This Week in Books (August 22)

Hosted by Lipsy Lost & Found my Wednesday post gives you a taste of what I am reading this week. A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words

My current read is The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett which was my pick on the Classic Club Spin #18. There are echoes of the garden from The Secret Garden but I have to be honest, I’m not exactly racing through it but I now need to get a move on to have it read and reviewed by the end of the month.

Blurb

The Shuttle is about American heiresses marrying English aristocrats; by extension it is about the effect of American energy, dynamism and affluence on an effete and impoverished English ruling class.

Sir Nigel Anstruthers crosses the Atlantic to look for a rich wife and returns with the daughter of an American millionaire, Rosalie Vanderpoel. He turns out to be a bully, a miser and a philanderer and virtually imprisons his wife in the house. Only when Rosalie’s sister Bettina is grown up does it occur to her and her father that some sort of rescue expedition should take place. And the beautiful, kind and dynamic Bettina leaves for Europe to try and find out why Rosalie has, inexplicably, chosen to lose touch with her family. In the process she engages in a psychological war with Sir Nigel; meets and falls in love with another Englishman; and starts to use the Vanderpoel money to modernize ‘Stornham Court’.

The book’s title refers to ships shuttling back and forth over the Atlantic (Frances Hodgson Burnett herself travelled between the two countries thirty-three times, something very unusual then). Goodreads

The last book I finished was This is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston one of my reads for 20 Books of Summer 2018 Challenge  which I am failing at.

Blurb

Johnny, an outstanding young swimmer, went missing nearly thirty years ago: drowned, or so everyone except his sister Imogen believes.

How could this have happened? Encouraged, pushed even, from a child by his father, Johnny could have made the Olympic team, couldn’t he?

As Imogen gradually pieces together bits of her family history, we hear the tragic echoes that connect her with the Great War and Ireland in the nineteen-twenties Amazon

And then I have a whole stack of great looking books to read for 6 September so I think next I will pick up Jenny Blackhurst’s, The Night She Died.

 

Blurb

On her own wedding night, beautiful and complicated Evie White leaps off a cliff to her death.
What drove her to commit this terrible act? It’s left to her best friend and her husband to unravel the sinister mystery.

Following a twisted trail of clues leading to Evie’s darkest secrets, they begin to realize they never knew the real Evie at all… Amazon

So what do you think? Any of this mixed bunch take your fancy?