Books read in June

 So, here we are, halfway through the year. Incredible. Wherever you are I hope the summer heat is not too intense - those in the northern hemisphere of course. (I have no idea whether anyone in the southern hemisphere, Oz or NZ etc., reads my blog.) We've had a couple of short heatwaves but our 'heatwave' temps are not comparable to places where the heat is serious. It doesn't get to 40C (104f) here, for instance, which it frequently does in other countries. So it's all relative. I personally hate anything over 30C (86f) and am really not a summer fan at all! Give me autumn or winter, and I'm mostly happy with spring too, but not summer. 

Anyway, enough of the weather report. Books. I read 6 in June, with not a dud among them, so for me, it was a good reading month.

26. A Book of Bones - John Connolly 

27. Death Rites - Sarah Ward 

28. Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky 

29. Pandora - Susan Stokes 

30. Lessons in Crime - edited by Martin Edwards (to be reviewed)

31. Death Sentence - Damien Boyd.

This is book six in Damien Boyd's 'Nick Dixon' series. It starts with a frightening death, underwater in a cave. And that's left hanging until a long way into the book. The real start is the discovery of a dead body in a WW2 pillbox on the side of of a canal in Somerset. It turns out to be a man named Alan Fletcher, and someone has killed him and  made him inhale brick dust before he died. It's bewildering and Nick Dixon and his team get nowhere until they discover that the dead man was a decorated Falklands war veteran and begin to investigate what happened to him in that war. This series is one of the best police procedural series you will find anywhere. It's painstaking in its attention to little details and I find it fascinating. The main characters have lives and partners, Nick lives with one of his former junior officers so she has had to be placed elsewhere within the Somerset police force. But none of this overwhelms the plot of each story and neither are there sob stories and angst and alcoholics and God knows what else. It's ordinary life as we know it, late home from work, both tired, so grabbing takeaways or nipping to the pub to sit by the fire with pie and chips. It does help of course that I know most of the settings of each book because I live in the next county to Somerset and have lived there in the past. It all feels so real. Another terrific instalment of this excellent series. I'm waaay behind, this one was written in 2016, so this year I want to read more and catch up a bit as there are now fifteen books!

So there you go, I couldn't choose a favourite as I enjoyed them all - all were four or five star reads... that's a good reading month.

I hope you're all keeping well. I say this as several of my blogging pals are not having a good time at the moment with health issues of spouses and bereavements. And I don't know if anyone remembers the lovely Pat from the blog, Here, There and Everywhere. We became good friends almost from the moment I started my blog in 2007, sharing a love of books and Star Trek and chatting on the phone occasionally. Very sadly, she passed away a couple of weeks ago, her health had not been good for years but it was still a real shock. She will be sadly missed. So please take of yourselves.
 

A couple of titles

So, just catching up on reviews of two books I've read over the past couple of weeks. So far, I seem to be having a decent reading month. I've read just 4 books but all were good. 

First up, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

So, this is book two in the author's 'Children of Time' trilogy. I read the first book eighteen months ago (I actually thought it was much more recently than that) and my review is HERE. I can't see any other way to speak about book two other than to reveal spoilers to book one, so please, if you're going to read this series, STOP HERE! Okay. So, representatives of Kern's world from book one, the spiders, and of the human ark ship from Earth, take off in a space ship to find other planets that were terraformed by humans. They find a planetary system. Flip back a couple of thousand years to read what happened here. Terraformers came from Earth but things go pear-shaped when they lose communication with Earth, a disaster has happened there. The terraformers are on their own. Something then happens to one of them, they think it's a minor accident: it's not. Flip forward again and the spiders and humans are approaching the system with no idea what they'll find. What they find is the result of experiments one of the scientists was doing thousands of years ago. Right, so this can easily be read as a standalone but probably best to read Children of Time first. But Children of Ruin is a whole new, very scary, ballgame. I'd say bordering on sci-fi horror, it certainly would be if it were a film and not a book. As I found with book one, it's not the people who stick in my mind it's the world-building and ideas. It's not always easy to follow, and is perhaps overly wordy, but goodness me, I look back at it and see a fantastic book. What an amazing writer Adrian Tchaikovsky is. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads as it wasn't quite the book that Children of Time was, it's a 4.5 really. But if you like a bit of hard science fiction, you can't really go wrong with this series. I've just checked Fantastic Fiction for the title of the next book, Children of Memory, only to find this is not a trilogy at all, book four is due out in 2026! Excellent. 

