Empty
Sign in or create account

What we're reading this month

There’s always a lovely big pile of books to be read in our house, but here’s what we’re actually in the middle of reading right now.

Stone Blind

Natalie Haynes £9.99

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023. In Stone Blind, the instant Sunday Times bestseller, Natalie Haynes brings the infamous Medusa to life as you have never seen her before. 

Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters, Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.

When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.

Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . .

The Marriage Portrait

£9.99

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023A Reese's Bookclub December Pick (2022)An Instant Sunday Times, New York Times and Irish Times Bestseller (August 2022)A Guardian and LitHub Book of the Year (December 2022)'Every bit as evocative and spellbinding as Hamnet. O'Farrell, thank God, just seems to be getting better and better' i newspaper' Her narrative enchantment will wrest suspense and surprise out of a death foretold' Financial Times' Ingenious, inventive, humane, wry, truthful . .

. better than her last novel' Scotsman' Finely written and vividly imagined' Guardian' In O'Farrell's hands, historical detail comes alive' Spectator Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso.

As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here. He intends to kill her. Lucrezia is sixteen years old, and has led a sheltered life locked away inside Florence's grandest palazzo.

Here, in this remote villa, she is entirely at the mercy of her increasingly erratic husband. What is Lucrezia to do with this sudden knowledge? What chance does she have against Alfonso, ruler of a province, and a trained soldier? How can she ensure her survival. The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.

The Wager

David Grann £10.99

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. Â Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile.

This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness.

As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death for whomever the court found guilty could hang. 

Weyward

Emilia Hart £9.99

As seen on BBC’s BETWEEN THE COVERS 

Three women, five centuries, one spellbinding story In the present day, Kate flees a traumatic relationship to the Cumbrian cottage she inherited from her great-aunt; but the cottage hides secrets of its own. In 1942, Violet rebels against her father’s ideas of a ‘proper young lady’ . .until he takes matters into his own hands. In 1619, Altha is on trial for witchcraft, implicated in the gruesome death of a local man.

Three women they tried to cage – but Weyward women belong to the wild. And they cannot be tamed… 

Browse by month …

Loading