Top Ten Tuesday 15 December 2020

Welcome to this weeks Top Ten Tuesday. Originally created by The Broke & The Bookish, which is now hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week it features a book or literary themed category. This weeks prompt is:

 Books On My Winter 2020-2021 TBR:

The journey through M. R. Carey’s “immersive, impeccably rendered world” (Kirkus) — a world in which nature has turned against us — continues in The Trials of Koli, book two of the Rampart Trilogy.The earth wants to swallow us whole…Koli has been cast out from Mythen Rood. Behind him are his family and the safety of the known. Ahead, the embrace of the deadly forests awaits.
But Koli heard a story, once. A story about lost London, where the tech of old times was so plentiful it was just lying on the streets. And if he can safely lead Ursula, Cup and Monono to this sparkling city, maybe he can save the rest of humanity, too.
In a world where a journey of two miles is an odyssey, he’s going to walk two hundred. But the city is not what it once was…and around him, Ingland is facing something it hasn’t seen in three centuries: war.

The Rampart Trilogy The Book of Koli, The Trials of Koli, The Fall of Koli
For more from M. R. Carey, check out:The Girl With All the Gifts, Fell side, The Boy on the Bridge, Someone Like Me
By the same author, writing as Mike Carey:The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots, Thicker Than Water, The Naming of the Beasts

Their romance only lasted a short few months… but that was more than 100 years ago.

Ever since his fiancé, Gemma MacLugh, was killed at the hands of a dragon shifter, vampire Leif Villers has mourned his loss. Still, a part of him never gave up on her. He could hear her voice, feel her love even through the grave, relive her memories over and over until they were stripped from him.

Now Leif has discovered the final piece to bring her back from death’s clutches. He carried her brooch, never knowing it held the key to resurrecting his love.

Too bad it’s now in the hands of the formidable kraken shifter who nearly destroyed the Shifter Academy in the recent vampire/shifter war and then slithered away, never to be seen again.

————

Across time, powerful selkie Gemma MacLugh–a magic user who can shape-shift into a seal–should have a wonderful, comfortable existence at her home in New York in 1897. But jealous sisters target her with their cruelty, making life miserable. If not for her Grandmother and her best friend and fellow selkie, Frederick, things might have been truly unbearable.

But when a mermaid seer foretells her upcoming death and opportunity arises to leave her home and travel across the country to a boarding house in Washington, she takes it.

To get away from her cruel sisters.

To escape her destiny.

But is it luck or fate’s final joke when she meets a tall, dark and handsome man by the name of Leif Villers?

Their love will challenge time and death itself, but can Leif get Gemma back? Can Gemma truly escape her fate?

**Reflect is the first book in the Reclaim Trilogy within the Shifter Academy Universe written by USA Today Bestselling Authors, Jesse Booth and Joanna Reeder**

In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

An insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions (named one of the Washington Post‘s Ten Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Critics’ Pick).

Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night), she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms’ Facebook group, her “influencer” sister’s Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore.

Enter Sam, a senior at the local women’s college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she’s always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She’s worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close. But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth’s father-in-law, the true differences between the women’s lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences.

A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.

‘At first glance they’re magnificent, yet the more she looks, the more she realizes how sinister the mountains appear: raw, jagged spikes. It’s not hard to imagine, she thinks, looking out; this place somehow consuming someone, swallowing them whole.’

An imposing, isolated hotel, high up in the Swiss Alps, is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But she’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when she receives an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement, she has no choice but to accept.

Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge. Though it’s beautiful, something about the hotel, recently converted from an abandoned sanatorium, makes her nervous – as does her brother, Isaac.

And when they wake the following morning to discover his fiancée Laure has vanished without a trace, Elin’s unease grows. With the storm cutting off access to and from the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.

But no-one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they’re all in . . .

The dual time-line conspiracy thriller that will make you question everything

Did you ever ponder the sheer absurdity of the story told in the New Testament? That humanity’s redemption lay in the execution of God’s only son?’

