Fiction – BooksPlease

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 today is Books On My Winter 2025-2026 to-Read List. The first three are books on my NetGalley shelf and will be published early in the New Year. The rest are books from my TBR lists. I do enjoy making lists and sometimes I stick to them!

The Fox of Kensal Green by Richard Tyrrell – a quiet neighbourhood of London is about to be shattered.
The Living and the Dead by Christoffer Carlsson – a haunting murder mystery, set in a rural Swedish town, where one community’s secrets will be laid bare over the next twenty years
Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra – a thriller set in the Colorado mountains during a ski-weekend.
The Vanishing of Margaret Small by Neil Alexander – a mystery that takes readers into a fascinating past, and introduces an unforgettable literary heroine.
Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton – the classic story of a quiet, unassuming man and the many lives he touches.
Exiles by Jane Harper – Investigator Aaron Falk finds himself drawn into a complex web of tightly held secrets in South Australia’s wine country.
The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson – a Christmas murder mystery featuring the real-life couple who invented Cluedo.
Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz – Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder.
Miss Willmott’s Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius: by Sandra Lawrence – a biography.
Tyrant: The Ruthless Rise of Roman Emperor Nero by Conn Iggulden – the second book in the Nero Trilogy. I’ve read the first book, which I thought was excellent.

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

The books in this post are all from my 20 Books of Summer list.

Currently I’m reading The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. I’ve started this book a few time before but now I am at last settled into reading it.

Description from Amazon UK:

‘Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world – but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children’s book.’

The last book I read was The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffeoner. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about a group of people on the 10.35 train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. It’s a story of s routine journey that takes a terrifying turn.

Next, I’m thinking of reading Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Synopsis from Amazon:

The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.
Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.
As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.