#EndOfTheYear #BookBlast #2019 #ReadingRecommendations

Everyone is busy writing end of year posts, And I honestly admire and respect those who can produce a cohesive list whilst I wail like a child going ‘BUT I LOVED THEM ALL!’

Sadly, this is a lie as evidence by my ‘abandoned’ shelf on Goodreads, but this year has genuinely been a banner year for me, reading wise, with a higher than average proportion of reads scoring 4-5 stars (some I would have given all the stars ion the sky tbh but that’s just greedy).

Here, in case you missed any of them, are some of my standouts of 2019. They are gripping, life changing, moving and revelatory books that have challenged me as a reader and lingered way after closing the last page.

I hope you enjoy them and please shout out to your top reads, recommend me some of your favourites too!

‘The Taking Of Annie Thorne’ by C.J Tudor

One night, Annie went missing. Disappeared from her own bed. There were searches, appeals. Everyone thought the worst. And then, miraculously, after forty-eight hours, she came back. But she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what had happened to her. Something happened to my sister. I can’t explain what. I just know that when she came back, she wasn’t the same. She wasn’t my Annie. I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, that sometimes I was scared to death of my own little sister.

Creepy, chilling and featuring my second favourite terrifying thing(scary dolls) this book is an absolute stellar followup to debut ‘The Chalk Man’ and January 2020 cannot bring her next novel, ‘The Other People’quickly enough!

Twitter @cjtudor

 

‘The Mating Habits Of Stags’ by Ray Robinson

Midwinter. As former farmhand Jake, a widower in his seventies, wanders the beautiful, austere moors of North Yorkshire trying to evade capture, we learn of the events of his past: the wife he loved and lost, their child he knows cannot be his, and the deep-seated need for revenge that manifests itself in a moment of violence. On the coast, Jake’s friend, Sheila, receives the devastating news. The aftermath of Jake’s actions, and what it brings to the surface, will change her life forever. But how will she react when he turns up at her door? As beauty and tenderness blend with violence, this story transports us to a different world, subtly exploring love and loss in a language that both bruises and heals.

Searing, beautiful and life changing, this is a character study of the land that a man lives on and how it ultimately changes him as he grows older. The link between man and nature is vividily explored in one of the best books I have ever read.

Twitter @EyeAndLightning

‘Call Me Star Girl’ by Louise Beech

Tonight is the night for secrets…

Pregnant Victoria Valbon was brutally murdered in an alley three weeks ago – and her killer hasn’t been caught.

Tonight is Stella McKeever’s final radio show. The theme is secrets. You tell her yours, and she’ll share some of hers.

Stella might tell you about Tom, a boyfriend who likes to play games, about the mother who abandoned her, now back after twelve years. She might tell you about the perfume bottle with the star-shaped stopper, or about her father …

What Stella really wants to know is more about the mysterious man calling the station … who says he knows who killed Victoria, and has proof.

Tonight is the night for secrets, and Stella wants to know everything…

With echoes of the chilling Play Misty for Me, Call Me Star Girl is a taut, emotive and all-consuming psychological thriller that plays on our deepest fears, providing a stark reminder that stirring up dark secrets from the past can be deadly…

Literary chameleon Louise Beech has done it again with this heart redning novel of crime, tragedy, ghosts and late night radio-it’s superb, you need to know nothing else other than that.

Twitter @LouiseWriter 

‘The Beat Of The Pendulum’ by Catherine Chidgey

Every day for a year, Catherine Chidgey recorded the words and language she came across during her day-to-day life – phone calls, television commercials, emails, radio shows, conversations with her family, street signs and satnav instructions. From these seemingly random snippets, she creates a fascinating portrait of modern life, focusing on the things that most people filter out.

Chidgey listens in as her daughter, born through surrogacy, begins to speak and develop a personality, and her mother slips into dementia. With her husband, she debates the pros and cons of moving to a new town. With her publisher, she discusses the novel she is writing. While, all around, the world is bombarding her with information.

In The Beat of the Pendulum, Chidgey approaches the idea of the novel from an experimental new direction. It is bold, exciting, funny, moving and utterly compelling.

Unlike anything else I have read this year, or ever, this puts you right inside the author’s head for the whole of the year that it took to write this. It is so difficult to categorise but I genuinely felt the rhythym of the book began ticking along with the sound of my caridac output and the reading/breathing/heartbeats became a synchronous movement. Superb.

Twitter @CathChidgey

‘An Isolated Incident’ by Emily Maguire

When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm ensues.

Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm are Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparently easy-going nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smarts that only experience can bring, and May Norman, a young reporter with high ideals sent to cover the story.

An Isolated Incident is a humane and beautifully observed tale of everyday violence, the media’s obsession with the murders of pretty young women and the absence left in the world when someone dies.

How do you begin to grieve for a relative whose death is being used as a flagpole on which to hang social responsibility, the rights of women, murder and small town minds? Unflinchingly brilliant in its depiction of the public face of giref, this is a wonderful underrated read.

