waiting for their A level exam results. It’s the night before the results come out, the night before all their lives were changed for ever. 

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville – historical fiction, set in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century, based on the journals of William Dawes. This is a parallel book to A Room Made of Leaves, about a a young astronomer, serving as a lieutenant in First Fleet.

Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal – historical fiction set in Victorian England in which a young girl is sold by her father to Jasper Jupiter’s travelling circus to perform as Nellie Moon, a leopard girl because of the birthmarks that speckle her skin.

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson – set in Northern Ontario in 1972, seven-year-old Clara’s teenage sister Rose has just run away from home. This is not a thriller but a heart-warming and heart-breaking story of the lives of ordinary people, whose lives have been touched by tragedy.