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.

Today’s theme is: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years (taken from Anne @ HeadFullofBooks) Here are the books I was reading on this day, or close to this day.

2016 – The Plague Charmer by Karen Maitland – set in Porlock Weir in 1361 where a village is isolated by the plague during the Black Death, a fascinating tale full of atmosphere and superstition.

2017 – Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley. I am not a great fan of her style – the play acting and dressing up – but she writes in a lively, chatty style. I gained a better understanding of the social history of Georgian England and of Jane’s wider family connections and what her family and friends thought of her both as a person and as an author.

2018 – The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola – historical fiction set on the Isle of Skye in 1857 where Audrey Hart has been employed by Miss Buchanan to collect the folklore and fairy tales of the local community, a novel full of family secrets and unfulfilled desires. 

2019 – Gallows Court by Martin Edwards – an intricately plotted murder mystery with plenty of suspense and intrigue set in 1930s London. There’s a headless corpse; an apparent suicide in a locked room; a man burned alive during an illusionist’s show in front of thousands of people.

2020 – A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry – historical fiction set in the 1870s some years after the end of the Civil War in Tennessee. These are dangerous times. It’s beautifully written, rendering the way the characters speak so that I could hear them, and describing the landscape so poetically and lyrically that the scenes unfolded before my eyes. 

2021 – Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope – an evocative portrayal of country life in nineteenth-century England, told with great compassion, humour and an acute insight into human nature. It’s the story of Mark Robarts, a young clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley.

2022 – Nucleus by Rory Clements – mix of historical fact and fiction, set in 1939 when England and Germany are on the brink of war. It is a fast-paced and gripping book, involving murder, IRA bombers, and espionage, with many twists and turns. In Nazi Germany Jews are in fear of their lives, trying to leave the country. Some have made it to England and America. In both countries the race is on to develop an atomic bomb.

2023 – Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively – This won the Booker Prize in 1987, a novel about a historian in her seventies looking back over her life, from a her childhood just after the First World War to the Second and beyond.

2024 – The Voyage Home by Pat Barker – the third book in her The Women of Troy trilogy. At the end of the Trojan War the Greeks and their prisoners eventually set sail for home. This is a well written, brutal, bloody tale of revenge told in a modern, colloquial style, and full of grim detail of horror and squalor. 

2025 – The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera. It’s about Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin, a quiet, introverted and determined man, was a reluctant defector, because whilst he loved Russia he came to hate the KGB and the Soviet system.