‘The Girl He USed To Know’ by Tracey Garvis Graves

Annika Rose likes being alone.
She feels lost in social situations, saying the wrong thing or acting the wrong way. She just can’t read people. She prefers the quiet solitude of books or playing chess to being around others. Apart from Jonathan. She liked being around him, but she hasn’t seen him for ten years. Until now that is. And she’s not sure he’ll want to see her again after what happened all those years ago.

Annika Rose likes being alone.
Except that, actually, she doesn’t like being alone at all.

This book broke me. It was absolutely the most side-swiping book I have read in this field, I expected to enjoy it but the tale of Annika and Jonathan threw me for a loop and had me bawling like a child. It was incredibler and the most honest love story I have read in a long time.

Twitter @tgarvisgraves

‘The Weight Of A Human Heart’ by Ryan O’Neill

A series of graphs illustrate the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary brawl – and an affair – play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother’s disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter.

Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, this collection by the award-winning author of Their Brilliant Careers turns the rules of storytelling on their head.

Ranging in setting from Australia to Africa to China and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart was the first published fiction by this remarkable Scottish writer based in Australia.

Innovative, extraordinary and thought provoking this is an absolutely wonderful collection.

 

‘Beautiful Star’ by Andrew Swanston

History is brought alive by those it effects, rather than those that created it. In Beautiful Star we meet Eilmer, a monk in 1010 with Icarus-like dreams; Charles I, hiding in 1651, and befriended by a small boy; the trial of Jane Wenham, Witch of Walkern, seen through the eyes of her granddaughter.

 

This is a moving and affecting journey through time, bringing a new perspective to the defence of Corfe Castle, the battle of Waterloo, the siege of Toulon and, in the title story, the devastating dangers of life at sea in 1875.

A beautiful treasure chest of delights, these seven tales are the eptiome of a writer at their prime-simply delightful!

Twitter @AndrewSwanston

 

‘The Gutter Prayer’ by Gareth Hanrahan

A group of three young thieves are pulled into a centuries old magical war between ancient beings, mages, and humanity in this wildly original debut epic fantasy.

The city has always been. The city must finally end.

When three thieves – an orphan, a ghoul, and a cursed man – are betrayed by the master of the thieves guild, their quest for revenge uncovers dark truths about their city and exposes a dangerous conspiracy, the seeds of which were sown long before they were born.

Cari is a drifter whose past and future are darker than she can know.

Rat is a Ghoul, whose people haunt the city’s underworld.

Spar is a Stone Man, subject to a terrible disease that is slowly petrifying his flesh.

Chance has brought them together, but their friendship could be all that stands in the way of total armageddon

This series opener has everything a fantasy fan needs, I completely loved it and am beyond excited for Book 2, ‘The Shadow Saint’, out in January 2020!

‘The Confession Of Frannie Langton’ by Sara Collins

They say I must be put to death for what happened to Madame, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don’t believe I’ve done?

1826, and all of London is in a frenzy. Crowds gather at the gates of the Old Bailey to watch as Frannie Langton, maid to Mr and Mrs Benham, goes on trial for their murder. The testimonies against her are damning – slave, whore, seductress. And they may be the truth. But they are not the whole truth.

For the first time Frannie must tell her story. It begins with a girl learning to read on a plantation in Jamaica, and it ends in a grand house in London, where a beautiful woman waits to be freed.

But through her fevered confessions, one burning question haunts Frannie Langton: could she have murdered the only person she ever loved?

 

‘The Girl At The Window’ by Rowan Coleman

Ponden Hall is a centuries-old house on the Yorkshire moors, a magical place full of stories. It’s also where Trudy Heaton grew up. And where she ran away from…

Now, after the devastating loss of her husband, she is returning home with her young son, Will, who refuses to believe his father is dead.

While Trudy tries to do her best for her son, she must also attempt to build bridges with her eccentric mother. And then there is the Hall itself: fallen into disrepair but generations of lives and loves still echo in its shadows, sometimes even reaching out to the present…

A hauntingly beautiful story of love and hope, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Memory Book and The Summer of Impossible Things

‘The Outsider’ by Stephen King

When an eleven-year-old boy is found murdered in a town park, reliable eyewitnesses undeniably point to the town’s popular Little League coach, Terry Maitland, as the culprit. DNA evidence and fingerprints confirm the crime was committed by this well-loved family man.

Horrified by the brutal killing, Detective Ralph Anderson, whose own son was once coached by Maitland, orders the suspect to be arrested in a public spectacle. But Maitland has an alibi. And further research confirms he was indeed out of town that day.

As Anderson and the District Attorney trace the clues, the investigation expands from Ohio to Texas. And as horrifying answers begin to emerge, so King’s propulsive story of almost unbearable suspense kicks into high gear.

Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy but there is one rock-hard fact, as unassailable as gravity: a man cannot be in two places at the same time. Can he?

So there we have it!
You can guarentee that as soon as I press the ‘publish’ button, about 10 others will immediately leap to mind, but if you haven’t read any of the above titles, or are in any way curious, I can thoroughly recommend THEM ALL!!

Any recommendations that you have, please feel free to chuck them my way !