This Week in Books – 01-05-24

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

A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words.

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It’s been another busy week of reading! I finished Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson, which I really enjoyed. In a slight change of plan, I then moved onto The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, and The Fervor by Alma Katsu.

A ghost has no substance, but it has power – and presence – and it can appear in alternative forms. In the metaverse, we are all alternative forms. The Dead will join us.

Our lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips.

We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs.

We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect.

To live amongst us.
To remind us.
To tempt us.
To take their revenge.

These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten… and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

A.J. Fikry, the grumpy owner of Island Books, is going through a hard time: his bookshop is failing, he has lost his beloved wife, and his prized possession – a rare first edition book has been stolen. Over time, he has given up on people, and even the books in his store, instead of offering solace, are yet another reminder of a world that is changing too rapidly.

But one day A.J. finds two-year-old Maya sitting on the bookshop floor, with a note attached to her asking the owner to look after her. His life – and Maya’s – is changed forever.

Gabrielle Zevin’s enchanting novel is a love letter to the world of books – an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko’s husband’s enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American-born: They were Japanese, and therefore considered a threat by the American government.

Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. What starts as a minor cold quickly becomes spontaneous fits of violence and aggression, even death. And when a disconcerting team of doctors arrive, nearly more threatening than the illness itself, Meiko and her daughter team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate, and it becomes clear to them that something more sinister is afoot: a demon from the stories of Meiko’s childhood, hell-bent on infiltrating their already strange world.

Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores a supernatural threat beyond what anyone saw coming: the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it’s too late.

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I’ve only just started it, but my current read is Exiles by Jane Harper.

A mother disappears from a busy festival on a warm spring night.

Her baby lies alone in the pram, waiting for a return that never comes.

A year later, Kim Gillespie’s absence still casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather to welcome a new addition to the family.

Joining the celebrations on a rare break from work is federal investigator Aaron Falk, who begins to suspect that all is not as it seems.

As he looks into Kim’s case, long-held secrets and resentments begin to come to the fore, secrets that show that her community is not as close as it appears.

Falk will have to tread carefully if he is to expose the dark fractures at its heart, but sometimes it takes an outsider to get to the truth…

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My next read might be Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.

On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate New York City jazz bar trying to stretch three dollars as far as it will go.

But a chance encounter with the handsome banker at the next table changes everything, opening the door to the upper echelons of New York society and a glittering new social circle. Plunged into a dizzy world of cocktail parties, sprawling mansions and glamorous magazine offices, Katey soon learns that there are rules to play by and riches can turn to rags in the trip of a heartbeat…

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And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