A bit late with this post, playing catch up with reading, reviews and blog posts. Despite time off over Christmas, that time was overtaken by life and I’m finally getting sorted (all prices quoted where at time of purchase).

Review Copies

 One Little Mistake by Emma Curtis via NetGalley due 23/2

Vicky Seagrave is blessed: three beautiful children, a successful, doting husband, great friends and a job she loves. She should be perfectly happy.

When she risks everything she holds dear on a whim, there’s only person she trusts enough to turn to.

But Vicky is about to learn that one mistake is all it takes; that if you’re careless with those you love, you don’t deserve to keep them . . .

 

Kindle Purchases

The Resurrection of Frederic Debreu by Alex Marsh (99p)

Who wants a respectable retirement anyway?

Not Ted Prescott, genial visitor to Mailliot le Bois, here on an impulsive mission to seek out his past whilst heroically diminishing the sleepy French town’s stocks of red wine.

But once the locals discover Ted’s authentic renditions of regional hero Frederic Debreu’s songs, life is suddenly not so straightforward for the stage-shy Derbyshire guitar-maker.

Reluctantly persuaded that he might help put their town back on the map, Ted finds himself billed as humble French farm labourer ‘Edouard Prescote’. Nonplussed as his self-conscious performances strike a chord, Ted finds himself drawn into a web of well-intentioned deceit that he finds increasingly hard to unravel.

Haunted by the loss of his missing brother, and with the hopes of an entire community riding on him, it soon becomes clear that there are other, more important things that he hasn’t mentioned to his loved ones…

 

Mishaps in Millrise by Tilly Tennant (99p)

Phoebe Clements’ life was a bit of a mess. Her boyfriend was killed in a freak accident, and then she lost her job just before Christmas. But when she wished for a new start, it came in the form of Jack, a gorgeous man she met in the grotto of a drunken Santa.

Five months on and their relationship is going from strength to strength: Phoebe’s just landed her dream job at Hendry’s toy store, and Jack’s little daughter adores her. But Phoebe is convinced her happiness can’t last, and when life decides to stamp all over her newfound luck, it seems she might be right…

There’s the small matter of Jack’s mother and her one-woman vendetta against Phoebe; there’s Jack’s troublesome brother, Archie, who moves in and turns their lives upside down; not to mention Hendry’s going into financial freefall, and Adam, the boss’s son, who seems determined to break up the happy couple so that he can claim Phoebe for himself.

Could things possibly get any worse? Phoebe is about to discover that if they can, they probably will… Can she turn things around, or will she lose sight of everything and everyone that matters in the chaos?

 

The Inheritance of Powder by Hilary Standing (99p)

Tired of life and disillusioned with his work, economist Carl Simonovsky would rather stay at home tending his beloved trilliums than work on yet another aid project pretending he knows how to solve complex dilemmas faced by poor countries. When he reluctantly finds himself in Bangladesh, dealing with a case of mass arsenic poisoning caused by a well-meant aid programme, he soon discovers that ignorance of the subject is the least of his problems.

Rumours of scandal and corruption surround the international agency that hired him. When Carl meets Zafirah, the passionate leader of a local grassroots organisation and campaigner on arsenic, he realises he cannot ignore the rumours and must dig deeper. But as the two of them grow closer, it becomes clear that they are on a collision course in relation to the arsenic crisis. If their relationship is to have a future, both face painful compromises, and Carl has to make a decision that will change the course of his personal and professional life for ever.

 

Dust by Mark Thomson (99p)

“Early in life, my grandfather told me that only three things were certain: birth, death and time. And time only ticked one way; it went forward and never back. It came to be a recurring wish with me, the desire to turn back the clock, to undo what I had done. Always wishing for the impossible, my feet stuck firm in the molasses of the present, unable to shrug off decisions I had made and their unforeseen or disregarded consequences.”

J.J. Walsh and Tony ‘El Greco’ Papadakis are inseparable. Smoking Kents out on an abandoned cannery dock, and watching gulls sway on rusting buoys in the sea, they dream of adventure…a time when they can act as adults. The day they’ll see the mighty Pacific Ocean.

Set in small-town New Jersey in the 1960s, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, Dust follows the boys through the dry heat of a formative summer. They face religious piety and its murderous consequences, alcohol, girls, sex, loss, tragedy and ultimately the tiny things that combine to make life what it is for the two friends – a great adventure.

But it’s a road trip through the heart of southern America with J.J.’s father that truly reveals a darker side to life – the two halves of a divided nation, where wealth, poverty and racial bigotry collide. This beautifully written debut novel would not be out of place alongside the work of Steinbeck and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust.

At turns funny, and at others heart-achingly sad, their story unfolds around the honest and frequently irreverent observations of two young people trying to grow up fast in a world that is at times confusing, and at others seen with a clarity only the young may possess.

 

Waves by Jared A Carne (99p)

Alex is stuck. Stuck in Essex. Stuck in his childhood home. Stuck in a job he hates. The relationship he’d been counting on all these years has finally fallen apart. He’s run out of things to hope for.

Anxious, uncertain and totally sober, Alex is dragged to the Outer Hebrides by his long-suffering friend, James. Somewhere between the mountains and the sea, Alex is desperate to find something to ignite a spark of life in him again.

Through castles, ceilidhs, bothies, lochs, vast beaches and tiny boats, chance meetings and old friends, Alex has to learn that maybe taking responsibility doesn’t mean the end of feeling free.

 

Lost in Static by Christina Philippou (99p)

Sometimes growing up is seeing someone else’s side of the story. Four stories. One truth. Whom do you believe?

Callum has a family secret. Yasmine wants to know it. Juliette thinks nobody knows hers. All Ruby wants is to reinvent herself.

They are brought together by circumstance, torn apart by misunderstanding. As new relationships are forged and confidences are broken, each person’s version of events is coloured by their background, beliefs and prejudices. And so the ingredients are in place for a year shaped by lust, betrayal, and violence…

 

The Cursing Stone By Adrian Harvey (99p)

The beautiful new novel from the bestselling author of Being Someone.

Fergus Buchanan has led a charmed life: a doting family, a loving sweetheart and the respect of his neighbours. All is as it should be and nothing stands between him and the limitless happiness that is his destiny.

But then he is sent from his remote island to retrieve the cursing stone, and his adventures in the wild world beyond cause him to question everything he thought he knew. Succeed or fail, nothing will be the same again.

This modern quest is a story of courage, duty and revenge, of family ties and loves lost and found, of dragons and postcodes. And ultimately the journey we all take to find our true selves…

Kindle Freebies

Stained by Abda Khan

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Gone the Next by Ben Rehder

The Towers by Natalie Hames

The Airshipmen by David Dennington

Amongst Friends by Katherine E Smith