Category: spell the month in books

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The theme this month is From your TBR list.

The links in the titles of each book go to Amazon UK and the descriptions are from Amazon UK, Goodreads, or LibraryThing.

S is for Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Set on the colonial, war-torn island of Cyprus in 1956, Jones tells the story of a young solider, Hal Treherne, and the effects of this “small war” on him, his wife, Clara, and their family. Reminiscent of classic tales of love and war such as The English Patient and Atonement, Jones’s gripping novel also calls to mind the master works of Virginia Woolf and their portrayal of the quiet desperation of a marriage in crisis. Small Wars is at once a deeply emotional, meticulously researched work of historical fiction and a profound meditation on war-time atrocities committed both on and off the battlefield.

E is for End in Tears by Ruth Rendell,

The twentieth book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person. The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while…

A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father’s worst nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old daughter on the side of the road.

P is for The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy

Manhattan, Thanksgiving Eve, 1945. The war was over, and Eric Smythe’s party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara — an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked a gatecrasher, Jack Malone — a U. S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, and a man whose world-view did not tally with that of Eric and his friends. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of postwar New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch-hunts, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.

T is for Thirteen by P D James, It’s the fifth book in the Eddie Flynn series of crime thrillers.

It’s the murder trial of the century. And Joshua Kane has killed to get the best seat in the house and to be sure the wrong man goes down for the crime. Because this time, the killer isn’t on trial. He’s on the jury.
But there’s someone on his tail. Former-conman-turned-criminal-defense-attorney Eddie Flynn doesn’t believe that his movie-star client killed two people. He suspects that the real killer is closer than they think, but who would guess just how close?

E is for Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge

For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls. In her labyrinthine passageways the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers are played out, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge’s haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end.

M is for The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it’s because she’s bored and hasn’t got anything else to do, but she can’t stop.

Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present…

B is for Broadchurch by Erin Kelly

It’s a hot July morning in the Dorset town of Broadchurch when Beth Latimer realises that her eleven-year-old son, Danny, is missing. As Beth searches desperately for her boy, her best friend, local police officer DS Ellie Miller, arrives at work to find that the promotion she was promised has been given to disreputable Scottish outsider DI Alec Hardy.

When Danny’s body is found on the beach Ellie must put her feelings aside as she works with DI Hardy to solve the mystery of Danny’s death. As the case becomes a murder investigation the news hits the national press, jolting sleepy Broadchurch into the national spotlight.

As the town’s secrets begin to unravel, members of this tight-knit community begin to consider those in their midst. Right now it’s impossible to know who to trust…

E is for The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan

Gwenni Morgan is not like any other girl in this small Welsh town. Inquisitive, bookish and full of spirit, she can fly in her sleep and loves playing detective. So when a neighbour mysteriously vanishes, and no one seems to be asking the right questions, Gwenni decides to conduct her own investigation.

Mari Strachan’s unforgettable novel was one of the most acclaimed and successful debuts of 2009. It is a heart-breaking and hugely enjoyable story.

R is for Rowan’s Well by C J Carter

Who’s the one person you’d trust with your life? Your husband? Your best friend? Your father? Think again…
Mark Strachan has everything: good looks, doting wife, great job, loyal best friend… and a hidden flaw that goes to his very core. A deep secret he’ll wreck lives to protect.
At Rowan’s Well, a house full of secrets on North Yorkshire’s rugged cliffs, Mark will force his family, and best friend Will, to face the consequences of trusting a man like him.
Mark is about to change all their lives forever. He’s going to commit a crime so shocking there’ll be no going back.
Unless someone can stop him.

The next link up will be on October 7, 2023 when the theme will be: Title contains a number or color

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the second Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The theme this month is Series – Books that are part of a series, or the name of the series itself.

These are all books I’ve enjoyed – the links to my reviews are in the titles of each book.

A is for Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie, a Poirot murder mystery.