Lastly, Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman.  

It's 1798 and Pandora 'Dora' Blake wants to be a designer of exotic jewellry. She lives with her uncle in a shop of antiquities that used to belong to her parents. They were archaeologists who died when Dora was eight and since then the famous shop has gone downhill, her awful uncle filling the shop with tat. There's no tat in the basement though, and when a beautiful vase is delivered and goes straight down there, Dora decides to investigate surrepticiously. She's aided by Edward Lawrence, a stranger who comes to see her one day. He's trying to gain entrance to the Society of Antiquaries and wants her help. Dora realises that the two can help each other in achieving their dreams, but not how much danger this is going to place both of them in. So this is a sort of Gothic mystery combined with a bit of Greek myth, based on the story of Pandora opening the box etc. It wasn't quite as myth based as I was hoping, I felt the link between Dora and the vase was not fully explored. It was very good on London of the late 1790s, the squalor and the crime in particular and how hard it was for 'everyone' to survive let alone for a woman to try to get a foothold in what was considered the male preserve of jewellry designing. Hermes, the magpie, was an interesting touch. The uncle was a bit 'too' awful, verging on being a caricature. All in all, I did enjoy this one but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, rounded up from 3.5 as I'm more inclined to do that than round down. 

So, my current read is this:

 I absolutely love an academic mystery so this is a 'must read' for me. Martin Edwards has done a fantastic job of collecting together an excellent clutch of short stories based in schools and colleges. I'm three quarters through and will review it when I've finished. 

A couple of quick reviews

 

So we've had 'No-mow May' here in the UK and that's my excuse for one of my lawns looking like this. In actuality my gardener, who cuts the grass, couldn't do it last week as it was raining too hard. And if I'm honest, I absolutely love how cheerful this looks and how many insects and birds it attracts. These are not dandelions, as some people think, but something called Catsear (Hyphochaeris radicata) and they're what happens when you don't keep a perfect lawn. I have lots of lovely clover too and the bees 'really' love that! Important to keep them happy these days. 

Anyway, this is a book blog not a horticultural, 'Monty Don' fangirl page. :-)

My first book for June (started in May in fact) was A Book of Bones by John Connolly. Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time knows how much I adore this series. This is book 17 and my interest is not flagging at all. 

So this is basically a continuation of book 16, The Woman in the Woods, which I see I did not review properly. In that, an individual named Quayle wreaked havoc all over the US, but ultimately in Maine, looking for the missing pages to an Atlas which, when complete, will alter the world - and not in a good way. Quayle returns to London after these events and it's there that Parker, Louis and Angel head after a stop-over in The Netherlands to gather information. In the UK, the body of a woman has been found in an abandoned village near Hadrian's Wall, connected to The Familists from book 16. The police are investigating and realise that there's a connection to other bodies discovered all over England. When Parker arrives in the UK is he going to be a help or a hindrance to their enquiries? This was 675 pages long but as usual with John Connolly, it didn't feel like it at all: I whipped through it. It's different to others in the series in that it's half police procedural as Connolly concentrates a lot on the Northumberland police trying to trace the woman's killer. There are also little 'weird' stories inserted into the text, from the past. This worked very well for me and added to the mystery of what The Fractured Atlas is. What Parker actually is - and Louis and Angel - is also known to readers of this series, oddly one of the police officers actually put her finger right on it but was joking when she said it. That was a bit of an 'Oh' moment. I've just discovered that there's more about the history of this 'Atlas' in Connolly's second book of short stories, Night Music, which I own but haven't read. I shall be doing that thing very soon. I must add that this is not a series for people who don't want to read about people dying in nasty ways. And Connolly does not mind who he kills. It's not quite Game of Thrones, but not everyone survives! Just sayin'. I plan to try and catch up with this series this year, I have five left to read as book 22 came out last month. 

Next, Death Rites by Sarah Ward. I thought the author was new to me but when I checked I realised I'd read In Bitter Chill, the first of her Peak District series about DC Childs. Death Rites is the first book in her 'Carla James' series, set in New England. 

