Category: Stacking the Shelves

Stacking the Shelves: 26 August 2025

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Marlene at Reading Reality and the details are on her blog, as well as a huge amount of book reviews. Why not visit her blog if you haven’t already found it? The gorgeous graphic is also used courtesy of the site.

The idea is to share the books you are adding to your shelves, may they be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical stores or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course e-books!

I’ve been away on holiday near Gatehouse of Fleet in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. We had a brilliant time in a lodge overlooking Fleet Bay, part of the Solway Firth.

I bought these three paperbacks from a charity shop in Gatehouse of Fleet:

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton – Like her previous novel The Luminaries, which I loved, this book is set in a fictionalised New Zealand, primarily in and around a national park in the South Canterbury region. The title is taken from a line in Macbeth. It follows members of a guerilla gardening collective, Birnam Wood as, with the help of a charismatic tech billionaire, they undertake a new project on abandoned farmland.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan, a version of Hamlet. Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb. I’ve enjoyed some of McEwan’s books, but this one looks rather different and, having read a few pages, I’m not sure about it.

A Bit on the Side by William Trevor, a collection of twelve short stories. I don’t think I’ve read any of Trevor’s books, but I thought this one looks interesting, with stories about adultery, secret passions and domestic infidelities. ‘A treat … each meditate[s] on the subject of love – adulterous, unspoken, clandestine, sometimes cruel. Whether set in rural Ireland or London, their pages whisper of relished secrets and dreams foolishly clung to’ Mail on Sunday.

These are e-books I’ve either bought for 99p or acquired for free this month:

The Testaments – Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. The Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime come face to face with the legendary, ruthless Aunt Lydia. But how far will each go for what she believes?

Step by Step: The Life In My Journeys by Simon Reeve. I love his TV travel programmes, so this was a 99p must for me. It’s his autobiography describing how he has journeyed across epic landscapes, dodged bullets on frontlines, walked through minefields and been detained for spying by the KGB. His travels have taken him across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. He gives the full story behind some of his favourite expeditions, and traces his own inspiring personal journey back to leaving school without qualifications, teetering on a bridge, and then overcoming his challenges by climbing to a ‘Lost Valley’ and changing his life … step by step.

The First Witch of Boston by Andrea Catalano, her debut novel. This was free from Amazon Prime this month. It is based on the true story of Margaret Jones, the first woman to be found guilty of witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1646. When Thomas and Margaret Jones arrive from England to build a life in the New World Margaret’s skill with healing herbs rouses suspicion of black magic. Personal tragedies, religious hysteria, and wariness of the unknown turn most against her, and even the devotion Margaret and her husband share is at risk.

I enjoy historical fiction and Mist Over Pendle by Robert Neill, (American title, The Elegant Witch) is one of my favourite novels. It tells the tale of witchcraft set in a wild inaccessible corner of Lancashire leading up to the trials of the famous Pendle witches in 1612. So, I thought it would be interesting to compare the two books.

Stacking the Shelves: 12 April 2025

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

It’s Saturday and time for Stacking the Shelves, hosted by Marlene at Reading Reality and the details are on her blog, as well as a huge amount of book reviews. Why not visit her blog if you haven’t already found it? The gorgeous graphic is also used courtesy of the site.

The idea is to share the books you are adding to your shelves, may they be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical stores or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course e-books!

These are e-books I’ve either bought or acquired for free this month:

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, a 99p offer.

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane’s long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.

The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle.This was free – a bonus short story from Amazon Prime this month.

Reuben thought he’d spend the rest of his life with Beth, until she broke his heart six months ago. He’s not even remotely over her, so he’s devastated to hear she’s getting married—this weekend. Now he’s faced with the ultimate question: what should he do on the day of the wedding? Grieve? Disrupt the ceremony? Or do everything in his power to pretend it’s not happening? Enlisting the help of his friends, Reuben is all set to mark the occasion with distraction on a grand scale: Ferraris, champagne, and a VIP box at the races. But on the morning of the Big Day, Reuben gets a phone call that not only derails his elaborate itinerary: it may well change his life completely…

The Boy from Tiger Bay: A True Story of Murder, Betrayal, and a Fight for Justice by Ceri Jackson. A free book from Amazon Prime this month.