This is set in the Middle East, where the Boyntons and Dr Gerard are travelling through the Judean desert to Petra. Also in the group are Jonathan Cope, a family friend, Sarah King, a newly qualified doctor, Lady Westholme, a member of Parliament and Miss Annabel Pierce, a former nursery governess. The beginning of the book is taken up with relating their journey to Petra and the complicated relationships between the characters. It comes to a climax when Mrs Boynton is found dead.

This is a quick, easy read, with a lot of dialogue in a relatively short book (less than 200 pages) in which Poirot, through questions, analysis and psychological reasoning, identifies the murderer.

U is for Underworld by Reginald Hill, the 10th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, set in the small mining town of Burrthorpe (a fictional town) in Yorkshire. There are two mysteries facing Dalziel and Pascoe. One is current when a man is found dead in the mine, and the other is a case that had appeared to have been resolved several years earlier, when Tracy Pedley, a young girl disappeared. Her body was never discovered.

Dalziel brings a touch of humour to the book as his down to earth approach to the miners gets more results than Pascoe’s middle class attempts to understand them.

G is for Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, the first in the Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mystery series. It’s set in London in 1930. 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. Scotland Yard is baffled by the sequence of ghastly murders unfolding across the city and at the centre of it all is mysterious heiress Rachel Savernake. Daughter of a grand judge, Rachel is as glamorous as she is elusive.

U is for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P D James, the first in the Cordelia Gray series. This is Cordelia’s first assignment on her own after the suicide of Bernie Pryde, her partner in Pryde’s Detective Agency. People assume she won’t carry on the Agency on her own as, of course, “it isn’t a suitable job for a woman”. Cordelia has other ideas and takes on an assignment from Sir Ronald Callander, a famous scientist, to investigate the death of his son, Mark who had been found hanged in suspicious circumstances. It soon becomes clear to her that this is not suicide, but something much more sinister – murder. 

S is for The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz, the second Hawthorne book. Daniel Hawthorne is an ex-policeman, now a private investigator, who the police call in to help when they have a case they call a ‘sticker’. This is a clever and a different type of murder mystery in which Horowitz, himself plays a major role, recruited by Hawthorne to write books about him and the cases he investigates. Divorce lawyer When Richard Pryce is found dead in his home, there are several clues and many suspects in this entertaining and perplexing murder mystery.

T is for Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham, the first book in the Fiona Griffiths crime thriller series. Fiona is Welsh, single and at the start of the book is aged 26, being interviewed for a job with the South Wales Police in Cardiff. Fiona does not play by the rules and when she is asked to help with the investigation of the brutal murders of Janet Mancini, a part-time prostitute, and April, Janet’s 6 year old daughter she doesn’t hesitate to use her initiative. 

But there is a problem as she has a two year gap in her CV around the time of her A Levels and she doesn’t want to talk about it. Fiona is desperate to put the past behind her but as more gruesome killings follow, the case leads her inexorably back into those dark places in her own mind.

The next link up will be on September 2, 2023 when the theme will be: From your TBR list.

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the second Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The theme this month is Red, White, and/or Blue on the cover or in the title. I’m featuring two books with predominantly blue covers and two with white covers.

These are all books I’ve enjoyed – the links to my reviews are in the titles of each book.

J is for The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines

Lizzie Flynn has a shop in a village near Kilkenny, a sort of knick-knack shop selling a variety of goods, cards, flower arrangements, home-made sweets, that needs brightening up and bringing up to date. Her settled life is turned upside down with the arrival of the Jigsaw Maker – Jim Nealon, a stranger who walks into her shop one morning and asks her to sell his beautiful jigsaws.

This is a beautifully written book, one with pace and tension in just the right places. There are plenty of repressed secrets that come to the surface as Lizzie helps Jim by writing about the scenes in his jigsaws. But who is Jim? Why has he come to the village and why did he ask Lizzie in particular to help him?

