Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

• 2nd May: The First 10 Books I Randomly Grabbed from My Shelf
• 9th May: Books I recommend most to others
• 16th May: Things Getting in the Way of Reading
• 23rd May: Things That Make Me Instantly Want to Read a Book (Auto-Buy Authors)
• 30th May: Things That Make Me Instantly NOT Want to Read a Book
• 6th June: Books or Covers that Feel/Look Like Summer
• 13th June: Bookish Wishes
• 20th June: Books on My Summer 2023 To-Read List

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This is in some ways the second part – the companion piece – to last week’s list. Having shared the books I already have that I am intending to read in the coming weeks and months, these are the upcoming releases that I am excited about and which are likely to add to that over flowing TBR pile!

I love the chance to geekily nose around and research these upcoming releases – to find out unexpectedly that our favourite authors are releasing a new book, or that something completely unknown is coming out that grips you by its cover, its premise or its blurb…

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July 2023:

Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 18th July

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys’ club running the film industry in ’90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, even though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbour is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he has a way to change their lives – even if his tales of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán might just find out that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies . . .

I have loved most things that Moreno-Garcia publishes from Mexican Gothic to The Daughter of Dr Moreau… and I’m not at all bitter that I was turned down for this on NetGalley!

August 2023

Family Lore, Elizabeth Acevedo, 10th August

The Marte women are preparing for a gathering that will change their lives forever

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides to host her own living wake – bringing together her family and community to celebrate her long life – her sisters Matilde, Pastora and Camila are concerned. What has she foreseen?

But Flor isn’t the only one with a secret. Matilde has tried to hide the extent of her husband’s infidelity for years, and now must confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora – always on a mission to solve her sisters’ problems – needs to come to terms with her past. And Camila, the youngest sibling, has decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted. Alongside their struggles, the next generation of Marte women face their own tumult of family obligations, infertility, and heartache.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the intertwining stories of these sisters and cousins, mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, to ask the ultimate question: what does it take to live a good life, for yourself and those you love?

I love the voice and language in Acevedo’s writing – adding something a little arcane seems delicious!

The Invisible House, Alice Hoffman, 17th August

Sixteen-year-old Ivy is pregnant and alone. Cast out by her family, she runs away and finds safety in the arms of Joel Davis. He offers a simpler life than the one she had in Boston, a quiet, rural life of rules, peace and community. Little does she realise, Joel is the charismatic leader of a cult known as the Community, and all is not quite as it seems.
 
Daughter Mia has only known the claustrophobic life of the Community. While out serving the Community one weekend, she secretly commits a transgression – reading. Discovering a world beyond the edges of the Community’s property is intoxicating. But breaking rules carries serious consequences, and sends Mia on a path she could never have imagined.
 
With two fiercely wonderful heroines, The Invisible Hour is a heart-breaking and hopeful novel of family, redemption and the power of love.

Alice Hoffman is one of those writers I always feel I should have read more of than I have…

Learned by Heart, Emma Donoghue, 24th August

Eliza and Lister have never been this wide-awake in their lives, and the Slope, with its curtains drawn wide, is bright with starlight. They talk in whispers, not to disturb the maids who lie sleeping on the other side of the box room. The question Eliza’s been needing to ask swells like a great berry in her mouth, and all at once she’s not scared to let it out, not scared at all, not scared of anything . . .

In 1805 fourteen-year-old Eliza Raine is a school girl at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. The daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was banished to this unfamiliar country as a little girl. When she first stepped off the King George in Kent, Eliza was accompanied by her older sister, Jane, but now she boards alone at the Manor, with no one left to claim her. She spends her days avoiding the attention of her fellow pupils until, one day, a fearless and charismatic new student arrives at the school. The two girls are immediately thrown together and soon Eliza’s life is turned inside out by this strange and curious young woman.

I love Emma Donoghue’s writing, and the thought of an historical novel exploring saphhic themes from her is exciting!

Normal Rules Don’t Apply, Kate Atkinson, 24th August

A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

In this brilliant volume, nothing is quite as it seems. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a lost man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations of human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories, Normal Rules Don’t Apply is a startling and funny feast for the imagination, stories with the depth and bite to create their own fully-formed worlds.

I must be honest: I don’t often find short stories particularly coherent or satisfying… but if any writer can master that for, then it is Atkinson!

September 2023

So Late In The Day, Claire Keegan, 7th September

After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home.

There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently.

All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.

I’d not come across Claire Keegan before Small Things Like These was nominated for the Booker Prize… but loved the lyrical, tender world that her rich but unpretentious prose created. Her works seem short, almsot like prose poems, and wonderful!

The Land of Lost Things, John Connolly, 7th September

Twice upon a time – for that is how some stories should continue . . .

Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident. She is a body without a spirit, a stolen child. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud to Phoebe the fairy stories she loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world.
But it is hard to keep faith, so very hard.

Now an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, and to journey – to a land coloured by the memories of Ceres’s childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father, to a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; to a land where old enemies are watching, and waiting.

To the Land of Lost Things.

I had no idea that this novel was coming out, or that there was even a whisper of an idea of a thought of a follow up to The Book of Lost Things which I remember reading very vividly, and loving, many many years ago. Time for a re-read before September?