Carla James is an English archaeologist from Oxford. She lost her husband recently and is looking for a change of scenery to take her mind off her loss. She gets a position at an elite university in the town of Jericho, 'somewhere' in New England. The body of a woman is found in a country area outside the town. It's surrounded by various objects or artifacts and Carla is called in for her opinion on these. None of it makes a lot of sense to her but she can't resist continuing to look into the murder, and that's when she starts to find connections with a handful of other killings and suicides that have happened over the last few years: the connections could lean towards the occult. The police actively try to dissuade her from investigating but their antipathy does nothing but spur her on. But who, on the university campus can she trust? And why won't the police listen to her? So this was very well written and pacey - a pageturner so I read it quickly. I think I saw the series mentioned by a blogging friend but I'm afraid I can't remember who. I found Carla a bit annoying at first, possibly too pushy and overstepping the mark at times. Then I saw how obstructive the police were being and I started to get annoyed that they couldn't see what was in front of them... and it didn't help that they were not pleasant people. At one stage Carla does not know who to turn to for help and I have to confess to thinking, 'Call Charlie Parker!' The setting of a New England university town felt realistic, we drove through a few when we were over there at various times. But I do wish the author had said which state it was in. There is apparently a Jericho in Vermont and it looks lovely, but too small to have a uni. Anyway, an interesting start to a new series. Will I read more? I'm not sure. It was good enough but I have a 'lot' of books on my tbr mountain, so we'll see. 

So now I have to choose a new book... think about me at this difficult time.

Books read in May

I can't believe it's almost the end of May, before we know it we'll be halfway through the year. Scary. I'm very behind with book reviews, so I shall do a quick catch-up in this post and see if I can keep rather more up to date in June. Hoho.

I read six books in May and these are they:

20. The Shell House Detectives - Emylia Hall

21. The Man in the Dark - Susan Scarlett

22. A Thousand Feasts - Nigel Slater. A collection of memoir 'essays' of his travels, mainly concerning food. Japan features heavily but also Scandinavia, the Middle-East. Beautiful, lyrical writing as always. 

23. Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh.   

This was an excellent sci-fi yarn, set on a large asteroid type rock, Gaea, where a group of refugees have taken up residence and created a warrior training society. They want to avenge the destruction of Earth by the Majoda who have now formed a confederation of planets. We follow Kyr, a female Amazonian type fighter, leader of her section and one of the best fighters on Gaea as she waits to see where she is assigned after training. What happens is a shock and she follows others who abandon Gaea, only to discover that nothing is as it seemed. This was very good, but it does divide the crowd a bit on Goodreads, and I can see why. Kyr is a bit one-dimensional, but she's been brain-washed since birth so... I liked the ideas and world building and the aliens. I thought it was a very solid sci-fi yarn.

 

24. Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters

Oddly enough, this one features another blonde-haired Amazonian lead female character in the shape of one, Vicky Bliss. She's an art historian come adventurer, sort of a female Indianna Jones figure. There's a long lost cabinet/sculpture thing by a Reformation artist to be found, so her and her boyfriend decide on a competition to be the first to find it. Off they pop to a castle in Germany and all kinds of weird shenanigans ensue. I only gave this a 3 star rating on Goodreads because it grated quite a lot with me. I know it was written in 1973 so a bit of latitude is required but the constant 'which is better? men or women?'  got quite annoying and I didn't care for the way Vicky and her boyfriend treated or spoke to each other. And why didn't they work together? It didn't make sense. There was a decent sense of Germany and its villages and castles so that was a plus. But in all honesty, I was disappointed by this one. The author is more famous for her Amelia Peabody books, of which I've read a couple - they're okay but I never felt the need to read all of them. I supsect this author is just not for me.

25. Sisters Making Mischief - Maddie Please.

A complete change for my last book of May. A contemporary fiction offering that centres on Joy Chandler. Joy is newly divorced and in her sixties, Hubby having left her for his secretary. He was a piece of work quite frankly and the family, a son and daughter and their various wives, husbands and kiddies, are not much better. Joy provides a wonderful Christmas for them... it's a disaster because they're so awful... so Joy ups and goes to France to visit her sister, Isabel, in Brittany. Here she starts to relax, help out a bit with gites and the antiques, meets new people and realises she's better off without Hubby, which we all could've told her from the start. This was a great deal of fun with nice characterisation and a really good sense of rural Britany and its people. Eugenie, the French, hypochondriac mother-in-law was a hoot and the French love interest bearing a resemblance to Harrison Ford didn't harm either. Enjoyed this a lot. 

