WWW Wednesday hosted by Taking on a World of Words. Answer the following questions:
What are you planning to read?
A Shipwreck in Fiji, A Sergeant Akal Singh Mystery by Nilima Rao
June 10, 2025; Soho Crime, historical mystery
Author: Nilima Rao is a Fijian Indian Australian who has always referred to herself as "culturally confused." Working with data by day, she writes in her spare time. A Disappearance in Fiji was her first novel.
Book description: Fiji, 1915: when a purported sighting of Germans on the run from WWI turns deadly, Sergeant Akal Singh must (reluctantly) take up the investigation in this vibrant follow-up to A Disappearance in Fiji.
History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook, July 1, 2025; Soho Crime
Someone is connecting Prof. Daphne Ouverture to the rising star of the university's anthropology department, Sam Taylor. When Sam is murdered, the killer believes Daphne has something of Sam's and is set on finding it. Helped by two detectives, Daphne searches for the "something" that ties her to Sam's death, while juggling teaching and her disastrous love life.
The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher, Jan. 11, 2022; Berkley
Genre: historical fiction
How a humble bookseller fought against incredible odds to bring one of the most important books of the 20th century to the world - James Joyce's Ulysses.
When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself.
When James Joyce's controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.
The Bookseller: the First Hugo Marston Novel by Mark Pryor, Jan. 1, 2012; Seventh Street Books
Genre: mystery
Book description: Max—an elderly Paris bookstall owner—is abducted at gunpoint. His friend, Hugo Marston, head of security at the US embassy, launches a search, enlisting the help of semiretired CIA agent Tom Green. Their investigation reveals that Max was a Holocaust survivor and later became a Nazi hunter. Is his disappearance somehow tied to his grim history, or even to the mysterious old books he sold?
What did you finish reading?
Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura, April 10, 2025; Pushkin Press, NetGalley
Genre: literary fiction
The Covid pandemic in 2020 brings two unlikely souls together as they both hide from their pasts and try to avoid each other and other people while living in the same house as landlady and tenant. The landlady, a former teacher, is so determined to be proper because she is living in the same house with a male, a security guard, that she never sees him and only communicates by notes with the tenant.
This leads to a very bizarre situation, when we wonder at the end, whether the security guard is still alive or has gone, and whether his continued presence is just a dream the landlady lives in. I couldn't decide, and that made the book both unsettling and thought provoking.
