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 The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf. The links are to Goodreads.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler – Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend tells him she’s facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son.

These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah’s meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

Past Lying by Val McDermid – It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have. 

The Complete Works of George Orwell: Novels, Poetry, Essays: (1984, Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Burmese Days, Down … Over 50 Essays and Over 10 Poems),

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel – In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

The Snow Angel by Anki Edvinsson  (Detectives von Klint and Berg Book 1) – A teenage suicide. A murdered pharmacist. A missing girl. Is the obvious connection the right one?

Relocating from Stockholm with her teenage daughter, Detective Charlotte von Klint expected Umeå to be a quiet backwater, a snow-covered change of pace from fighting the criminal underworld of the capital. But when a pharmacist is found brutally murdered in her apartment, and a young girl and her dealer boyfriend vanish without a trace after a party, suddenly Umeå doesn’t seem so benign. And the boy on the bridge doesn’t feel like an isolated incident.

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods – On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found…

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder… where nothing is as it seems.

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks – When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences.

Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.
Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

Blue Murder by Cath Staincliffe – Meet Janine Lewis. A single mum of three and Manchester’s newest detective chief inspector. Her cheating husband walked out the day she got promoted. Now she’s six months pregnant with his baby and in charge of her first murder case.

The body of a deputy head teacher is found on a lonely allotment. Gutted — his stomach sliced open — and left for dead, The only witnesses are a dying elderly man and a seven-year-old girl. And now the prime suspect has disappeared . . .

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know? by Dov Waxman – No conflict in the world has lasted as long, generated as many news headlines, or incited as much controversy as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, despite, or perhaps because of, the degree of international attention it receives, the conflict is still widely misunderstood. While Israelis and Palestinians and their respective supporters trade accusations, many outside observers remain confused by the conflict’s complexity and perplexed by the passion it arouses.The Israeli-Palestinian What Everyone Needs to Know? offers an even-handed and judicious guide to the world’s most intractable dispute. Writing in an engaging, jargon-free Q&A format, Dov Waxman provides clear and concise answers to common questions, from the most basic to the most contentious. Covering the conflict from its nineteenth-century origins to the latest developments of the twenty-first century, this book explains the key events, examines the core issues, and presents the competing claims and narratives of both sides. Readers will learn what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about, how it has evolved over time, and why it continues to defy diplomatic efforts at a resolution.

All Creatures Great and Small: The Classic Memoirs of a Yorkshire Country Vet by James Herriot – The first volume in the multimillion copy bestselling series.

Delve into the magical, unforgettable world of James Herriot, the world’s most beloved veterinarian, and his menagerie of heartwarming, funny, and tragic animal patients.

For fifty years, generations of readers have flocked to Herriot’s marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing animals and humans alike with his keen, loving eye.

In All Creatures Great and Small, we meet the young Herriot as he takes up his calling and discovers that the realities of veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire are very different from the sterile setting of veterinary school.