A brutal murder. A blighted investigation. The true story of five men damned by a crime they didn’t commit.

On Valentine’s Day 1988, twenty-year-old Lynette White was brutally murdered in a dark corner of Cardiff’s world-famous, and infamous, Tiger Bay. Stigmatised by a bad reputation, the area was on the brink of major redevelopment which would change the historic community forever.

South Wales Police launched its biggest murder hunt to date, and within weeks detectives released a photofit of a prime suspect seen outside the murder scene, his hands covered in blood. A white man. But as the months passed by and no arrest was made, the police came under inevitable pressure.

Everyone knew John Actie. But he didn’t know Lynette White. Yet, almost a year after her death, he and four other innocent men were charged with killing her. None matched the description, and none were white. But they became the scapegoats in what some saw as a desperate attempt to close the case.

Told predominantly through John Actie’s eyes, The Boy from Tiger Bay is an explosive true-crime narrative that exposes one of the UK’s most infamous murder investigations—a story of racial injustice and the enduring fight to bring the truth to light.

I’ve received one ARC this week from NetGalley

The Death of Shame (A Raven and Fisher Mystery Book 5) by Ambrose Parry, publication date, 5 June 2025.

1854, Edinburgh.
Respectable faces hide private sins.

Apprentice Sarah Fisher is helping to fund Dr Will Raven’s emerging medical practice in exchange for being secretly trained as a medic, should the rules barring women ever change. Sarah needs no instruction in the inequalities that beset her gender, but even she has her eyes opened to a darker reality when a relative seeks her help in searching for her missing daughter. Annabel Banks was promised a situation in a prestigious household, but there has been no word from her since she left home, and the agency that arranged her position says she never appeared.

Sarah’s inquiries lead her to reforming campaigners trying to publicise the plight of the hundreds of girls ensnared in Edinburgh’s houses of assignation. Sarah learns how young women are lured, deceived, trafficked and raped, leaving them ruined in the eyes of a society obsessed with moral purity, and where virginity is prized as a lucrative commodity.

Drawing upon real historical events, The Death of Shame takes Raven and Sarah into a treacherous labyrinth of exploitation, corruption, and immorality.

Stacking the Shelves: 25 January 2025

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

It’s Saturday and time for Stacking the Shelves, hosted by Marlene at Reading Reality and the details are on her blog, as well as a huge amount of book reviews. Why not visit her blog if you haven’t already found it? The gorgeous graphic is also used courtesy of the site.

The idea is to share the books you are adding to your shelves, may they be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical stores or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course e-books!

These are all e-books I’ve either bought or acquired for free from Amazon since the beginning of this year:

The Woman In Blue: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 8  by Elly Griffiths. Somehow I missed reading this book when it first came out in 2016, so when I saw it was 99p on Amazon I bought it. It’s book 8 out of 15 in the series. When Ruth’s friend Cathbad* sees a vision of the Virgin Mary, in a white gown and blue cloak, in Walsingham’s graveyard, he takes it in his stride. Walsingham has strong connections to Mary, and Cathbad is a druid after all; visions come with the job. But when the body of a woman in a blue dressing-gown is found dead the next day in a nearby ditch, it is clear that a horrible crime has been committed, and DCI Nelson and his team are called in for what is now a murder investigation.

*I’ve read most of this series. Cathbad is one of my favourite characters.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, a new-to-me author. This is a new translation by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, of the 2011 novel that explores how a teacher losing his sight and a pupil losing her voice form a poetic bond. It is a short book, of just 149 pages narrated by the two unnamed characters, one a woman grieving for her mother and her son, now in the custody of her ex-husband. She is also experiencing the loss of her ability to speak. The other is a man losing his connection to place and family, as well as the loss of his eyesight.  They meet when the woman attends his Ancient Greek lessons.

