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

• 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
• 27th June: Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2023

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Happy Independence Day to those of you in America! And as Jana says

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!

So, firstly, I am a Brit, living in Britain and I apologise profusely for the very tongue-in-cheek meme there! As I also apologise for the whole colonialism and imperial history. Although I do love my country – its hills and countryside, its wildlife, its greenery and its people’s quirks and idiosyncracies, and of course its language and literature – I’ve always found the flag a challenging symbolic image, nationalistic and redolent with imperialistic connotations.

However, I do love these cover-themed topics, because they pull together a very random selection of books and are a chance to remind ourselves of books we have loved but half-forgotten, or perhaps books that piqued our interest but then never got read… but maybe that’s just me!

But in terms of colours for this week’s theme, it is the classic red, white and blue… which leads neatly to the obvious first choice:

Red, White and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston

What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?

Alex Claremont-Diaz is handsome, charismatic, a genius – pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House ever since his mother first became President of the United States. There’s only one problem. When the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an altercation between Alex and Prince Henry, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.

Heads of family and state devise a plan for damage control: stage a truce. But what begins as a fake, Instagrammable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon they are hurtling into a secret romance that could derail the presidential campaign and upend two nations.

A fantastic read from lockdown – a cosy reimagining of an America governed by the complete opposite of Trump, female, Mexican, honest, humane! – with a sweet romance, and significantly less explicit than some of the reviews suggested!

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Red

Children of Paradise, Camilla Grudova

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise – one of the city’s oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats – she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt.

Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise – unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers.

It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry…

This was haunting and strange little novel, disturbing and visceral in its writing, and somehow dreamlike in its depiction of the cinema with its mysterious additional screen…

The Mitford Vanishing, Jessica Fellowes

1937.

War with Germany is dawning, and a civil war already raging in Spain. Split across political lines, the six Mitford sisters are more divided than ever. Meanwhile their former maid Louisa Cannon is now a private detective, working with her ex-policeman husband Guy Sullivan.

Louisa and Guy are surprised when a call comes in from novelist Nancy Mitford requesting that they look into the disappearance of her Communist sister Jessica, nicknamed Decca. It quickly becomes clear that Decca may have made for the war in Spain – and not alone.

As a second, separate missing person case is opened, Louisa and Guy discover that every marriage has its secrets – but some are more deadly than others …

I’ve not read this one yet, but I’ve enjoyed the other offerings from Jessica Fellowes, following the Mitford family through the eyes of maid-cum-friend Louisa.

The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis

LA, 1981. Buckley College in heat. 17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.

Can he trust his friends – or his own mind – to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Again, not a book I’ve read yet but the blurb is incredible and, well, it is Bret Easton Ellis!

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White

Not many books covers, as I perused my shelves, have white covers

The Dog of the North, Elizabeth McKenzie

Penny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.

Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

It was a long time ago that I read The Portable Veblen but I recall very fond memories of it…

Hell Bent, Leigh Bardugo

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory?even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.

Yeah, this is more grey than white, but white text and that appalling image of the white creature…. I’ve begun this sequel to Ninth House and will probably return to it, but got a little distracted by the repeated references to Darlington’s glowing erect cock… seriously.

We Spread, Iain Reid

Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.”

Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny – with a growing sense of unrest and distrust – starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging, or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?

Witherward, Hannah Mathewson

This is a nice one to transition from white to blue….

Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like our own. Here, it’s summertime in February, the Underground is a cavern of wonders and magic fills the streets. But this London is a city divided, split between six rival magical factions, each with their own extraordinary talents  and the alpha of the Changelings, Gedeon Ravenswood, has gone rogue, threatening the fragile accords that have held London together for decades.

Ilsa is a shapeshifting Changeling who has spent the first seventeen years of her life marooned in the wrong London. Alone, she scratched out a living first as a pickpocket and then as a stage magician’s assistant, dazzling audiences by using her Changeling talents to perform impossible illusions. When she’s dragged through a portal into the Witherward, Ilsa finally feels like she belongs. Yet her new home is on the brink of civil war: pulled into the fray, Ilsa must use all the tricks up her sleeve simply to stay alive.

This just looks fun!

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Blue

The Blue Book of Nebo, Manon Steffan Ros

Dylan was six when The End came, back in 2018: when the electricity went off for good, and the normal 21st-century world he knew disappeared. Now 14, he and his mam have survived in their isolated hilltop house above the village of Nebo in north-west Wales by learning new skills and returning to old ways of living. However, despite their close understanding, the relationship between mother and son changes subtly as Dylan has to take on adult responsibilities. And they each have their own secrets – which emerge as they take it in turns to jot down their thoughts and memories in a found notebook – the Blue Book of Nebo.

It always amuses me a little at the assumption that the world would fall apart without electricity… and then I look at how reliant we are on it I relent and think, well okay then!

And this one did win the YOTO Carnegie Medal this year for YA publishing as is pretty high on my TBR list.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

This is (rightly) winning every award going this year: it is a masterfully written and realised novel, overtly literary without being superior, dealing with powerful themes without being preachy. It is not an easy read emotionally and is often brutal in its depiction of opiate-addicted youngsters, but it is exquisite.

Also, it seems as this is the second blue-covered award winner in 2023, that this is the colour to go for!

Blue Water, Leonora Nattrass

This is the secret report of Laurence Jago. Unwilling spy. Reluctant sailor. Accidental detective.

New Year 1795, and Laurence Jago is aboard the Tankerville mail ship, en route to Philadelphia. Laurence is travelling undercover, supposedly as a journalist’s assistant. But his real mission is to protect a civil servant, en route to Congress with a vital treaty that will stop the Americans from joining the French in their war against Britain.

When the civil servant meets an unfortunate – and apparently accidental – end, the treaty disappears, and Laurence realises that only he can keep the Americans out of the war. Trapped on the ship with a strange assortment of travellers including two penniless French aristocrats, an Irish actress and a dancing bear, Laurence must hunt down both the lost treaty and the murderer, before he has a tragic ‘accident’ himself…

This seems a rather apt novel for the theme, set in the aftermath of the American Declaration… but it also sounded like a compelling mystery set on a somewhat eccentric boat – I do love a good seafaring yarn!

August Blue, Deborah Levy

At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson – former child prodigy, now in her thirties – walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.

Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar – almost her double – purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.

So begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses.

A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

Love Deborah Levy and I am looking forward to diving into this one.

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Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes

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)