Category: Memes

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Ordinal Numbers in the Title

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Book Titles Featuring Ordinal Numbers (Ordinal numbers are numbers that define an item’s place in a series. For example: first, second, third, fourth, tenth, fourteenth, thirty-third, one hundredth, etc.) (submitted by Joanne @ Portobello Book Blog)”.

I was hoping I could find a book that I’d read with each of the ordinal numbers from first to tenth, but I was a few short so had to use some higher numbers as well.

1. First of the Tudors by Joanna Hickson – Historical fiction exploring the beginnings of the Tudor dynasty through the story of Jasper Tudor, uncle of the future Henry VII.

2. The Second Sleep by Robert Harris – At first this seems like a straightforward historical mystery set in the 15th century, but it soon becomes clear that what you’re reading is actually something completely different!

3. Third Girl by Agatha Christie – A Poirot mystery from 1966, which has a strong sixties feel, making it quite different from her earlier novels. One of my favourite Christie characters, Ariadne Oliver, plays a big part in this one too.

4. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies – The first book in Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. This one is set in a small Canadian town and follows the sequence of events triggered by the innocent act of a boy throwing a snowball.

5. Katharine Parr, the Sixth Wife by Alison Weir – As the title suggests, this is the story of Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Katharine Parr. It’s the final book in Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queens series and probably my favourite.

6. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff – A wonderfully vivid and gripping novel set in Roman Britain and telling the story of a young centurion whose father disappeared with the Ninth Legion.

7. The Tenth Gift by Jane Johnson – A dual timeline novel with the historical thread set in the 17th century and following the story of a woman sold into slavery in Morocco after being captured during a raid by Barbary pirates on the coast of Cornwall.

8. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield – A Gothic novel about family secrets and the power of books and storytelling. I enjoyed this one.

9. The Fourteenth Letter by Claire Evans – A mystery set in Victorian London. I was disappointed because I felt there was no real sense of time and place, but the plot was interesting.

10. The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan – The first in a trilogy of novels set in Mughal India and describing the events that lead to the construction of the Taj Mahal. I still haven’t read the other two books.

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Have you read any of these? Which other books with ordinal numbers in the title can you think of?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wuthering Heights to Midnight is a Lonely Place

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, one of my favourite classics. The book has been getting a lot of attention recently due to the new film adaptation (which I wrote about here), so it’s a perfect choice for this month’s Six Degrees.

For my first link, I’ve chosen a novel inspired by Wuthering Heights – Ill Will by Michael Stewart (1). Those of you who have read Wuthering Heights will remember that Heathcliff disappears for several years after overhearing a conversation between Catherine and Nelly. In Ill Will, Stewart gives a possible account of where Heathcliff may have gone during that period and what he could have been doing. I loved the setting and the historical detail, but the language felt inappropriate for a book inspired by a 19th century classic and pulled me out of the story.

The Tutor by Andrea Chapin (2) also attempts to fill in a ‘lost year’. Little is known about William Shakespeare’s life between the years of 1585 and 1592 and in this novel, Chapin imagines that in 1590 Shakespeare was employed as a tutor at a country estate in Lancashire (there’s no real evidence for this theory, although several people have suggested it). She uses this idea to show where some of the inspiration for his work may have come from, particularly the poem Venus and Adonis.

The word ‘tutor’ made me think of other books about teaching. John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner (3) is about the life of a man who teaches English Literature at the University of Missouri for more than forty years. It’s not the most eventful of lives, yet I found the book completely gripping and would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys fiction with academic settings.

Another book published in 1965 is Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart (4). I love Stewart’s novels – they all have a wonderful sense of place and this one is no exception. Set in Vienna, the book follows our heroine Vanessa as she searches for her missing husband and becomes caught up in a mystery involving the dancing Lipizzaner stallions of the famous Spanish Riding School.

Vienna is a setting I always enjoy reading about, so my next link is to Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne (5), the first in a new series of wartime spy thrillers featuring Stella Fry and Harry Fox. In this book, set in 1938, Stella travels to Vienna on the trail of a murder suspect. I loved Thynne’s portrayal of the mood of the Austrian people following the annexation of their country by Nazi Germany. I recently read the second book in the series and will be reviewing it soon.