Eleven Numbers, a short story by Lee Child. Nathan Tyler is an unassuming professor at a middling American university with a rather obscure specialty in mathematics—in short, a nobody from nowhere. So why is the White House calling? Summoned to Washington, DC, for a top-secret briefing, Nathan discovers that he’s the key to a massive foreign intelligence breakthrough. Reading between the lines of a cryptic series of equations, he could open a door straight into the heart of the Kremlin and change the global balance of power forever. All he has to do is get to a meeting with the renowned Russian mathematician who created it. But when Nathan crashes headlong into a dangerous new game, the odds against him suddenly look a lot steeper.

Genius Gut: 10 New Gut-Brain Hacks to Revolutionise Your Energy, Mood, and Brainpower by Emily Leeming. Microbiome scientist and registered dietitian Dr Emily Leeming explains the ground-breaking evidence on the relationship between food and mood, unveiling the powerful gut-brain connection…and exciting new links to your gut bacteria. I downloaded the sample before deciding to buy this book and think it looks very interesting and easy to read for a non-scientist like me. I never thought much about my gut until I had bowel cancer eighteen months ago!

The Fake Wife by Sharon Bolton. I’ve a lot of her books and have enjoyed them all, so this is one I’m really looking forward to reading. It’s described as an absolutely gripping psychological thriller with jaw-dropping twists. Olive Anderson is dining alone at a hotel when a glamourous stranger joins her table, pretending to be her wife. What starts as a thrilling game quickly turns into something dangerous. But as much as the fake wife has her secrets, Olive just might have more . . .

Adding to the TBRs

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

As usual I am behind with writing about the books I’ve read, with four to do. I’m in the middle of writing about The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, but it is taking me longer than I’d hoped and I haven’t finished my post yet.

So, here’s a post about the four books I’ve added to my TBRs this week:

STSmall

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves. This means you can include ‘˜real’ and ‘˜virtual’ books (ie physical and ebooks) you’ve bought, books you’ve borrowed from friends or the library, review books, and gifts.

I’ve added one paperback and three e-books:

  • The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley. A friend recommended this book to me and I was delighted to see that it is one of the Kindle Daily Deals this morning. It’s steam-punk, a genre completely new to me! It is described as:

Utterly beguiling, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street blends historical events with dazzling flights of fancy to plunge readers into a strange and magical past, where time, destiny, genius ? and a clockwork octopus ? collide.

I hope I’ll like it as much as my friend did!

  • John Le Carré: the Biography by Adam Sisman, because I want to know more about the author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Night Manager and his other espionage books. During the 1950s and the 1960s, he worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under a pen name. This is the definitive biography of a major writer, described by Ian McEwan as ‘perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the twentieth century in Britain’.
  • Time Heals No Wounds: a Baltic Sea crime novel by Hendrick Falkenberg. This is one of the free books for Amazon Prime members in May. German author Hendrik Falkenberg studied sports management and works in sports broadcasting. The magical allure that the sea holds for him comes alive in his stories, which are set on the north German coast. His first book, Die Zeit heilt keine Wunden (Time Heals No Wounds), was a #1 Kindle bestseller in Germany and has been translated for the first time into English.
  • And lastly, HeavenAli held a draw to give away some of Virginia Woolf’s books and I’m delighted that I won Orlando in the giveaway.

Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards.

I’m looking forward to reading these books in the coming months!

Stacking the Shelves: 9 April 2016

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

STSmall

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves. This means you can include ‘˜real’ and ‘˜virtual’ books (ie physical and ebooks) you’ve bought, books you’ve borrowed from friends or the library, review books, and gifts.

I’ve borrowed three library books this week, books by authors whose books I’ve read in the past and enjoyed:

  • The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers – I borrowed this because I’ve some of Salley Vickers’ books and loved them, in particular Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday and Where Three Roads Meet, so I’m hoping I’ll love this one too.

Blurb:

There is something special about the ancient cathedral of Chartres, with its mismatched spires, astonishing stained glass and strange labyrinth. And there is something special too about Agnès Morel, the mysterious woman who is to be found cleaning it each morning.