U is for The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

This tells the story of Her Majesty, not named, but she has dogs, and is married to a duke. She comes across the travelling library, thanks to the dogs, parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors at Buckingham Palace and ends up borrowing a book to save the driver/librarian’s embarrassment.

She borrows books regularly and this changes her life. This little book is full of interesting ideas about books and the nature of reading and society. As the Queen expands her range she realises that ‘Books did not care who was reading them, or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth: letters a republic.’

L is for Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Ursula Todd was born on 11 February 1910 at Fox Corner during a wild snowstorm. But in the course of the book Ursula dies many deaths and there are several different versions that her life takes over the course of the twentieth century – through both World Wars and beyond. Each time as she approaches death she experiences a vague unease, before the darkness falls. As she grows older she experiences different outcomes to the events that lead up to that feeling of unease, and finds that sometimes she can prevent the darkness from falling. By the end of the book I had a complete picture of a life lived to the full.

The whole book is full of ‘what ifs’ – what if this character had behaved differently, what if that had not happened, what if you’d made a different choice of subject to study or a different career, or married a different person?  

Y is for The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd

This is a most remarkable book, telling how the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia in 1815 had a profound and far reaching impact on the world. It led to sudden cooling across the northern hemisphere, crop failures, famine and social unrest in the following year, which became known as The Year Without Summer and in North America as Eighteen hundred and froze to death. But it wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that volcanic eruptions were shown to affect climate change.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s more like a collection of short stories than a novel, but it works very well for me, highlighting the global connections. It is of course about climate change, showing the far-reaching effects of the Tambora eruption, which weren’t limited to 1815 and 1816. It led to hardships in 1817 and 1818 with the outbreak of cholera and typhoid epidemics triggered by the failure of monsoons.

The next link up will be on August 5, 2023 when the theme will be Series – Books that are part of a series, or the name of the series itself.

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the second Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

There’s no theme this month. These are all books I’ve enjoyed – the descriptions are taken from Goodreads and the links to my reviews are in the titles of each book.

A is for Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)

Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks. This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.

U is for An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas

Adamsberg travels to London, where a routine conference draws him into a disturbing investigation.

Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. With him are a young sergeant, Estalère, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is the break they all need, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard.

Just outside the baroque and romantic old Highgate cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet. As Scotland Yard’s investigation begins, Adamsberg and his colleagues return home and are confronted with a massacre in a suburban home. Adamsberg and Danglard are drawn in to a trail of vampires and vampire-hunters that leads them all the way to Serbia, a place where the old certainties no longer apply.

G is for The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.

There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more.

But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod’s family.

U is for The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Led by her yapping corgis to the Westminster traveling library outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen finds herself taking out a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Duff read though it is, the following week her choice proves more enjoyable and awakens in Her Majesty a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer. And so, as she devours work by everyone from Hardy to Brookner to Proust to Beckett, her equerries conspire to bring the Queen’s literary odyssey to a close.

S is for A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a “surplus woman,” one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother’s place and into the town of Winchester, home to one of England’s grandest cathedrals. There, Violet is drawn into a society of broderers–wo men who embroider kneelers for the Cathedral, carrying on a centuries-long tradition of bringing comfort to worshippers.

T is for The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

A warm and uplifting story of how a woman falls in love with a place and its people: a landscape, a community and a fragile way of life.

A rural idyll: that’s what Catherine is seeking when she sells her house in England and moves to a tiny hamlet in the Cévennes mountains. With her divorce in the past and her children grown, she is free to make a new start, and her dream is to set up in business as a seamstress. But this is a harsh and lonely place when you’re no longer just here on holiday. There is French bureaucracy to contend with, not to mention the mountain weather, and the reserve of her neighbours, including the intriguing Patrick Castagnol. And that’s before the arrival of Catherine’s sister, Bryony…

The theme for September 10 is Space; books about exploring outer space, stars, science fiction set on different planets, etc. Anything that connects to space in any way.