TBR Thursday 253…

Episode 253

Despite the arrival of actual book-post from publishers this week (Yay!!) the astonishing fall in the TBR continues – down 2 to 198! However, if it cheers up any of you who are severely distressed at the idea of a falling TBR, I should perhaps admit to having acquired eight audiobooks in Audible’s sale…

Here are a few more that should blow my mind soon…

Fiction

Sula by Toni Morrison

The final book of my 20 Books of Summer list, but will I get to it in time? It’ll be a nail-biting race to the finish line… 

The Blurb says: As girls, Nel and Sula shared each other’s discoveries and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is the story of the fear that makes people accept self-pity; the fear that will not countenance escape and that justifies itself through myth and legend. Sula herself is cast as a witch and demon by the people who resent her strength. They attack her with the most pervasive weapon of all, the weapon of language and story. But Sula is a woman of power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.

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Fiction

Clouds by Chandrahas Choudhury

A few years ago, I read and adored Choudhury’s earlier book, Arzee the Dwarf, and have waited a long, long time for a new one. This one has been out for a while in India, but hasn’t had a proper publication in the UK, which makes me feel it may have been considered too intrinsically Indian to work well for an international market. But we’ll see – I think the blurb sounds great!

The Blurb says: Recently divorced psychotherapist Farhad Billimoria realizes he will never find love again in Bombay and prepares for a move to San Francisco. On a farewell tour throughout the city, his mind crackles with bittersweet memories and giddy dreams. But is love about to bloom for Farhad just as he has given up on the city? And if it does, will he bring to it the man that he is, or the one he wants to become?

Elsewhere in Bombay, the tribal youth Rabi remains stuck as the caretaker to his parents, two ailing and cranky old Brahmins. Rabi comes from the remote Cloud people of eastern India, a sky-watching tribe that observes the Cloudmaker–the mercurial God who drifts and muses in the skies–and that is dragged into the modern world when a mining company invades their sacred mountain. Rabi’s mentor Bhagaban, a forward-thinking filmmaker, leads their resistance. But will Rabi follow Bhagaban or his parents, who reassert a golden Indian past?

From one of India’s most celebrated young writers, Clouds illuminates the inner lives of characters forging their own paths in the great metropolis and shows a vast, prismatic portrait of modern India in all its tumult and glory.

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Vintage Crime

The Man Who Didn’t Fly by Margot Bennett

Courtesy of the British Library. Another new-to-me author and a Scottish one at that! It sounds like fun, although early reviews are distinctly mixed. (If I find I’m not in the mood for any one of the last few books on my 20 Books list, I might swap this one in…)

The Blurb says: Four men had arranged to fly to Dublin. When their aeroplane descended as a fireball into the Irish Sea, only three of them were on board. With the identities of the passengers lost beneath the waves, a tense and perplexing investigation begins to determine the living from the dead, with scarce evidence to follow beyond a few snippets of overheard conversation and one family’s patchy account of the three days prior to the flight.

Who was the man who didn’t fly? What did he have to gain? And would he commit such an explosive murder to get it? First published in 1955, Bennett’s ingenious mystery remains an innovative and thoroughly entertaining inversion of the classic whodunit.

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Reginald Hill on Audio

Exit Lines by Reginald Hill read by Colin Buchanan

Continuing my slow re-read of my favourite crime series of all time, I thought it would be fun to try the audio version of this one. I’m not a huge fan of Colin Buchanan’s portrayal of Pascoe in the TV series, so may or may not get on with him as a narrator. But I have the paper copy to fall back on if necessary… 

The Blurb says: Three old men die on a stormy November night: one by deliberate violence, one in a road accident and one by an unknown cause,

Inspector Pascoe is called in to investigate the first death, but when the dying words of the accident victim suggest that a drunken Superintendent Dalziel had been behind the wheel, the integrity of the entire Mid-Yorkshire CID is called into question.

Helped by the bright but wayward Detective-Constable Seymour, hindered by ‘Maggie’s Moron’, the half-witted Constable Hector, Peter Pascoe enters the twilight and vulnerable world of the senior citizen – to discover that the beckoning darkness at the end of the tunnel holds few comforts.

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NB All blurbs and covers taken from Goodreads, Amazon UK or Audible UK.

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Quick Reminder: For those who are planning to read A Month in the Country, the date for reviews and comments is Monday, 31st August. I’ll be starting it soon – hope we all enjoy it!

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So…what do you think? Are you tempted?