It’s May already – where have the first four months of this year gone?! As usual, I have a huge list of books piled up that are screaming at me to be read from my very overfull bookshelves. I am definitely a compulsive book buyer, and cannot resist a book with a pretty cover. I also have a habit of pre-ordering books from my favourite authors without even reading the blurbs! I have yet to be disappointed, but it’s definitely an expensive pastime. Here is a list of the books I am hoping to read in May. However, It might well extend into June… I very rarely stick to any TBR lists that I set myself, so definitely take this with a pinch of salt!

Love Notes for Freddie

Marnie FitzPatrick is a reclusive sixth-former from Hertfordshire with a dysfunctional family, a penchant for Pythagoras’ Theorem and an addiction to doughnuts and gin. Julie Crewe is a disillusioned maths teacher who lives vicariously through the girls she teaches, yet who once danced barefoot through Central Park with a man called Jo she has never been able to forget.

This one isn’t actually due to be released until the beginning of June, but I am so excited to read it that I just had to include it. I have read both The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, and absolutely fell in love with Eva Rice’s writing style. Her books are addictive, eccentric, fantastically vintage and spilling with original characters. I am sure her next book will live up to the hype. The story sounds intriguing and I can’t wait to read it!

Small Wars

What happens when everything a man believes in — the army, his country, his marriage — begins to crumble? Hal Treherne is a young British soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Transferred to Cyprus to defend the colony, Hal takes his wife, Clara, and their daughters with him. But Hal is pulled into atrocities that take him further from Clara, a betrayal that is only one part of a shocking personal crisis to come. Small Wars is a searing, unforgettable novel from a writer at the height of her powers.

So far, I have only read the author’s debut novel, The Outcast, but it was passionate, beautifully written, and harrowing. I absolutely adored it, and have read it several times. I am very excited to read this. I love novels that are set in the Second World War, and this sounds like it will be just as dramatic and hard-hitting as Jones’s debut novel. She seems to have a talent for writing compelling, engrossing narrative that burrows deep under your skin.

The Hourglass Factory

The year is 1912 and London is in turmoil. The suffragette movement is reaching fever pitch but for broke Fleet Street tomboy Frankie George, just getting by in the cut-throat world of newspapers is hard enough. Sent to interview trapeze artist Ebony Diamond, Frankie finds herself fascinated by the tightly laced acrobat and follows her across London to a Mayfair corset shop that hides more than one dark secret.

Then Ebony Diamond mysteriously disappears in the middle of a performance, and Frankie is drawn into a world of tricks, society columnists, corset fetishists, suffragettes and circus freaks. How did Ebony vanish, who was she afraid of, and what goes on behind the doors of the mysterious Hourglass Factory?

Of course there is nothing I like better than a novel about Suffragettes (Opal Plumstead and Parade’s End are amongst my favourites!) Add in some murder mystery, Fleet Street, and the circus, and it could be a thrilling read. It definitely sounds like it will be a gem, and it looks like it too. It was the beautiful cover that drew me to buying it in the first place. This is a debut novel from Lucy Ribchester so it will be interesting to see if it’s as fast-paced and exciting as the blurb makes out!

The Sun In Her Eyes 

‘Before your mother died, she asked me to tell you something …’
When Amber Church was three, her mother was killed in a car accident. A stranger was at the scene and now, nearly thirty years later, she’s desperate to talk to Amber.
Living in London and not-so-happily married to Ned, Amber is greeted one morning by two pieces of news: she’s to be made redundant from her City job and her beloved father, across the world in Australia where she grew up, has been felled by a stroke. She takes the first plane out to be by his side, leaving Ned uncertain as to when she will return. Reunited with her old friends, Amber is forced to confront her feelings for Ethan Lockwood, the gorgeous, green-eyed man she fell for as a young girl.
And then Amber receives a letter that changes everything …

I can be a bit of a book snob, not proudly, and am an avid hater of the endless stream of ChickLit that graces the shelves of Waterstones. However, someone who does not fit this narrow genre is Paige Toon. Although officially ‘ChickLit’, her books are clever, and a little deeper than the average romantic, love-triangle story that is so common in the genre. I absolutely love her writing style, and the way that she manages to weave her characters in and out of each other’s books. This should definitely be a great, easy, beach read, and she hasn’t disappointed me yet.

Celandine

Set seventy years before The Various, the second book in the trilogy follows the adventures of young Celandine at the onset of the First World War. Having run away from her detested boarding school, Celandine is too afraid to go home in case she is sent back. As she seeks shelter in the Wild Wood near her home, little does she think she will encounter a world where loyalty and independence is fiercely guarded, and where danger lurks in the most unlikely of places. Celandine’s troubled character finds both refuge and purpose among the secret tribes of little people that she alone believes in.

The novels of the Various trilogy are full of mystery, beauty and adventure; this second novel is both page-turning and life-affirming.

This is the second book in the Touchstone trilogy, and I read the first, The Various, almost thirteen years ago, when I was ten years old. I haven’t picked it up for a long time, but even now, I remember how magical and beautiful the story was. Steve Augarde is a fantastic writer. It’s pages were full of beauty and adventure and now they seem to fill me with a deep-seated longing to be a child again. I will definitely re-read The Various before beginning Celandine. It’s a little battered compared to this brand new copy that I received for Christmas from my mother. I must have read it a hell of a lot for her to remember it from over a decade ago. Someone said to me recently: ‘It’s extremely important to keep reading children’s literature. It keeps your heart young.’ And I couldn’t agree more.

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