No one quite knows where she came from – not the diffident Abbé Paul, who discovered her one morning twenty years ago, sleeping in the north porch; nor lonely Professor Jones, whose chaotic existence she helps to organise; nor Philippe Nevers, whose neurotic sister and newborn child she cares for; nor even the irreverent young restorer, Alain Fleury, who works alongside her each day and whose attention she catches with her tawny eyes, her colourful clothes and elusive manner. And yet everyone she encounters would surely agree that she is subtly transforming their lives, even if they couldn’t quite say how.

But with a chance meeting in the cathedral one day, the spectre of Agnès’ past returns, provoking malicious rumours from the prejudiced Madame Beck and her gossipy companion Madame Picot. As the hearsay grows uglier, Agnès is forced to confront her history, and the mystery of her origins finally unfolds.

Blurb:

Reading Gaol’s most famous prisoner is pitted against a ruthless and fiendishly clever serial killer. ‘Intelligent, amusing and entertaining’ Alexander McCall Smith It is 1897, Dieppe. Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, novelist, raconteur and ex-convict, has fled the country after his release from Reading Gaol. Tonight he is sharing a drink and the story of his cruel imprisonment with a mysterious stranger. He has endured a harsh regime: the treadmill, solitary confinement, censored letters, no writing materials. Yet even in the midst of such deprivation, Oscar’s astonishing detective powers remain undiminished – and when first a brutal warder and then the prison chaplain are found murdered, who else should the governor turn to for help other than Reading Gaol’s most celebrated inmate?
In this, the latest novel in his acclaimed Oscar Wilde murder mystery series, Gyles Brandreth takes us deep into the dark heart of Wilde’s cruel incarceration.

Blurb:

Charlie Howard ‘“ struggling crime-writer by day, talented thief by night ‘“’¯has gone straight. But holing himself up in a crumbling palazzo in Venice in an attempt to concentrate on his next novel hasn’t got rid of the itch in his fingers. And to make matters worse, a striking Italian beauty has just broken into his apartment and made off with his most prized possession, leaving a puzzling calling card in its place.

It looks as though kicking the habit of a lifetime will be much more of a challenge than Charlie thought.

Sneaking out into Venice’s maze of murky canals, Charlie’s attempts to tame a cat burglar embroil him in a plot that is far bigger and more explosive than he could ever have imagined.

We should treasure our libraries.

Stacking the Shelves: 2 April 2016

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

STSmall

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves. This means you can include ‘˜real’ and ‘˜virtual’ books (ie physical and ebooks) you’ve bought, books you’ve borrowed from friends or the library, review books, and gifts.

I bought three books this week.

I loved watching The Night Manager, adapted from John le Carré’s novel, so when I went to Main Street Trading on Tuesday I hoped they would have a copy. They didn’t – but they did have Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a book I’ve wanted to read ever since I watched the BBC adaptation many years ago (Alec Guinness was George Smiley).

Blurb:

George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy.

The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock. Smiley’s mission is to catch a Moscow Centre mole burrowed thirty years deep into the Circus itself.

Yesterday I went shopping and passing Berrydin in Books I had to go in and, of course, I had to buy a book – well two actually. First another book that I was prompted to read by a TV adaptation in 2012 – Birdsong by Sebastian Foulks.

Blurb:

A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters, and Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front. His love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, he experiences the unprecedented horrors of that conflict – from which neither he nor any reader of this book can emerge unchanged.

And also Citadel by Kate Mosse, because I like time-slip books. The main story is set in 1942-44 in Nazi-occupied  Carcassonne in France and moves back in time to 342, with a monk, Arinus trying to find a hiding place for a forbidden Codex.

Blurb:

1942, Nazi-occupied France. Sandrine, a spirited and courageous nineteen-year-old, finds herself drawn into a Resistance group in Carcassonne – codenamed ‘Citadel’ – made up of ordinary women who are prepared to risk everything for what is right.

And when she meets Raoul, they discover a shared passion for the cause, for their homeland, and for each other.

But in a world where the enemy now lies in every shadow – where neighbour informs on neighbour; where friends disappear without warning and often without trace – love can demand the highest price of all…

As soon as I read some of my TBR books (6 in March) it seems I just have to find more – at least it’s only three this time.