I’m ending my chain with a simple link using the word Midnight. Midnight is a Lonely Place by Barbara Erskine (6) tells the story of an author who rents a cottage on the Essex coast to work on her new book. When strange things start happening at the cottage, she becomes convinced that she is being haunted by the ghosts of a Roman soldier and a Druid prince. I found it atmospheric but wished there had been more focus on the historical characters. Erskine always sounds like an author I should love, but I’m often left feeling a bit disappointed by her books.

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And that’s my chain for March! My links have included fiction inspired by Wuthering Heights, ‘lost years’, teaching, the year 1965, Vienna and the word midnight.

In April we’ll be starting with Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books for Armchair Travellers

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Books for Armchair Travellers”

There are lots of ways I could have approached this topic, but the ten books I’ve chosen are set in places that I’ve never visited and probably never will. It was nice to have the opportunity to ‘see’ them through the pages of these books!

1. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)

2. The English Girl by Katherine Webb (Oman)

3. Little Black Lies by Sharon Bolton (The Falkland Islands)

4. The Missing Sister by Dinah Jefferies (Myanmar)

5. The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart (Syria and Lebanon)

6. The Predicament by William Boyd (Multiple locations including Guatemala)

7. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)

8. Death in Zanzibar by M.M. Kaye (Zanzibar)

9. Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain (Borneo)

10. Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett (Multiple locations including Mali and The Gambia)

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Have you read any of these? And have you been to any of these places or, like me, are you only likely to visit them from your armchair?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Flashlight to Nights of Plague

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Flashlight by Susan Choi, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk’s disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels.

The first book that comes to mind is Surfacing by Margaret Atwood (1), in which another father goes missing, possibly drowned. His daughter, an unnamed narrator, returns to her childhood home on an island in northern Quebec to discover the truth behind his disappearance. I read the book last year and found it fascinating, although I’m not sure I fully understood it all.

Quebec is my next link. The short story The Custom of the Army appears in Diana Gabaldon’s Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (2), a collection of stories and novellas featuring characters from her Outlander series. In The Custom of the Army, Lord John Grey goes to Canada to serve as a witness at a court martial and becomes caught up in the Battle of Quebec of 1759. That one wasn’t one of my favourite stories, but I enjoyed the collection overall.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (3) shares the word ‘stone’ in the title. I loved this wonderful novel set in an Ethiopian hospital and following the stories of the conjoined twin sons of a British surgeon and an Indian nun. I still haven’t read Abraham Verghese’s second novel, but I really should.

Another book featuring conjoined twins is The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting (4), the first in the Sister Bells trilogy about life in the remote Norwegian village of Butangen where two church bells – commemorating the twins, Gunhild and Halfrid – are said to have supernatural powers. The novel was originally published in Norwegian and translated into English by Deborah Dawkin.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (5) is another book set in Norway and written by a Norwegian author. It’s actually a trilogy, but often combined into one volume and tells the story of the title character, who grows up in Norway in the 14th century. It’s a sad, tragic story, but I loved it and can recommend Tiina Nunnally’s translation. The book led to Undset winning the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”.

Another novel I’ve read by a Nobel Prize winner is Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (6), translated by Ekin Oklap. It’s set on a fictional Mediterranean island during an outbreak of plague at the turn of the 20th century and Pamuk uses this a starting point to explore the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

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And that’s my chain for February! My links include: missing fathers, Quebec, the word ‘stone’, conjoined twins, Norwegian authors and Nobel Prize winners. The chain took me from Japan to the Mediterranean via Canada, Ethiopia and Norway, and features three books in translation.

In March we’ll be starting with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë – one of my favourite classics!

Top Ten Tuesday: Book covers with unusual typography

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Book Covers Featuring Cool/Pretty/Unique/etc Typography“.

I thought I would struggle with this, but actually the only difficulty was narrowing the options down to ten. I think all of the books below have interesting typography – I hope you agree! My reviews are linked if you want to find out more about any of these titles.

1. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

2. Florence & Giles by John Harding

3. When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

4. Roseblood by Paul Doherty

5. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

6. Stormbird by Conn Iggulden

7. The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

8. Secrecy by Rupert Thomson

9. Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson

10. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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Have you read any of these books? Which of these covers do you think has the best typography?

