Spell the Month in Books: January

Spell the Month in Books is hosted by Jana @ Reviews from the Stacks.

The idea is simple: find a book title for each letter in the month's name, write a post and share the link on that month's link up page. There are optional challenges for each month. This month the theme is "new", to be interpereted anyway you want.

I'm going with titles added to my TBR and earmarked for the reading challenges I've committed to in this "new" year of reading!

J - Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade's Journey by John Sayles

It begins in the highlands of Scotland in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, the last desperate stand of the Stuart ‘pretender’ to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his rabidly loyal supporters. Vanquished with his comrades by the forces of the Hanoverian (and Protestant) British crown, the novel’s eponymous hero, Jamie MacGillivray, narrowly escapes a roadside execution only to be recaptured by the victors and shipped to Marshalsea Prison (central to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times) where he cheats the hangman a second time before being sentenced to transportation and indentured servitude in colonial America "for the term of his natural life." His travels are paralleled by those of Jenny Ferguson, a poor, village girl swept up on false charges by the English and also sent in chains to the New World.

The novel follows Jamie and Jenny through servitude, revolt, escape, and romantic entanglements -- pawns in a deadly game. The two continue to cross paths with each other and with some of the leading figures of the era- the devious Lord Lovat, future novelist Henry Fielding, the artist William Hogarth, a young and ambitious George Washington, the doomed General James Wolfe, and the Lenape chief feared throughout the Ohio Valley as Shingas the Terrible.

A - Ancestry by Simon Mawer

Beginning with his great-great-grandfather Abraham Block, acclaimed novelist Simon Mawer sifts through evidence like an archaeologist, piecing together the stories of his ancestors. Illiterate and lacking opportunity in the bleak Suffolk village where his parents worked as agricultural laborers, Abraham leaves home at fifteen, in 1847. He signs away the next five years in an indenture aboard a ship, which will circuitously lead him to London and well beyond, to far-flung ports on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In London he crosses paths with Naomi Lulham, a young seamstress likewise seeking a better life in the city, with all its prospects and temptations.

Another branch of the family tree comes together in 1847, in Manchester, as soldier George Mawer weds his Irish bride Ann Scanlon—Annie—before embarking with his regiment. When he is called to fight in the Crimean War, Annie must fend for herself and her children on a meager income, navigating an often hostile world as a woman alone.

With a keen eye and a nuanced consideration of the limits of what we can know about the past, Mawer paints a compelling, intimate portrait of life in the nineteenth century.

N - Night in Passchendaele by Scott Bennett

One bloody night. One lone survivor. One chance of redemption.

France, 1919. One year after the guns fell silent across the Western Front, Lieutenant Wilfred Rhodes receives his final classified mission before he can return to Australia. He must end the command of Captain Charlie Kingsley, the unhinged radical leader of the Graves Recovery Unit.

Still haunted by the loss of his platoon in the Battle of Passchendaele, Rhodes infiltrates Kingsley's unit and works with the war-weary men to exhume the Australian dead. As the peaceful French countryside begins to heal Rhodes, he realises those behind his assignment are hiding something from him about that fateful night in Passchendaele.

Rhodes quickly faces a crossroads as he feels the pressure from his superiors, and the allure of Kingsley's promise of a new utopian life for him and the soldiers. Tensions mount, old wounds are reopened and the threat of further blood spilled on French soil looms in the air ...

U - Unquiet by E. Saxey

A young woman discovers her long-thought dead brother-in-law in her garden and sets about unravelling the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance in this gripping and unsettling Victorian gothic horror, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters.

London 1893. Judith has been living alone in her family home for four months, the rest of her family travelling around the world whilst she tries desperately to get over the death of Sam, her brother-in-law, who drowned in an accident a year ago.

One icy evening, she discovers Sam, alive, in the garden. He has no memory of the past year, and remembers little of the accident that appeared to take his life.

Desperate to keep his reappearance a secret until she can discover the truth about what happened to him, Judith journeys to the scene of Sam’s accident, only to unearth secrets she never thought she would find.

A - Armour of Light by Ken Follet

Revolution is in the air

1792. A tyrannical government is determined to make England a mighty commercial empire. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte begins his rise to power, and with dissent rife, France’s neighbours are on high alert.

Kingsbridge is on the edge

Unprecedented industrial change sweeps the land, making the lives of the workers in Kingbridge’s prosperous cloth mills a misery. Rampant modernization and dangerous new machinery are rendering jobs obsolete and tearing families apart.

Tyranny is on the horizon

Now, as international conflict nears, a story of a small group of Kingsbridge people - including spinner Sal Clitheroe, weaver David Shoveller and Kit, Sal’s inventive and headstrong son - will come to define the struggle of a generation as they seek enlightenment and fight for a future free from oppression. . .

R - Reynardine by Judith Lennox-Smith

His only thought is for revenge...

Inspired by the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1615, Judith Lennox's magnificent novel tells the story of Reynardine, the mysterious highwayman. Perfect for fans of Rachel Hore and Kate Morton.

Seventeenth-century corrupt, decadent and dangerous; a playground for the ambitious in search of power, wealth and position. Richard Galliers, returning from three years in exile, wants none of it. His only thought is for revenge.

Mall Conway, the beautiful and headstrong daughter of a Cambridgeshire gentleman is bored; bored with country life and with the restrictions of society. But her peaceful existence is shattered all too soon when Galliers inadvertently involves her in his determination to bring down a deadly enemy...

Galliers' relentless quest takes him from the squalor of taverns and brothels and the tawdry glitter of playhouses to the decadent allure of Jacobean London's great houses. And to the bleak wastes of the East Anglian Fens, where Reynardine, the mysterious highwayman, reigns, the terror of all weary travellers.

Y - Year of the Sheep: A Novel of the Highland Clearances by James Y. Bartlett

SCOTLAND, 1805

The clan chief wants to remove the people living in the Highland glens and straths, replacing them with thousands of black-face Cheviot sheep and a few herders.

The people of the glens, who have lived there peacefully for hundreds of years, do not wish to go.

That was the essential conflict of the Highland Clearances, a dark and distressing time in Scotland's history. But in the pages of Year of the Sheep, James Y. Bartlett's epic retelling of the Clearances in Sutherland in Scotland's far North, the conflict is even starker.

Both the clan chief and the people fighting back were women.

Elizabeth Gordon was the 19th chief of Clan Sutherland, and landlord over one million acres of Scotland. She married George Granville Levenson-Gower, termed 'the Leviathan of Wealth,' who was far and away the richest man in Great Britain. Together, they planned and executed the systematic removal of most of the inhabitants of the interior lands and replaced them with sheepwalks.

But the plan of removal ran into resistance in Glencullen, an isolated village along the River Cullen, deep in the rolling hills and mountains of Sutherland. Most of the inhabitants of the glen were women--their husbands and fathers and sons had been sent off to fight in the King's wars in Europe against Bonaparte.

Left on their own and told to obey their clan's leader as they always had, the women of Glencullen instead chose to fight back. Led by their village shaman and healer, Mute Meg; organized by the schoolteacher Anna Kenton, the niece of Lady Elizabeth; and inspired by the ferocious leadership of the almost shape-shifting outlaw known as Billy Hanks, the women of Glencullen decided to make a fateful stand to defend their way of life.

Based on actual events, Year of the Sheep is an epic novel that runs from the Battle of Culloden Moor through the French Revolution in Paris, and from the swanky mansions of London to the rude huts of Glencullen, fated to be set to the fire as a way of life that lasted almost a thousand years was extinguished.


Next Month: February's link up theme is "comfort reads".