Wishlist Wednesday ~ Waiting on Wednesday

Wishlist Wednesday is hosted by Dani at 'Pen to Paper', and Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill at 'Breaking the Spine'. They are both weekly events that highlight an upcoming release that we are eagerly anticipating, or a book that has been on our wishlists for a while.


My choice today is Secrets of the Tides by Hannah Richell.

Synopsis from 'Goodreads':


Every family has its secrets. Some are small, like telling a white lie or snooping through a private drawer. Others are more serious like infidelity and betrayal. And some secrets are so terrible they must be hidden away in a deep, dark place, for if they ever came to light, they would surely tear a family apart.

The Tides are a family full of secrets. Returning to Clifftops, the rambling family house high up on the Dorset coastline, youngest daughter Dora hopes for a fresh start, for herself and the new life she carries. But can long-held secrets ever really be forgiven? And even if you can forgive, can you ever really learn to love again?

Secrets of the Tides is a compelling family drama with a dark thread of suspense at its heart.


Due to be published by Orion on April 12th 2012.

Wishlist Wednesday ~ Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

'Wishlist Wednesday' is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This week the book I am highlighting that is on my wishlist is: 

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Synopsis from goodreads:

A sophisticated and entertaining debut novel about an irresistible young woman with an uncommon sense of purpose. 

Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.

The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Condé Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.

Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.

This sounds like a wonderful read and I can't wait to read it!

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This week the book I am highlighting that is on my wishlist is Night Waking by Sarah Moss

Synopsis from goodreads:

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.

I haven't read anything by this author before, but I think this one sounds intriguing. Plus I love puffins! :)

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This week the book I am highlighting that is on my wishlist is The Girl on Paper by Guillaume Musso.

Plot summary from amazon.co.uk

Just a few months ago, Tom Boyd was a multi-million selling author living in LA, in love with a world-famous pianist. But after a very public break-up, he's shut himself away, suffering from total writer's block with only drink and drugs for company. One night, a beautiful, naked stranger appears in Tom's house. She claims to be Billie, a character from his novels, who has fallen into the real world because of a printer's error in his latest book. Crazy as her story sounds, Tom comes to see that this must be the real Billie. And she wants to strike a deal with him: if he writes his next novel she can go back to the world of fiction. In return she will help him win back his beloved Aurore. What does he have to lose? Guillaume Musso's latest romantic adventure is a story of friendship, love and the special place that books have in our lives.

I have already read one novel by this author, Where Would I Be Without You, (click the title for my review), and it was an interesting combination of romance, thriller and a little bit of the supernatural, and this one sounds a bit special too. They are translated from the French original.

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This week the book I am highlighting that is on my wishlist is Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. 

I've just finished reading her latest book, The Peach Keeper, and it was a light, magical enjoyable read. I'd like to go back and read her previous novels now, I believe there are three, and this is one of them which appeals to me. 

Synopsis from goodreads:

The women of the Waverley family -- whether they like it or not -- are heirs to an unusual legacy, one that grows in a fenced plot behind their Queen Anne home on Pendland Street in Bascom, North Carolina. There, an apple tree bearing fruit of magical properties looms over a garden filled with herbs and edible flowers that possess the power to affect in curious ways anyone who eats them.


For nearly a decade, 34-year-old Claire Waverley, at peace with her family inheritance, has lived in the house alone, embracing the spirit of the grandmother who raised her, ruing her mother's unfortunate destiny and seemingly unconcerned about the fate of her rebellious sister, Sydney, who freed herself long ago from their small town's constraints. Using her grandmother's mystical culinary traditions, Claire has built a successful catering business -- and a carefully controlled, utterly predictable life -- upon the family's peculiar gift for making life-altering delicacies: lilac jelly to engender humility, for instance, or rose geranium wine to call up fond memories. Garden Spells reveals what happens when Sydney returns to Bascom with her young daughter, turning Claire's routine existence upside down. With Sydney's homecoming, the magic that the quiet caterer has measured into recipes to shape the thoughts and moods of others begins to influence Claire's own emotions in terrifying and delightful ways.


As the sisters reconnect and learn to support one another, each finds romance where she least expects it, while Sydney's child, Bay, discovers both the safe home she has longed for and her own surprising gifts. With the help of their elderly cousin Evanelle, endowed with her own uncanny skills, the Waverley women redeem the past, embrace the present, and take a joyful leap into the future. 

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This week the book I am highlighting that is on my wishlist is Season of Light by Katharine McMahon. This is her new novel, coming out in the UK in November this year I think. She is one of my favourite authors, I've read many of her previous novels, so I'm very much looking forward to this one.

Synopsis from Goodreads:


Season of Light begins in 1788, in the heady days just before the French revolution, when Paris is fizzing with new ideas about liberty and equality. Asa Ardleigh, the impressionable 19-year-old daughter of a country squire, has traveled to the city with her older sister, Philippa, and Philippa's new husband. In Paris, they are introduced to the literary salon of Madame de Genlis. It is in this salon that Asa meets, and falls in love with, a dashing intellectual and idealist, Didier Paulin. Their affair is curtailed when Asa is forced to return to England, but they continue to write as the storm clouds gather over France and war with England seems imminent. Meanwhile back at home, no one knows of Asa's liaison. Asa's middle sister, Georgina, has met Harry Shackleford, the most eligible man in London that season, and to whom the Ardleigh estate is entailed. After the death of their mother, the Ardleigh girls' father began to drink heavily and now the estate is nearly bankrupt. In Shackleford, Georgina sees not only a fortuitous marriage for her sister, but also the solution to their financial woes. However Asa's accomplishments need some polishing. Georgina therefore employs Madame de Rusigneux, a French Marquise. Asa soon discovers there is more to this woman than meets the eye.

Wishlist Wednesday - on Friday!

I'm belatedly taking part in a weekly blog hop today, Wishlist Wednesday, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

My chosen wishlist book this week is One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde.

I have been reading his novels for quite a few years, and really enjoy his 'Thursday Next' and 'Nursery Crimes' series', and also the recent novel 'Shades of Grey'. I think this one is the latest featuring the character of literary detective Thursday Next and her adventures in the 'Book World'. The previous novels are very entertaining and clever, with Thursday jumping in and out of classic fiction books and so on. They are a nice change for me as I don't read much in this kind of genre, but his novels are an exception. I hope this one will be just as good. It is out in hardback now I believe, so I will keep it on my wishlist and perhaps buy the paperback if I haven't read it by then. 

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site and join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

This time I've chosen The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It's been on my wishlist a little while. It seems to be causing a bit of a stir in the book world, I keep hearing and reading about this novel everywhere, email newsletters from bookshops and book websites, and on other lots of book blogs I follow, and my interest was piqued! 


I'm interested in it even though it is, from what I've read, more along the lines of magic and fantasy, and maybe therefore sounds a little outside the sort of book I normally read. I think it will challenge my perceptions and expand my book horizons a bit. So this one is on my wishlist and I will think about buying it in the run up to Christmas, once I am through with some more review books and books I've been hoping to read for ages...!

Wishlist Wednesday

I'm taking part in a new weekly blog hop today, hosted by Dani at Pen to Paper. Visit the site to join in.

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

I've chosen The English German Girl by Jake Wallis Simons. It's been on my wishlist for a couple of months at least, and I think I'm probably going to give in and buy it fairly soon. 

I think it'll be especially interesting because it features similarities to novels I've read recently: the Kindertransport aspect, as also featured in Far To Go by Alison Pick, and the child relocated to England during WWII and trying to save their parents, as also featured in The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons. So it definitely sounds up my street anyway!