WWW Wednesday (September 18)

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To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

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

I am reading Teatime for the Firefly by Shona Patel which is so much more than I ever expected. This is a tale set in a different time (1943), a different culture and has informed me so much of what World War II meant in India as well as including loads of information about the tea gardens of Assam.

Blurb

My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star. For a young girl growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us together-me and Manik Deb.

Layla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent minded by her eccentric Anglophile grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb-a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined-if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.

I have just finished Bellman & Black by Diane Settterfield
which is going to be published at the beginning of October

Click the book cover to see my review

Next on my list is The Bridesmaid by Jenny Scotti

Jenni Scott contacted me to see if I would be interested in reviewing this and I looked at the blurb and couldn’t resist (again) This looks like it has everything I will enjoy in a murder-mystery. It is set in England, the victim has secrets to be uncovered and best of all it has connections to the past.

  Blurb

Haddley, a quiet English village in the Midlands. Kelly Evans — a sixteen year old girl — is brutally murdered. Her body is discovered by a neighbour, and the police are called in to investigate. Kelly was young and beautiful, and her untimely death comes as a shock to all who knew her … or does it really?

The dark side of Kelly’s personality soon comes to light. She was ruthless and promiscuous, and stopped at nothing to get what she wanted, even if it meant wrecking other people’s lives. She made quite a few enemies, and among close friends and neighbours are some who might have had a very good reason for wanting to get rid of her.

The investigation takes a new and unexpected turn when a locket goes missing, and a connection is made with the twenty-year-old murder of a wartime movie star. As the police search the past for answers and gradually piece the mystery together, the respectable veneer starts cracking exposing a web of jealousy, sexual intrigue and deceit.
Goodreads