 

So actually, that was not a bad reading month. Out of six books, just one I felt was a bit average and slightly disappointing, the rest were all very readable, particularly The Shell House Detectives, The Man in the Dark and Sisters Making Mischief. So nothing to complain about there. 

My current read is this:

 

This is book number 17 of John Connolly's wonderfully creepy and weird Charlie Parker series. Most of the books take place in the USA but the action this time has moved to The Netherlands and then the UK, up near the border of England and Scotland beside Hadrian's Wall. And it doesn't disappoint. John Connolly continues to be my favourite author and his Charlie Parker books my favourite series. 

I hope you all had a good May and are keeping well and reading lots of good books! 

 

Catching up

I seem to be in a perpetual state of 'Catching up' so it's nothing new that I'm three books behind with my reviews. Let's see if I can be brief for once. (Hint: nope, didn't manage it, 'bout time I stopped kidding myself I can do it. )

First up, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson.

Constance Haverhill is currently on the south coast of England, acting as a companion to the mother of her previous employer, a Lady of the Manor type, who kept Constance's mother close by as they had been close friends for years. Sadly, her mother has now died. Constance has been running the estate farm but now her brother is back from WW1 with a wife and Constance, for several reasons, is not required. So here she is, temporarily in a seaside town with no idea what her future holds. Enter Poppy Wirrall who has been riding a motorbike during the war and doesn't want to give it up. So she's starting a business ferrying women about the town in a sidecar attached to her motorbike. It's not long before Constance is involved with Poppy and her business and that of trying to entice Poppy's brother, who lost his leg in the war, to help restore an old aircraft. I think I first heard about this book on Constance from Staircase Wit's blog. It was one of her favourite books from last year (I think) and I can see why as it's a delight. Yes, it's full of get-up-and-go and fun ideas. But it also has serious issues as a theme, that of men returning from the war and needing their old jobs back, or new ones. And it was really hard for the women too because they had learnt independence and liked being useful. And some, like Constance, were cast adrift with nowhere to go and no prospects: she needed a job to live. The book is full of interesting, very individual characters whose lives and futures I became very caught up in. It maybe overdid the female angle just a smidgeon but I could forgive this quirky book that because it was so well written and 'fun'. 

Next, The Shell House Detectives by Emylia Hall.

Ally Bright, a woman in her sixties, has a beach house on the coast of Cornwall. She's been a widow for a year, her husband, Bill, was a retired policeman, still rather immersed in the community, whereas Ally liked to live a more solitary life as an artist. Her peace is shattered one night when a young man, in quite an agitated state, knocks on her door looking for her husband. Feeling unable to help him, Ally sends him away. Next day, ex-policeman, Jayden, is one of the people to find the young man at the bottom of a cliff, barely alive. Did he jump or was he pushed? Ally, feeling partly responsible, and Jayden, missing his policing days, set about finding out. This was so good. For my money, it wasn't purely a murder mystery story. The found family aspect, the concentration on the characters, what their lives were and why they were as they were, made this more of contemporary fiction book with a strong element of crime. I would also not put this into the 'cosy' crime genre. What I also loved about the book was its very strong sense of place. I know the area where it's set, the north Cornish coast, not up near the Devon border, but right down in the Penzance/St. Ives area of West Penwith. As someone from that area, it was the perfect setting. I already have book 2 on my Kindle, it takes place at Chistmas so I may well leave it until November or December to read that.

Lastly, The Man in the Dark by Susan Scarlett, written in 1940 by the author, Noel Streatfeild, of Ballet Shoes fame.