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I discovered in 2025

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: Bookish Discoveries I Made in 2025

There were lots of authors I tried for the first time last year, but the ten I’m listing below are all authors whose work I enjoyed and would like to explore further (or in some cases, already have).

1. Caroline Blackwood – The Stepdaughter was a very dark and unsettling novella but I was gripped by it and will be looking for more of her books.

2. Kim Curran – I read The Morrigan for Reading Ireland Month last year and have just finished her new book, Brigid, which I’ll be reviewing soon.

3. Carys Davies – This time, an author I read for Reading Wales Month! Clear was a beautifully written book and I would be happy to try her previous ones.

4. Beth Lewis – The Rush, set in Canada during the Gold Rush, was one of my books of the year in 2025. Her previous books all sound interesting, but very different.

5. Graham Greene – I liked, though didn’t love, The End of the Affair, my first Greene novel. I’m definitely planning to read more of his books and have put Brighton Rock on my new Classics Club list.

6. Hannah Dolby – I loved No Life for a Lady and will be reading How to Solve Murders Like a Lady soon. I can’t wait to meet our heroine Violet Hamilton again!

7. Patrick Ryan – Ryan’s family saga Buckeye was possibly my favourite of all the books I read last year. It’s his first adult novel, although he has previously written young adult novels and short stories.

8. Benjamin Wood – Seascraper was another of my books of the year for 2025. I read it for Novellas in November and thought it was beautiful.

9. Moray Dalton – I read The Art School Murders for Dean Street December and was very impressed. Luckily, there are lots of other books in the series for me to look forward to!

10. Tarjei Vesaas – I read two books by this Norwegian author last year – The Birds and The Ice Palace – and enjoyed both. He has a few other books also available in English.

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Have you read any of these authors? Which new-to-you authors did you try for the first time in 2025?

Top Ten Tuesday: More books to look out for in the first half of 2026

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2026”.

I’ve already listed some of my most anticipated historical fiction releases in a recent post, which you can see here. I’m listing below another ten books that I either found out about after putting that post together or that fall into other genres – so these are not necessarily my *most* anticipated books, but are still some that I would like to read.

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1. Strange Buildings by Uketsu, tr. Jim Rion (26th February 2026) – I loved Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, so I can’t wait for this one. It seems it will be in a similar format, with clues and secrets hidden within pictures and floorplans.

2. The Astral Library by Kate Quinn (26th February 2026) – This fantasy novel sounds very different from the other Kate Quinn books I’ve read, which were historical fiction, but I’m still interested in trying it.

3. The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski (5th March 2026) – This is a debut novel, so I’m not sure what to expect but it’s a 20th century family saga and sounds appealing.

4. Airing in a Closed Carriage by Joseph Shearing (10th March 2026) – I noticed that this is one of the upcoming titles from British Library Crime Classics in the first half of the year. I’m particularly intrigued by this one as I’ve read two other books by Joseph Shearing (a pseudonym of Marjorie Bowen).

5. The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín (26th March 2026) – A collection of short stories about people living far from home. I’ve had mixed experiences with Tóibín’s books so I’m hoping this will be a good one!

6. Son of Nobody by Yann Martel (2nd April 2026) – I haven’t read anything by Martel apart from Life of Pi, which I liked, and this new one about the Trojan War sounds interesting.

7. A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz (23rd April 2026) – This will be the sixth book in the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series. I’ve enjoyed all five of the others so I’m looking forward to this one.

8. The Fourth Queen by Nicola Cornick (9th May 2026) – I can’t find any information on the plot of this book yet, but Nicola Cornick is an author I usually enjoy reading. Most of her novels are historical fiction with dual timelines and a touch of the supernatural, so I’m assuming this will be similar.

9. She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo, tr. Jesse Kirkwood (21st May 2026) – Another Japanese book I’ll be looking out for this year. This is the eighth book featuring the detective Kosuke Kindaichi to be published by Pushkin Press; I’ve read all of the others and they’re always fascinating!

10. Whistler by Ann Patchett (2nd June 2026) – I’m sure this one will be on other people’s lists this week too. I’ve only read two Ann Patchett books so far and loved one but not the other, so I’m curious to see what I’ll think of this one.

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Do you want to read any of these? Are there any new releases you’re looking forward to in the first half of 2026?