Monthly Archive

And just over a week after my blog birthday it was my real birthday. I’m a very long way from being 10 years old but still enjoy opening my presents. As is traditional, here is the detail of my book haul (which some of you ill already have seen a photo of on Facebook.

• How to Ruin a Queen by Jonathan Beckman – Marie Antoinette, the stolen diamonds and the scandal that shook the French throne; had me at diamonds. Oh, and scandal…
• Bird in a Cage by Frederic Dard – deadly deceit in 19602s Paris
• Summer of Night by Dan Simmons – “It’s the summer of 1960 and in the small town of Elm Haven, Illinois, five twelve-year-old boys are forging the powerful bonds that a lifetime of change will not break. […] But amid the sundrenched cornfields their loyalty will be pitilessly tested.“
• The Fisherman by John Langan – “It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman“
• Margaret Pole by Susan Higginbotham – “Of the many executions ordered by Henry VIII, surely the most horrifying was that of sixty-seven-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, hacked to pieces on the scaffold by a blundering headsman.”

As is also traditional, I am now on a book-buying freeze, probably until end of March, certainly until end of February, when only pre-orders well cross the threshold chez Bride.