Marda Mayne is 26, and the eldest sibling of a GP and his wife. Until now she's worked as a dispenser in her father's surgery but finances suddenly become tight and Marda decides to find another paying job. She's taken on by one, James Longford, as a companion to his 17 year old American ward, Shirley, who is about to come and live with him, having lost her father. James was blinded in a racing car accident and has withdrawn into himself, becoming a recluse as he doesn't want to be a burden or to have his friends pity him. It doesn't take sparky Marda long to realise that things in this mausoleum of a household need to change and with Shirley's help the two set about their mission to bring light and joy back into the house. So, this was a delightful, undemanding read, no mention of the war so I presume it wasn't actually written in 1940 but possibly a few years earlier. The whole point of the story was that of bringing James back into the real world and that was well done. I liked Marda and her sparkiness and common sense, Shirley was a trifle more annoying, especially her rather overt attentions to James but her heart was in the right place, unlike James' awful sister. This is a lovely, gentle, amusing read, republished by Dean Street Press, that I would recommend to anyone feeling the need for that kind of thing at the moment. At £2.99 the Kindle versions of these republished books are very reasonable and I have quite a collection now. 

I was going to say that that's me up to date but I've actually also just finished Nigel Slater's new book of memoir type essays, A Thousand Feasts, mainly about food, but I'll talk about that another time as this post is long enough. I'll just leave you with this bookish quote from him, which made me laugh:

 Annotations tell a story too. My aunt put a simple pencil tick in every Mills and Boon romance she borrowed from the library so she could spot those she'd read. An entire literary lifetime of stories of 'doctor falls in love with nurse'. I have a cookery book, picked up in a charming shop near Kew gardens, that is annotated by the previous owner. A recipe for 'Moist fruit cake' comes with the grumpy addition, 'No it isn't'.

I hope you're all well and finding as many good books to read as I am. :-)

I have been reading...

That header is telling a slight porky as I've not been reading a huge amount this month at all. Being busy, plus having family visiting has curtailed my reading a bit, but I do have three books to report on, one fiction, two non-fiction.

First up, City of Ruins by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. 

This is book 2 in the author's 'Diving' science-fiction series. The main protagonist is a woman known only as 'Boss' who dives abandoned space-craft wrecks in outer space. In book 1, Diving into the Wreck, the chance discovery of a Dignity ship from centuries ago, with lost technology from that era, changes the course of Boss's life. She's now running her own company investigating occurrances of this lost tech. and this takes her and a motley crew of people to the city of Vaycehn to look at something called 'death holes' which suddenly appear and swallow whole neighbourhoods. In order to investigate properly they must keep certain things secret from the authorities, such as the technology they suspect is somewhere deep in the newly discovered cave system under the city. So, if anything this was even better than book 1 and that got a 5 star rating from me. I loved all the cave explorations, what they discovered, the startling thing that happened and the results of that. I'm not giving much away you'll notice but this was seriously good and I'm so pleased to have discovered this series via Tracy.

Next, The Dream of Rome by Boris Johnson.

I've had this on my tbr shelf for about ten years, possibly longer (it was first published in 2007), and as I was looking for background books for my Latin studies, this jumped out at me as I loved Johnson's book on Winston Churchill. The Dream of Rome is like a book-long essay to be honest, exploring the Roman Empire, how they managed to maintain the peace for hundreds of years and why it came to an end. It starts with the first emperor, Augustus, and outlines what a piece of work he was: that was a real eye-opener although my Latin tutor had previously told me that he was a very ambivilent character. Fascinating stuff. Johnson's writing style suits me very well as he's funny and writes in a very accessible manner. I spent a lot of time laughing and I learnt a lot. I will say that this is a good 'starter' book for Roman studies, it's probably not much use to anyone who already knows a lot, I suspect there's not much new in it but I found Johnson's opinions interesting, particularly his way of comparing the Roman Empire to the EU. Some things I agreed with, some I did not, but I do like to listen to and consider 'all' points of view. A more academic viewpoint on the Romans would be the wonderful Mary Beard and I will be moving on to something by her soon, there's quite a lot of choice! And I would really like to read a deeper biography of Augustus, so must look to see what's available.

Lastly, a lovely friend sent me Traces by Patricia Wiltshire as she knew I shared her fascination with how murders are solved.

