Four Fantastic Books Published Today (February 27)

Well today is a great day for new books!

To read my reviews click on the book covers

First up is The One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

Blurb

One single mum
With two jobs and two children, Jess Thomas does her best day after day. But it’s hard on your own. And sometimes you take risks you shouldn’t. Because you have to . . .
One chaotic family
Jess’s gifted, quirky daughter Tanzie is brilliant with numbers, but without a helping hand she’ll never get the chance to shine. And Nicky, Jess’s teenage stepson, can’t fight the bullies alone.
Sometimes Jess feels like they’re sinking . . .
One handsome stranger
Into their lives comes Ed Nicholls, a man whose life is in chaos, and who is running from a deeply uncertain future. But he has time on his hands. He knows what it’s like to be lonely. And he wants to help . . .
One unexpected love story
The One Plus One is a captivating and unconventional romance from Jojo Moyes about two lost souls meeting in the most unlikely circumstances. Goodreads

This is one emotional read but utterly satisfying. Jojo Moyes is one of those writers that has the power to make you really care about the characters she has created so much so they become your friends. A publisher’s dream for Penguin Books.

Next up is Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase by Louise Walters

Blurb

Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do, to this child, to this child’s mother, it is wrong…
Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother’s belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew – dated after he supposedly died in the war.
Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later…Goodreads

A fantastic dual time-line novel with the modern day Roberta finding out about Dorothy’s life at the time of World War II. Who couldn’t forgive Dorothea and why is the big question at the heart of this novel published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Next up is the debut novel by Sarah Hilary, Someone Else’s Skin one of my favourite crime novels written this year, published by Headline.

Blurb

Detective Inspector Marnie Rome. Dependable; fierce; brilliant at her job; a rising star in the ranks. Everyone knows how Marnie fought to come back from the murder of her parents, but very few know what is going on below the surface. Because Marnie has secrets she won’t share with anyone.
But then so does everyone. Certainly those in the women’s shelter Marnie and Detective Sergeant Noah Jake visit on that fateful day. The day when they arrive to interview a resident, only to find one of the women’s husbands, who shouldn’t have been there, lying stabbed on the floor.
As Marnie and Noah investigate the crime further, events begin to spiral and the violence escalates. Everyone is keeping secrets, some for survival and some, they suspect, to disguise who they really are under their skin.
Now, if Marnie is going to find the truth she will have to face her own demons head on. Because the time has come for secrets to be revealed…

This is just my sort of crime fiction, one where there are a myriad of storylines, expertly handled and with likeable characters to compensate for the baddies! This book was so much more than I had expected!

And lastly out of the fab four is the superbly creepy A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan published by Doubleday

Blurb

You won’t remember Mr Heming. He showed you round your comfortable home, suggested a sustainable financial package, negotiated a price with the owner and called you with the good news. The less good news is that, all these years later, he still has the key.
That’s absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine?
The answer to that is, he has the keys to them all.
William Heming’s every pleasure is in his leafy community. He loves and knows every inch of it, feels nurtured by it, and would defend it – perhaps not with his life but if it came to it, with yours… Goodreads

This book has haunted me since the day I read it and I know I am going to have to pick it up again to experience the sheer cleverness of the tale of a boy who started by hiding in wardrobes and finished up living amongst unsuspecting families.

Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase – Louise Walters

Historical Fiction
4*’s

A book with a dual timeline containing letters from the past set against the background of a second-hand bookshop was always going to appeal to me so I was especially delighted when this ARC dropped through my letterbox.

The book starts with a letter to Dorothea dated February 1941, the very letter that Roberta finds amongst her Grandmother’s possessions, written by her Grandfather after he died.

At the beginning of World War II Dorothy is hanging out washing when an aeroplane crashes into a field behind her house. Alone and aloof Dorothy opens her heart to the possibility of happiness when Jan Pietrykowski, the Polish Squadron Leader comes to visit her following the crash, but how does this link to the letter found amongst her grandmother’s belongings? Roberta is keen to unravel the mystery but who can she ask? Her elderly Grandmother or her desperately ill father?