Elliot Ambrose is one of the few souls on Earth who knows the truth about Yeshua of Nazareth. His determination to expose this truth throws him into conflict with an ancient and powerful foe, who will stop at nothing to protect their secrets. Elliot must undertake a violent journey, and a war started in Judea two thousand years ago culminates in a final battle in the twenty-first century.

This dark, gripping, dual time-line conspiracy thriller will appeal to fans of Dan Brown, S. J Parris, and Raymond Khoury.

An offbeat, funny and heartwarming romantic novel from the fabulous King of Strictly, Craig Revel Horwood.

Set against the colourful boho backdrop of London’s Camden in the 1990s, Craig Revel Horwood’s first novel, Dances and Dreams on Diamond Street, tells the story of an unlikely family of friends who each rent a room in a ramshackle six-bedroom, four-storey townhouse. Like any family, the residents of Diamond Street sometimes fights and often act up but when the chips are down, they’re there for each other in an instant – usually brandishing a cheap bottle of booze, and the offer of an impromptu kitchen disco.

Presided over by the wise-cracking but warm-hearted patriarch of the family, Danny Hall, a professional dancer turned choreographer, the novel follows a year in the life of the inhabitants of Diamond Street, rough diamonds one and all, as they try to achieve their dreams – with unexpected, heart-warming and sometimes hilarious results.

Who is Captain Sir Tom Moore? You’ve seen him on the television walking the length of his garden. A frail elderly man, doing his bit at a time of crisis. But he wasn’t always like this.

From a childhood in the foothills of the Yorkshire Dales, Tom Moore grew up in a loving family, which wasn’t without its share of tragedy. It was a time of plenty and of want. When the storm clouds of the Second World War threatened, he raised his hand and, like many of his generation, joined up to fight.

His war would take him from a country he had never left to a place which would steal his heart, India, and the Far East, to which he would return many years later to view the sight he had missed first time around: the distant peak of Everest.

Captain Tom’s story is our story. It is the story of our past hundred years here in Britain. It’s a time which has seen so much change, yet when so much has stayed the same: the national spirit, the can-do attitude, the belief in doing your best for others.

Must read: The Diary of Bink Cummings Vol 1 & 2 previously.

Tests, life is full of them. The world is constantly trying see how much you can take before you break. Before you’re no longer you. Before your world dissolves into nothing. How long you can preserver and overcome the endless obstacles.
It’s no secret that Big and I butt heads. It’s no secret that I not only dislike my mother, I hate her, because she hates me.
Can these people break me?
Can they push me to the edge of insanity, ready to jump?
Having moved in with Big, I was living the life I never even knew I wanted. Every day was filled with hope and love.
Until it wasn’t.
Until it all changed and I was forced to learn what I’m made of.
It took a single day for my world to never be the same.
One day to change me forever.
A day of revelations.
Twenty-four hours I’ll never forget…

Steamy Adult romance
Warning: Contains Mature scenarios, and mass quantities of profanity. For Ages 18+

-This is not a Stand alone.

From the New York Times and USA Today Best Seller L Wilder comes the complete Satan’s Fury MC series with this limited time offer. The boxed set will only be available through the Thanksgiving Holiday, and then it will be gone forever. Grab yours quick while you can.

• Maverick- The sergeant at arms finds his silver lining.
• Stitch- With this enforcer, there are no limits to his brutality, no lines drawn in the sand … until Wren.
• Cotton- The president of Satan’s Fury gives in to his carnal desires.
• Clutch- Sometimes closing one door, opens another.
• Smokey- Chance brought them together. Circumstance tore them apart.
• Big- Hacker verses hacker in the most intriguing way.
• Two Bit- Where she was his weakness, he was her strength.
• Diesel- He may look like the boy next door, but if you mess with someone he cares about, he’ll become your worst nightmare.

*The Satan’s Fury MC series continues with the Memphis Chapter. Be sure to check out Blaze, Shadow, and the latest addition, Riggs. All are standalone romances with no cheating and no cliffhanger.

Until next week.