The author is a palynologist who didn't start out that way but always had a love of the natural world, especially plants. She was born in Wales to rather dysfunctional parents but adored her grandmother to bits. She did allsorts, which I now forget, before ending up qualified to help the police with murder enquiries. Palynology is the scientific study of pollen, spores, fungi, that sort of thing. It seems none of us can go anywhere at all without picking up evidence of where we've been, often in the shape of plant pollen on ourselves or in soil on our shoes, in the car and so on. So when someone is murdered, the study of the area where they're found versus what kind of plant pollen they have on them is vital in deciding where they were killed and who might have done the deed. I found the cases she described quite fascinating... true crime sort of thing. The biographical stuff was ok by me (some on Goodreads did not like that), I too was very attached to my grandmother so I could identify with that. I did find the author a bit prone to waffle, a bit too much repetition, but all in all this was a very interesting read and I'm glad to have increased my scientific knowledge just a little bit, which is not difficult as there's so little to begin with. :-)

So, the two books I'm currently reading are these:

 

Both are absolutely delightful. 

And this is the book themed jigsaw puzzle my daughter and I worked on over the Easter, 2,000 pieces and huge fun to do. Click on it for a clearer view.

 

So I hope you're all keeping well, enjoying spring if you're in the northern hemisphere, autumn if in the southern, and finding lots of lovely books to read.

Books read in March

Spring has definitely sprung here in the UK and because of all the rain we had in the winter everything is green and the spring flowers, especially the primroses, are really lovely this year.

 

I had what I would call a 'fun' reading month. Aside from one book, everything I read was enjoyable in an easy reading manner. Sometimes that's just the ticket.

10. A Mudlarking Year - Lara Maiklem 

11. Stone Maidens - Lloyd Devereux Richards 

12. Lady of Quality - Georgette Heyer 

13. The Aeneid - Virgil. I've been reading this for a few weeks and finished it a week or two ago. I'm not going to try to review it as I wouldn't have a clue where to start. But Virgil was a Roman writer who, it's thought, wrote this epic as a tribute to Emporer Augustus who was 'A piece of work' as we say these days. It charts the journey of Aeneas, after his defeat at Troy, to the shores of Italy where Rome was founded. It was an interesting read for various reasons but I found all the battles and descriptions a bit tedious. At some stage I will go back and reread Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey but not just yet. I am however enjoying this foray into the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome to connect with my Latin studies.

14. Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

This series is set thousands of years into Earth's future where humans are out among the stars. 'Boss' is a female who dives wrecks, not under the sea, but out in deep space: she's definitely a bit of a maverick. She lost her mother when she was a child, to a mysterious room known as the Room of Lost Souls. Boss was with her but somehow survived and no one knows how. She comes across a new wreck, an Earth ship thousands of years old, but it should not be in this part of space, it should actually be impossible for it to be where it is. So how is it here? So I have Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery to thank for this wonderful discovery. I thought I was up on sci-fi authors but I'd never heard of this series, or this author. This was top-notch science fiction writing, great characters - I liked Boss and her relationship with her mad scientist, ambivilent father a lot. The world building is excellent and the menace, because there is one, is so well depicted it actually scared me. That's good writing for you. I'm already halfway through book 2, City of Ruins, and if anything, it's even better. 

Tracy's review is HERE 

15. The Marriage Season by Jane Dunn.

Sybella Lovatt is a widow with a young son, her husband having died in the Peninsula War. She has a younger sister, Lucie, who is stunningly beautiful and Bella is determined to find her a good marriage. Off they trot to London to stay with Lucie's elderly godmother so that she can have a proper coming out. Shenanigans ensue of course, including various suitors, not only for Lucie but for Bella, who wasn't even looking. Shades of Sense and Sensibility in this one although Lucie is nowhere near as daft as Marianne and Bella not as self-sacrificing as Eleanor. It's more similar to several Georgette Heyers but, although not badly written at all, not quite on that level. It suffers a little from something I complain about a lot, too much intelligent speech and thoughts coming from very young children, in this case a three year old boy. I also thought the villain in it was too much of a cartoon character. All that said, it was fun, especially the interactions between Bella and Mr. Brabazon, and there were some decent period details. I have a couple more of the author's books on my Kindle so will read more at some stage.

So, that was my March reading month. Six books read, one non-fiction, five fiction, bit of a motley mix, as is usual with me, but no disappointments among them and that's as much as you can ask for really.

I hope you're all keeping well and have some good reading plans for the month of April.