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.
The last book I finished reading was Little Spark by Jess Kidd which I absolutely loved!
A secret cannot stay locked away forever
Bodkin Bell, orphan, pickpocket and survivor, doesn’t know where she came from, but she knows she’s different. Gaslights flare as she walks past. Cutlery spins. Shocks fly from her fingertips.
For years, she was ‘Little Spark’, the star of an electrifying travelling act – until it went too far and she ended up in a London gaol.
Now she’s been offered a way out. A chance to serve at Point Mote, a vast, desolate house marooned on the misty Kent marshes. There, she will assist a reclusive family of cunning inventors in the creation of automata: miraculous, lifelike machines for which gentlemen collectors will pay handsomely.
But this house of wonders hides mysteries too. As Bodkin starts to question why she is really there, she unearths secrets that have been buried bone-deep for years – and a truth beyond all imagining. One that was never meant to be found.
I’m currently reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.
The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath – one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels.
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.
Enter – if you can bear it – the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
Next might be The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
First published in 1947, The Blank Wall is a rare example of a noir thriller told from a woman’s perspective, in which the dangers of war are mirrored by the quiet, yet equally treacherous, perils of home life.
Lucia Holley, a mother of two living just outside New York with a husband serving in the Navy during World War Two, finds herself unexpectedly entangled in a web of criminal activity when she sets out to protect her 17-year-old daughter from blackmail.
The Blank Wall explores both the everyday realities of life on the American home front – rationing and shortages, writing letters to a husband posted overseas, managing a household – and also the darker, more unexpected challenges that arise in times of crisis.
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding blends the psychological thriller genre with the domestic in a fast-paced crime novel that is both gripping and unsettling.
And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎
Oooh the Wasp Factory! I remember my husband reading that years ago. x