“Hy Brasil” by Margaret Elphinstone

Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone is the last fiction book on my TBR challenge. After winning a writing competition, Sidony Redruth finds herself on Hy Brasil to write the first ever travel book about a remote archipelago of islands situated in the north Atlantic. What develops is something like a swashbuckling adventure story for adults, there’s even some modern day pirates thrown in!

“The Music of the Primes” by Marcus Du Sautoy

I know it may seem odd to some, but maths was my favourite subject at school, and I’m still interested in the subject, so one of my Christmas presents a couple of years ago, was The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy.

“Mr Lonely” by Eric Morecambe

This is the story of Sid Lewis, with his modest beginnings as the host in a nightclub and, after his invention of the character, the eponymous Mr Lonely, his rise to fame through television and his own show in Vegas.

This was a very odd book for me to read.

“Emotional Geology” by Linda Gillard

Back to my Kindle again with Emotional Geology by Linda Gillard. Rose has moved to island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides to try and make a new start in life and immerse herself in her work as a textile artist. She makes friends with her neighbours and is attracted to the neighbours brother, Calum. She must then decide whether she can come to terms with her previously tumultuous relationships and her own enforced estrangement from her daughter enough to be able to move on with her life and the promise of love in the future.

I really enjoy reading Linda’s books. There is always more to the love story than meets the eye,

“Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks

This has been on my TBR for a long, long time, and many people have recommended it to me over the years. It starts in 1910, and follows Stephen, a young Englishman who has travelled to Amiens in France on business, and falls in love with Isabelle, the wife of the man whose house he is staying in. Six years later, we catch up with Stephen on the battlefields of France in the first world war, in the battle of the Somme, and later at Ypres. Interspersed between Stephen’s story, we also follow the story of his granddaughter in England, 1978, as she discovers his war diaries and finds out more about his life.

This was a real page turner of a story. After the bright

“The Library of Shadows” by Mikkel Birkegaard

The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard starts with the strange death of bookshop owner Luca Campelli. His son, Jon, who hasn’t seen his father since he was fostered after the suicide of his mother twenty years ago, inherits the shop, but is immediately drawn into the secret society of people who can affect your thoughts and feelings when you read or when they read to you, and somebody is trying to destroy them, his father having been their latest victim, and is soon in a fight for his own life.

When I bought this book a few years ago, it was purely based

“Wild Mary” by Patrick Marnham

Wild Mary by Patrick Marnham is the biography of Mary Wesley, whose career as an author took off after she’d passed her 70th birthday. In a remarkably productive fourteen years, she published ten novels, most of which focused on the time of her youth during World War 2, often with scandalous, strong willed female heroines, sexual affairs, dysfunctional families and a fight for independence for women, all done with a wicked sense of humour but frank and honest. This authorised biography of Mary, looks back at her life before her fame, and shows how her experiences influenced her work.

I adored Mary Wesley’s books

“The Infinite Book” by John D. Barrow

The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow, a Mathematics professor at Cambridge University is all about infinity, how the concept first came about, what we mean by it, and how relevant it is to modern science, mathematics and astronomy, plus some of the less obvious subjects such as mythology and philosophy.

Despite the fact that I love maths,

“Human Traces” by Sebastian Faulks

When I started this challenge to blitz my TBR shelf, I had three Sebastian Faulks books to read. The first I tried was A Week In December which I didn’t get on with, and so the other two are finding themselves moving further and further down the list, but there comes a time when all books on that shelf must be read, and Human Traces time had come.

The book follows Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter from

“The Hungry Tide” by Amitav Ghosh

The Hungry Tide follows Piyali, an American woman cetologist (someone who studies whales, dolphins and porpoises), and Kanai, an Indian businessman who meet on the train on route to a remote area of India called the Sundarbans which is a collection of many tiny islands in the Bay of Bengal. The American is on her way to study two rare species of river dolphins who are native to this area, and the businessman is going to visit his widowed aunt, and to collect the book his late uncle has left to him. The tide of the title moves miles inland every day, partially submerging islands and mangrove forests. There are also man-eating tigers, crocodiles, snakes and sharks to be wary of, making Piya’s expedition even more dangerous. Alongside the story of the present day, we also learn of the social and political history, mythology and more modern social issues, such as trafficking of women.

I feel like I’ve had The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh on my TBR for donkeys years,