Tag: The Bee Sting

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023

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Is it my imagination or are the days starting to stretch out a little bit again? It's still pitch dark on my morning runs but I don't feel that I am both driving to and home from work in the darkness! And this week's theme is a lovely one, a celebration of the books I have read in 2023 - which already seems a very long time ago and we have not yet finished January! - from authors I have not come across before. We all have those familiar favourite authors, don't we? Those writers who we just know we will feel welcome and comfortable and familiar with, even in a new book - and that is a wonderful thing! And alongside that, it is a joy to uncover a new author whom we might also fall in love with, possibly with a weighty backlist to enjoy, potentially with a future of more books to come. It is also a feature that I track on my reading spreadsheet - I am such a geek! - so I can easily share my full list of books by new-to-me authors, of which there were 22.

Book Review: Prophet Song, Paul Lynch

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"Prophet Song" is a chilling and propulsive novel set in an Ireland turning towards tyranny. When Eilish's husband, a trade unionist, disappears, she is faced with terrifying choices in a society unraveling into oppression and civil war. As she fights to save her family, the novel offers a devastating and deeply human portrait of a country at the brink of war.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favourite Books of 2023

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Birnam Wood is on the move... Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

Top Ten Tuesday: Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year

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This is a little bit of a milestone: my first TTT as a fifty-year old... half a century. Realising that I pre-date the internet, Space Invaders, the Rubik's cube, Jaws and Concord was an eye-opnener. And realising that those people who I've always seen as 'old' were actually much younger than I am now is mind-boggling. And as my Dad is in the final stages of terminal cancer and is only 26 years older than I am now ... that's a humbling thought! Will my taste in reading suddenly change? Suddenly my TBR fill up with books about slippers and geraniums..? I doubt it! Anyway, this week's theme is to consider what goals I might want to achieve by the end of the year - those remaining three months.