It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This weekly meme is hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date and is a place to share what you've been reading over the past week, what you are currently reading and what you hope to read next.

Not much achieved over the past week. One book read, Season of Light by Katherine McMahon. Again one that I hadn't intended to read just yet. It happened to be downstairs while all my current reads were upstairs and
I was too lazy to fetch them. Once started I couldn't put it down. This book took me by surprise. It starts off as a romance, but takes off in a different direction. The ending was unexpected but very satisfactory. I'll be reading more from Katherine McMahon.

Slow progress is being made with my four current reads. The term "reading slump" keeps flitting through my mind, but I think the actual culprit is lack of reading time as I focus on other things.

My current reads are made up of two books that I'd carried over from previous weeks and two books that I added last week, Spindrift and an Australian classic published in the 1940s, My Love Must Wait.

Ambulance Girls is still up next and after that, because I cannot read enough about that abandoned Parisian apartment, The Velvet Hours by Alyson Richman.

What I Read Last Week

Season of Light by Katherine McMahon

Season of Light begins in 1788, in the heady days just before the French revolution, when Paris is fizzing with new ideas about liberty and equality. Asa Ardleigh, the impressionable 19-year-old daughter of a country squire, has traveled to the city with her older sister, Philippa, and Philippa's new husband. In Paris, they are introduced to the literary salon of Madame de Genlis. It is in this salon that Asa meets, and falls in love with, a dashing intellectual and idealist, Didier Paulin. Their affair is curtailed when Asa is forced to return to England, but they continue to write as the storm clouds gather over France and war with England seems imminent. Meanwhile back at home, no one knows of Asa's liaison. Asa's middle sister, Georgina, has met Harry Shackleford, the most eligible man in London that season, and to whom the Ardleigh estate is entailed. After the death of their mother, the Ardleigh girls' father began to drink heavily and now the estate is nearly bankrupt. In Shackleford, Georgina sees not only a fortuitous marriage for her sister, but also the solution to their financial woes. However Asa's accomplishments need some polishing. Georgina therefore employs Madame de Rusigneux, a French Marquise. Asa soon discovers there is more to this woman than meets the eye...

What I'm Reading Today

Nor the Years Condemn by Justin Sheedy

“Nor the Years Condemn” is based on the incredible true story of the amazing breed of young men who answered the call of Britain in her darkest hour. They learnt to fly bone-shatteringly high-performance combat aircraft in which they fought for freedom against the so far unstoppable might of Nazi Germany. In their teens and early-20s, they were the ‘top guns’ of their era, out of pure necessity for the job at hand the best and brightest, physically and mentally, of a generation. This fact will render the death of so many of them doubly heart-rending for the reader, albeit that they were sacrificed in so noble a cause.
“Nor the Years Condemn” portrays the gripping saga of doomed, brilliant youth through the eyes of 20-year-old Australian law student and rugby star, Daniel Quinn. Flanked by the highly intelligent, sometimes hilarious young men of his elite ilk, he leaves his peacetime life behind and crosses the Planet to fight tyranny. Flying the iconic Supermarine Spitfire (to this day a stirring symbol of the resistance of Good against Evil), Quinn’s personality is transformed from his peacetime self into a professional killer.
With in-the-cockpit-seat flying sequences that readers have described as cinematic, “Nor the Years Condemn” is also a story of the grieving mothers cursed to relinquish their wonderful sons to war, of first love, of strategic deception and betrayal, of brotherhood and once-in-a-lifetime friendship on a knife’s edge. It is a story of shining young men destined never to become old, and of those who do: the survivors condemned by the years, and to their memory of friends who remain forever young.

We That Are Left by Clare Clark

It is 1910 and to ten-year-old Oskar Grunewald, the Melville family is impossibly, incomprehensibly glamorous. Born into privilege, their certainties are as unshakeable as the walls of their Victorian castle. It is a world to which Oskar, mathematics prodigy and son of a penniless German composer, has no wish to belong. But when Theo Melville is killed in the Great War, shattering his family’s lives, Oskar finds himself drawn reluctantly into the gaping hole his death has left behind. As Theo’s two sisters struggle to forge their paths in a world that no longer plays by the old rules, Oskar’s life becomes entwined with theirs in a way that will change all of their futures.

Spindrift by Tamara McKinley

1905. Christy has always dreamed of making the journey from her home in Tasmania back to the wild and beautiful Scottish island where she was born - the Isle of Skye, nicknamed 'cloud island' by the Old Norse people - to once again lay eyes on the tumbling waterfalls and dramatic coastlines of her homeland. And now, in her sixty-fifth year, Christy has finally decided to go, her mistrustful daughter Anne and beloved granddaughter Kathryn acting as companions. But what Anne and Kathryn don't realise is that Christy's past is darker and more textured than they could know, and that in returning to Skye they will unearth bittersweet memories long-buried - memories that will ultimately change the course of the three women's lives forever.

My Love Must Wait by Ernestine Hill

When Matthew Flinders, the first man to chart and circumnavigate Australia, set sail from England in July 1801, he left behind the intrigues of his homeland but also his young bride of only a few weeks, Ann Chappell. He didn′t see her again for more than nine years. During that time he carried out incredible feats of seamanship and navigation, made the first charts of much of the coastline of Australia, and was shipwrecked and later held prisoner by the French on Mauritius.



What I Hope To Read Next

Ambulance Girls by Deborah Burrows

On duty during London's Blitz...
As death and destruction fall from the skies day after day in the London Blitz, Australian ambulance driver, Lily Brennan, confronts the horror with bravery, intelligence, common sense and humour.
Although she must rely upon her colleagues to carry out her dangerous duties, Lily begins to suspect that someone at her Ambulance Station may be giving assistance to the enemy by disclosing secret information. Then her Jewish ambulance attendant and best friend, David Levy, disappears in suspicious circumstances. Aided, and sometimes hindered, by David’s school friend, a mysterious and attractive RAF pilot, Lily has to draw on all of her resources to find David but also negotiate the dangers that come from falling in love in a country far from home and in a time of war. 
  
The Velvet Hours by Alysson Richman
 

As Paris teeters on the edge of the German occupation, a young French woman closes the door to her late grandmother’s treasure-filled apartment, unsure if she’ll ever return.
An elusive courtesan, Marthe de Florian cultivated a life of art and beauty, casting out all recollections of her impoverished childhood in the dark alleys of Montmartre. With Europe on the brink of war, she shares her story with her granddaughter Solange Beaugiron, using her prized possessions to reveal her innermost secrets. Most striking of all are a beautiful string of pearls and a magnificent portrait of Marthe painted by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. As Marthe’s tale unfolds, like velvet itself, stitched with its own shadow and light, it helps to guide Solange on her own path.
Inspired by the true account of an abandoned Parisian apartment, Alyson Richman brings to life Solange, the young woman forced to leave her fabled grandmother’s legacy behind to save all that she loved.