Welcome September! The month when the leaves on the trees turn yellow, and temperatures dip. Although, who knows whether we may yet have a bit of late summer sun.
Whatever the weather, here are just ten books that I would like to read this month.
The Physician of Ninevah by Glenn Cooper
London, present day. Dr. Kate Mayne, a brilliant Assyriologist still recovering from heartbreak, devotes her life to uncovering the secrets of the ancient world. She never expects one of those secrets to walk into her life—claiming to be a royal physician from the long-lost city of Nineveh.
Assyria, 7th century BCE. Mannu-ki-Ashur, Chief Physician to King Ashurbanipal, faces an impossible choice. The woman he has loved since childhood is dying from a poison no medicine or forbidden magic can cure. In desperation, Mannu turns to an ancient ritual that sends him hurtling through time to modern-day London.
When Kate confirms Mannu’s identity through ancient texts only she can read, she is swept into a race against time, assassins from Nineveh, and the limits of belief. Together, Mannu and Kate must find a cure and confront a destiny that spans empires. Along the way, they discover a bond that might just be stronger than time itself.
The Midnight Hour by Eve Chase
Present day Paris: Maggie Parker receives a call. The new owners of her family’s old Notting Hill home are digging up the basement. They’ve no idea what might lie beneath.
London, twenty-one years earlier: teenaged Maggie, babysitting her little brother, waits in vain for her mother to come home after a night out. Seeking clues to her mother’s mysterious disappearance, she's drawn away from the neighbourhood’s grand terraces and into its hustling backstreets - and the arms of someone else living on their wits.
Over two decades later, the clock is ticking on a secret set to shatter Maggie’s grown-up life. But the draw of the past is irresistible...
The Vanishing Act by Jo Jakeman
Life as a missing person is absolute murder...
When artist Eloise Ford hears that human remains found in an abandoned mine are believed to be those of long-missing teenager Elizabeth King, the shock sends her reeling.
It can't be true. Eloise knows this for a fact because... she is Elizabeth King.
Now, her carefully curated life in Cornwall is falling apart. Her husband is acting strangely, her children aren't speaking to her and she can't sell a painting for love nor money. But much more worrying are the signs that someone knows exactly who she is... and why she had to vanish thirty years ago.
Eloise needs answers. Is her son's ex-girlfriend just plain annoying... or does she know something? Will the detection skills of the online 'Truth Seekers' group prove more than amateurish? What's the real story behind those village newcomers?
And just how far would she go to keep her family, her friends, and her fraudulent life, safe?
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths
Ali Dawson and her cold case team investigate crimes so old, they're frozen - or so their inside joke goes. Most people don't know that they travel back in time to complete their research.
The latest assignment sees Ali venture back farther than they have dared before: to 1850s London in order to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of MP Isaac Templeton. Rumour has it that Cain was part of a sinister group called The Collectors; to become a member, you had to kill a woman...
Fearing for her safety in the middle of a freezing Victorian winter, Ali finds herself stuck in time, unable to make her way back to her life, her beloved colleagues, and her son, Finn, who suddenly finds himself in legal trouble in the present day.
Could the two cases be connected?
The Eights by Joanna Miller
They knew they were changing history.
They didn’t know they would change each other.
Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.
Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Beatrice, politically-minded daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way – and her own friends – for the first time. Socialite Otto fills her room with extravagant luxuries but fears they won’t be enough to distract her from her memories of the war years. And quiet, clever, Marianne, the daughter of a village vicar, arrives bearing a secret she must hide from everyone – even The Eights – if she is to succeed.
But Oxford’s dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.
The Eights is a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination, courage, and what it means to come of age in a world that is forever changed.
A Keeper by Graham Norton
A masterly tale of secrets and ill-fated loves set on the coast of Ireland.
Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother's death, intent only on wrapping up that dismal part of her life. There is nothing here for her; she wonders if there ever was. The house of her childhood is stuffed full of useless things, her mother's presence already fading. And perhaps, had she not found the small stash of letters, the truth would never have come to light.
40 years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet but for the tireless wind that circles her as she hurries further into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea. She has no sense of where she is going, only that she must keep on.
The Life She Could Have Lived by Laura Pearson
What if the answer to one little question could change your whole life?
Soon after Anna goes on the best date of her life with a man called James – she and her best friend Niamh visit a fortune teller. Who tells Niamh that she will have one great love. But all she tells Anna is that her future is with a man whose name begins with a J.
It won’t be Jamie though – he never calls. And then Anna meets Edward – gorgeous, kind, loving. He’s all she’s ever dreamed of. Until he asks her to make a choice about their future.
If Anna says ‘yes’ to him, her life will go one way. If she says ‘no’, it’ll go another. Both of the worlds could be happy. Both of the worlds could be heartbreaking… But as Niamh meets her one great love in both worlds, which of Anna’s answers – yes or no – will bring her life together with the person who she’s fated to be with?
The Traitor's Circle by Jonathan Friedland
Berlin, 1943. A group of high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo - revealing their secret to the Nazis' most ruthless detective.
They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering headmistress. Meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule, what unites them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance. Or so they believe.
How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? And who betrayed them?
Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruellest men, they showed a heroism that raises a question with new urgency for our time: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?
A Slowly Dying Cause by Elizabeth George
Amid the beauty of Cornwall’s coastline, the death of a local man shatters the peace with its violence. The body of Michael Lobb is discovered in his family’s tin and pewter workshop, and Detective Inspector Beatrice Hannaford is brought in to investigate. Suspicion quickly develops when it emerges that a mining company had been trying to buy the man’s land, and Lobb was the only remaining obstacle to the deal going through.
But every step of Bea’s investigation provokes more questions than answers, and the complexity of the case develops further as Lobb’s family life, rife with mistrust and deception, comes to light. With cryptic alibis and shifting motives, the tangled web of intrigue soon draws in her colleagues Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers, who must search for a killer in a community that has very little trust in outsiders . . .
The Great West Railway Girls Do Their Bit by Jane Lark
1940 - As the Nazi invaders race across Europe, the women of the Great Western Railway works pull together like never before.
Catherine wrestles with self-pity after a machine-shop accident. With her fiancé and brothers on the front lines in France, she must find a new way to fight on the home front.
At her side are her steadfast GWR friends, among them Maggie, facing the loss of her father and family home, and Lily, desperate for news of her childhood sweetheart. All are determined to keep morale high and do their bit to win the war.
Amid blackout nights and rationed days, as the war creeps closer to home, these resilient women forge deeper bonds of sisterhood, confronting heartache and embracing joy. Standing up and volunteering to do even more, when hundreds of thousands of exhausted and wounded troops are rescued from Dunkirk and arrive in Dover. Britain’s ships and small boats saved them, now the trains must move them to safety and the women need to help to keep them alive...
Happy September Reading!
Annie x
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