This Week in Books – 03-05-17

This Week in Books is a feature hosted by Lipsy at Lipsyy Lost and Found that allows bloggers to share:

• What they’ve recently finished reading
• What they are currently reading
• What they are planning to read next

The last book I finished reading was Mister Memory by Marcus Sedgwick – I really enjoyed this tale of a most unusual protagonist:

A dazzling literary mystery from prizewinning author Marcus Sedgwick, for fans of Scarlett Thomas, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Patrick Suskind.

In Paris, in the year 1899, Marcel Després is arrested for the murder of his wife and transferred to Salpêtrière asylum. And so the story might have stopped.

But this is no ordinary patient: Marcel Després, Mister Memory, is a man who cannot forget. And it is no ordinary case: the hurried cover-up hints at dark secrets in the shadows.

A policeman and a doctor decide to unravel the mystery…but the answers lie inside Marcel’s head.

And how can he tell what is significant when he remembers every detail of every moment of his entire life?

My current read is These Dividing Walls by Fran Cooper:

One Parisian summer.

A building of separate lives.

All that divides them will soon collapse…

In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building.

Within its walls, people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone, while others wish they did not. A woman with silver-blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill, and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else’s, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers.

Into this courtyard arrives Edward. Still bearing the sweat of a channel crossing, he takes his place in an attic room to wait out his grief.

But in distant corners of the city, as Paris is pulled taut with summer heat, there are those who meet with a darker purpose. As the feverish metropolis is brought to boiling point, secrets will rise and walls will crumble both within and without Number 37…

My next book is likely to be A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, which is my book club’s choice for May:

A vicious fifteen-year-old “droog” is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent film of the same title.

In Anthony Burgess’s nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends’ social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to “redeem” him—the novel asks, “At what cost?”

And that’s my week in books!

What are you reading this week?