I have to admit although I was really looking forward to reading this book, I didn’t warm to either Dorothy or Roberta at first. Roberta in particular seemed a strange young woman, who in this day and age fears they are past it in their early thirties? I was irritated by her comparing herself female colleagues in the second-hand bookshop who after all were only a few years younger and I feared that this book was going to be a disappointment. Dorothy’s misery was more easily understood, living in a little cottage in Lincoln, estranged from her mother, abandoned by her husband and mourning her childlessness. However it didn’t take long for their stories to worm their way under my skin and I fell in love with both stories, past and present, willing the two women on to find happiness.

There is much to enjoy in this debut novel particularly the letters whose inclusion made me mourn the fact that it is less and less likely that a bookseller will find such missives in the future! The settings are described to perfection, I could easily picture the little cottage, the bookshop which I ached to visit, as well as clearly understanding why Dorothy stood apart from her fellow villagers thereby becoming a main source of their gossip. A book with a lot of charm to sweeten a tale of love and loss.

I have a feeling that this book is one that will linger in my mind, there is such a lot of emotion, mainly supressed contained within the pages.

I received my copy of this book from Lovereading as I am a member of their review panel and as such is my honest opinion of this debut novel due to be published 27 February 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton.

Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase – Amazon UK

 

Friday Finds (December 20)

Hosted by Should be Reading

FRIDAY FINDS showcases the books you ‘found’ and added to your To Be Read (TBR) list… whether you found them online, or in a bookstore, or in the library — wherever! (they aren’t necessarily books you purchased).

So, come on — share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

Well I am still adding to that great big TBR

First up I actually won a book in a Goodreads Giveaway, and since I rarely win anything, I am especially delighted to have a signed copy of The September Garden by Catherine Law

Blurb

Set in London during the Blitz, in occupied France and amid the rolling Chiltern hills of Buckinghamshire, this is the story of two cousins who, as squabbling rivals, are thrown together by the outbreak of war. Nell and Sylvie grow up quickly during the early days of rationing, black-outs, and the arrival of RAF planes in the skies over the Chilterns. Sylvie, marooned in England, is desperately worried for her parents who she left behind in Nazi-occupied Normandy, and puts up a barrier of bitterness to hide her distress. Nell, meanwhile, witnesses the crumbling of her parents’ marriage. Even as the war rages on around them, the competition and jealousy between the cousins battles on – especially in romance. When the girls fall in love with the same man, the brave and unassuming RAF officer Alex Hammond, he is spared having to choose between them. The machinations of war change the course of all their lives, with devastating consequences. Sylvie continues to hurt those who love her and to hide her pain behind her tough facade. And for Nell, the only place she can ever find solace is inside the September Garden, the walled garden that her father tended so lovingly before he left. This is the only place she feels safe in, to where she is always drawn, and where she decides to hide her most dreadful secret…Amazon

Hodder & Stoughton have kindly sent me a copy of the fabulous looking Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase by Louise Walters which will be published in February 2014

Blurb

Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother’s belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew – dated after he supposedly died in the war.
Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later…Goodreads

I have also been given a copy of Watching Over You by Mel Sherratt which is due to be published on 14 January 2014 by Amazon publishing

Blurb

Following the death of her husband and unborn child, Charley Belington sells the family home and bravely starts life over again. On moving into a new flat, she is befriended by her landlady, Ella, who seems like the perfect friend and confidante.
But, unbeknown to Charley, Ella is fighting her own dark and dirty demons as the fallout from a horrific childhood sends her spiralling down into madness—and unspeakable obsessions.
As Ella’s mind splinters, her increasingly bizarre attentions make Charley uneasy. But with every step Charley tries to take to distance herself, Ella moves in a tightening lockstep with her, closer and closer and closer…Netgalley

I really want a copy of A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley but have so far resisted the urge to purchase this myself… maybe once I see what Santa brings me!

Blurb

Murder – a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy. And a very strange, very British obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?
In A Very British Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nation-wide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria’s lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, puppet shows and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of modern Britain, murder entered our national psyche, and it’s been a part of us ever since.

Related articles

• A Very British Murder, by Lucy Worsley. BBC Books, £20 (independent.co.uk)
• An Interview with Crime Thriller Writer~ Mel Sherratt (writeofmind.wordpress.com)