The Fraud, Zadie Smith, 7th September

Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who deserves to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel.

Kilburn, 1873. The ‘Tichborne Trial’ has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be – or an imposter.

Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of façades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.

It’s Zadie Smith. Who wouldn’t be excited by a new novel? And I remember coming across the scandal of the Tichborne Trial in my reading somewhere else… There seems to be a lot contained in this novel – race, colonialism, story, deceit – and it sounds thrilling.

The Secret Hours, Mick Herron, 14th September

Two years ago, the Monochrome inquiry was set up to investigate the British secret service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out misconduct, allowing the civil servants seconded to the inquiry, Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, unfettered access to confidential information in the service archives.

But with progress blocked at every turn, Monochrome is circling the drain … Until the OTIS file appears out of nowhere.

What classified secrets does OTIS hold that see a long-redundant spy being chased through Devon’s green lanes in the dark? What happened in a newly reunified Berlin that someone is desperate to keep under wraps? And who will win the battle for the soul of the secret service – or was that decided a long time ago?

Spies and pen-pushers, politicians and PAs, high-flyers, time-servers and burn-outs . . . They all have jobs to do in the daylight. But what they do in the secret hours reveals who they really are.

Herron’s spy fiction is a blast – although I have not caught up with the Slough House gang in a while – and this feels a little more serious than those which is perhaps a good thing: there are only so many times I need to read about Jackson Lamb’s farting.

The Last Devil to Die, Richard Osman, 14th September

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.

With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

It’s The Thursday Murder Club‘s newest outing… geriatric retired spies and surprising tenderness within the more over-the-top criminality.

The Night House, Jo Nesbo, 28th September

WHEN THE VOICES CALL, DON’T ANSWER…

In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote town of Ballantyne.

Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, no one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie.

No one, that is, except the enigmatic Karen, who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number to an abandoned house in the woods. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices start. When another classmate disappears, Richard grapples with the dark magic that’s possessing Ballantyne to try and find them before its too late…

Nesbo has a range as a writer and this looks and feels young adult perhaps… but I don’t see that as a problem.

October 2023

Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night, Sophie Hannah, 26th October

CAN HERCULE POIROT SOLVE A BAFFLING MURDER MYSTERY IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS?

It’s 19 December 1931. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool are called to investigate the murder of a man in the apparent safe haven of a Norfolk hospital ward. Catchpool’s mother, the irrepressible Cynthia, insists that Poirot stays in a crumbling mansion by the coast, so that they can all be together for the festive period while Poirot solves the case. Cynthia’s friend Arnold is soon to be admitted to that same hospital and his wife is convinced he will be the killer’s next victim, though she refuses to explain why.

Poirot has less than a week to solve the crime and prevent more murders, if he is to escape from this nightmare scenario and get home in time for Christmas. Meanwhile, someone else – someone utterly ruthless – also has ideas about what ought to happen to Hercule Poirot . . .

Sophie Hannah’s Poirot books are a sweet pastiche of and homage to Christie’s writing and character – a definite comfort read as the nights start to draw in.

November 2023

Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree, 9th November

First loves. Second-hand books. Epic adventures.

Viv’s career with the renowned mercenary company Rackam’s Ravens isn’t going as planned. Wounded during the hunt for a powerful necromancer, she’s packed off against her will to recuperate in the sleepy beach town of Murk – so far from the action that she worries she’ll never be able to return to it. What’s a thwarted soldier of fortune to do?

Spending her hours at a struggling bookshop in the company of its foul-mouthed proprietor is the last thing Viv would have predicted. Even though it may be exactly what she needs. Still, adventure isn’t far away. A suspicious traveller in grey, a gnome with a chip on her shoulder, a summer fling and an improbable number of skeletons prove Murk to be more eventful than Viv could have ever expected.

Sometimes, right things happen at the wrong time. Sometimes, what we need isn’t what we seek. And sometimes, we find ourselves in the stories we experience together.

Whilst I enjoyed Legends and Lattes, I wasn’t wholly blown away by it as so many others on social media were. Does it need a prequel? Not really. Am I likely to enjoy an unchallenging, cosy low-stakes fantasy in the winter months? Who wouldn’t? And also, there are not enough bookshops in fantasy!

December 2023

I couldn’t find anything in the schedules for December that really appealed… at least not yet. It is still six months away!

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So, I am sure I have missed so many books here but on a cursory survey, these stuck out to me. Please do let me know what you are looking forward to and share your excitement!

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Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes

July 4: Book Covers In the Colors of My Country’s Flag (It’s the 4th of July in the USA today, so tell us what country you live in and share book covers that match the colors of your country’s flag!)
July 11: Freebie
July 18: Books With One-Word Titles (submitted by Angela @ Reading Frenzy Book Blog)
July 25: Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish (Feel free to tell us why if you want, but if you do please be nice to the authors and don’t tag them when you mention your post on social media!)
August 1: Forgotten Backlist Titles (Spread love for books that people don’t talk about much anymore!)
August 8: Books I’ve Read/Want to Read Because of Top Ten Tuesday (books you discovered through Top Ten Tuesday, or they kept appearing in top tens and you got intrigued) (submitted by Ellie at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm)