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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at BookDate. It’s a weekly post sharing what you’ve recently finished reading, what you’re currently reading, and what you plan to read this week. don’t forget to link up on BookDate’s blog and check out what everyone’s been reading.
What I read recently:
I took part in my first #24in48 Readathon this weekend, which was a challenge but great fun. I only found out about it the day before it started so wasn’t aiming for reading for the full 24 hours. I managed to read Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden & Other Stories and almost finished A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.
Earlier in the week I did a buddy read with Zuky@Bookbum of Friend Request by Laura Marshall, You can see my review here.
I DNf’d on The Stars Are Fire by Anita Shreve as I didn’t enjoy the style of writing and really couldn’t get into it.
What I’m currently reading:
A psychological thriller on kindle and historical fiction in paperback from Reader’s First.
Up next:
I’ll definitely be reading something from my #20 Books of Summer list and continue to make a dent in my NetGalley backlog.
! These older books are usually much easier than new releases to get a hold of at libraries and elsewhere. If you have your own Throwback Thursday recommendation feel free to jump on board, you’re welcome to use Renee’s pic as well. If you’d just link back to her @ 
Stella has life under control – and that’s the way she likes it. For twenty-five years, she’s been trusted assistant to a legendary fashion designer, but after her boss dies suddenly, she’s left with nothing to do apart from clear the studio. 
Set on a small Irish dairy farm, this tender and funny debut novel follows two lost souls as they try to carve out new lives amid a colourful cast of characters reminiscent of those in the hit film Waking Ned Divine. Abby has been estranged from the family farm since her rebellious mother ran off with her when she was a small child. Kit is a burned out New York stockbroker who’s down on his luck. But that’s all about to change, now that he and Abby have converged on the farm just in time to help Corrie and Fee, two old cheesemakers in a time of need. Full of delightful and quirky characters–from dairy cows who only give their best product to pregnant, vegetarian teens to an odd collection of whiskey-soaked men and broken-hearted women who find refuge under Corrie and Fee’s roof–BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS is an irresistible tale about taking life’s spilled milk and turning it into the best cheese in the world.
New from the author of House of Daughters- an irresistible confection of love, loss, and Italian sweets in the delectable tradition of Chocolat. 
Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her prosperous merchant father brings a young painter back with him from Holland to adorn the walls of the new family chapel. She is fascinated by his talents and envious of his abilities and opportunities to paint to the glory of God. Soon her love of art and her lively independence are luring her into closer involvement with all sorts of taboo areas of life. On excursions into the streets of night-time Florence she observes a terrible evil stalking the city and witnesses the rise of the fiery young priest, Savanarola, who has set out to rid the city of vice, richness, even art itself. Alessandra must make crucial decisions about the shape of her adult life, as Florence itself must choose between the old ways of the luxury-loving Medicis and the asceticism of Savanorola. And through it all, there is the 
Diana Athill will be ninety in December, 2007. “Somewhere Towards the End” tells the story of what it means to be old: how the pleasure of sex ebbs, how the joy of gardening grows, how much there is to remember, to forget, to regret, to forgive – and how one faces the inevitable fact of death. Athill has lost none of her skill or candour as a writer, her love of the intimate detail. Her book is filled with stories, events and people, and the kind of honest, intelligent reflection that has been a hallmark of her writing throughout her long career. ‘We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex,’ she writes of her last affair, when she was in her late sixties. ‘We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition.’Diana’s previous books are: “Instead of a Letter”, “After a Funeral”, and “Stet”, her much praised memoir of her life as a book editor (many said the best in London) with Andre Deutsch. She describes her books as ‘documentaries’ and her early work prefigured the modern taste for memoir. As she writes in “Somewhere Towards the End”, ‘I believed, and still believe, that there is no point describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching of my upbringing: do not think yourself important.’
The fourth novel in Andrea Camilleri’s savagely funny, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series featuring Inspector Montalbano The commissioner kept looking at him with an expression that combined contempt and commiseration, apparently discerning unmistakable signs of senile dementia in the inspector. I’m going to speak very frankly, Montalbano. I don’t have a very high opinion of you. Nor I of you, the inspector replied bluntly. Montalbano’s gruesome discovery of a naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer. Among the suspects are her ageing husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques-dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim’s friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate. But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to this murder…
Sometimes the hardest journey is the road home.
Nina, her son Christopher in tow, flies to Malta for one last visit with her ageing parents.
Carmen has been feeling the need to break free for Too Darn Long. So when her equally frustrated friend Beth suggests the ultimate escape – dancing their way through a series of scorchingly-hot countries – she can’t resist!
Jamie and Izzy, friends for ever, have a dream: a spangly double wedding in Las Vegas. And, at twenty-seven, they decide they’ve had enough crap boyfriends and they’re ready for crap husbands – all they have to do is find them. So where better than Las Vegas itself, where the air is 70% oxygen and 30% confetti?
“In this novel authorized by the Little House estate, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before—Caroline Ingalls, “Ma” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books.
The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.
In order to spend more time with her four-year-old son Ned, Clara Costello trades in her secure, well-paid job and sports car for a camper van called Winnie, and the three of them set off on a mystery tour of England. Of course, her friends and family think she’s gone mad. But when they arrive in Deaconsbridge, a small market town on the edge of the Peak District, Clara and Ned become drawn into the lives of the locals. Two in particular seem destined to get under Clara’s skin—Gabriel Liberty, a cranky widower who terrifies his family, and Archie Merryman, a local dealer in second-hand furniture, who possesses a heart of gold. Then Clara finds herself having to confront a problem much closer to home, and one she had hoped she would never have to face.
It is autumn in the Somerset town of Glastonbury. Lance Bradley is idling away his life there as usual when he receives a call for help from the eccentric sister of his old friend Rupert Alder. Inexplicably, Rupe has stopped sending the money that his dysfunctional siblings depend on. Reluctantly, Lance goes to London to learn what he can, only to find that his friend has vanished. His employers, a shipping company, believe he is guilty of a major fraud. A Japanese businessman called Hashimoto claims he has stolen a document of life and death importance. And a private detective who has been trying to trace on Rupert’s behalf an American called Townley has been warned off by unnamed but immensely powerful interests. Townley, it seems, was involved in a mysterious death at Wilderness Farm, near Glastonbury, back in 1963, that year of so many shattering events which just happens also to be the year of Lance’s birth.
David’s entire twelve-year life has been spent in a grisly prison camp in Eastern Europe. He knows nothing of the outside world. But when he is given the chance to escape, he seizes it. With his vengeful enemies hot on his heels, David struggles to cope in this strange new world, where his only resources are a compass, a few crusts of bread, his two aching feet, and some vague advice to seek refuge in Denmark. Is that enough to survive?
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger’s cinematic storytelling that makes the novel’s unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant. 
Dark secrets haunt the manor house at Selden in Buckinghamshire, where Emilie Selden, motherless, fiercely intelligent and beautiful, has been raised in near isolation by her father. John Selden, student of Isaac Newton, is conducting a secret experiment. He aims to turn Emilie into a brilliant natural philosopher and alchemist and fills her with knowledge while recording every step she takes. In the spring of 1725, when Emilie is eighteen, father and daughter begin their most daring adventure – an attempt to breathe life into dead matter. But they are interrupted by the arrival of two strangers. During the course of a sultry August, Emilie is caught up in the passion of first love and, listening for the first time to her heart rather than her head, she makes her choice with consequences that are far-reaching and tumultuous.
In this captivating debut, Christi Phillips blends fact and fiction, suspense and sensuality into a vibrant, richly imagined novel in which a modern historian uncovers a courtesan’s secret role in a shocking conspiracy of seventeenth-century Venice. 
Best-selling romance author and ardent knitter Debbie Macomber combines both her skills in this novel about a newly opened Seattle yarn shop and the knitting class that brings four women together to make baby blankets. The owner of the shop and her three students produce more than blankets, knitting together bonds of solidarity, friendship, love, hope, and renewal. The book even includes the pattern for the blanket, which was created by premier knitting designer Ann Norling.
