Welcome to What I’ve Been Reading Lately, a feature where I’ll be giving short reviews of what I’m currently reading:
All links lead to the StoryGraph listing.
Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard
The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late – but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began.
Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there’s no smoke without fire.
A year on, he’s signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it.
Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret. And she’s about to learn that there are some stories that should never be told . . . (Credit: Penguin Ireland)
Always a big fan of Howard’s thrillers! The way she keeps a tense and chilling with her stories has always been a treat for me to read. And her latest thriller is proving to be another tantalizing read that I have a hard time putting down!
Tomorrow Is Beautiful: Poems To Comfort, Uplift and Delight edited by Sarah Crossan
Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words. This poetry anthology provides the antidote, offering calm, hope and peace to all.
Focusing on positivity, this is the perfect collection to dip into whenever you need a boost. Containing a selection of classic poems from Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, as well as contemporary poems chosen by Sarah Crossan – the go-to verse novelist in the UK – this beautiful book will lift your spirits time and time again. An essential read and the perfect gift for anyone in need of comfort, joy and hope. (Credit: Bloomsbury)
After having the first half of 2025 being tumultuous and challenging, I thought picking up a poetry collection that I read back in 2021 would provide me with some comfort and serenity. Looking back at these poems gives me a way to deal with my anxiety and fears but also gives an hopeful and uplifting outlook which we can all use right about now.
The Boy Lost In The Maze by Joseph Coelho
In his new verse novel, Joseph Coelho brilliantly blends Greek myth with a 21st century quest. In Ancient Greece Theseus makes a dangerous and courageous journey to find his father, finally meeting the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. While Theo, a modern-day teenage boy, finds himself on a maze-like quest to find his own father. Each story tells of a boy becoming a man and discovering what true manhood really means,
The path to self-discovery takes Theo through ‘those thin spaces where myth, magic and reality combine’. Doubts, difficulties and dangers must be faced as Theo discovers the man he will become. (Credit: Otter Barry)
Apart from Sarah Crossan, Joseph Coelho always brings the emotion and the magic in novel in verse for teens and with this latest emotional read. I also love how Coelho blends together mythology and reality in a tale of a young teenage trying to come to terms with their identity.
In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space by Irvin Weathersby Jr.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely. (Credit: Viking)
Just finished this one and I knew it was going to be interesting but didn’t think I would like as much as I do right now. With this thought-provoking read that urges us to take a second a look at the art and public spaces that we have so deeply embedded in our history and encouraging readers to take a deeper glance at what may cause us trauma but a chance for us to learn more for a better future generation. Both dynamic and challenging, a book that everyone should read right now.
The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates
Step into a world where:
- Little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men.
- A pornographic deepfake image or video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet.
- Men create ‘perfect’ AI girlfriends who live in their pocket – customised to every last detail, from breast size to eye colour and personality, only lacking the ability to say no.
This isn’t an image of the future. Sex robots, chatbots and the metaverse are here and spreading fast. A new wave of AI-powered technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, is putting women everywhere in danger.
In The New Age of Sexism, Sunday Times bestselling author and campaigner Laura Bates takes the reader deep into the heart of this strange new world. She travels to cyber brothels and visits schools gripped by an epidemic of online sexual abuse, showing how every aspect of our lives – from education to work, sex to entertainment – is being infiltrated by ever-evolving technologies that are changing the way we live and love forever. This rising tide, despite all its potential for good, is a wild west where women’s rights and safety are being sacrificed at the altar of profitability. (Credit: Simon & Schuster UK)
This has been at the top of my list for a while, and I am thrilled that I am able to start it! Bates writing and insight is always delighted to read but with the rise of technology and AI, both topics that I am interested in, I want to pay close attention to what Bates has to say in this one. I know I am going to be angry and sad, but this topic discuss in this book will be of vital importance.
What I Plan to Read Next:
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels. (Credit: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Austen At Sea by Natalie Jenner
In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come visit him in England.
In Philadelphia, Nicholas & Haslett Nelson—bachelor brothers, veterans of the recent Civil War, and rare book dealers—are also in correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, who lures them, too, to England, with the promise of a never-before-seen, rare Austen artifact to be evaluated.
The Stevenson sisters sneak away without a chaperone to sail to England. On their ship are the Nelson brothers, writer Louisa May Alcott, Sara-Beth Gleason—wealthy daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator with her eye on the Nelsons—and, a would-be last-minute chaperone to the Stevenson sisters, Justice Thomas Nash.
It’s a voyage and trip that will dramatically change each of their lives in ways that are unforeseen, with the transformative spirit of the love of literature and that of Jane Austen herself. (Credit: St. Martin’s Press)
Heartbreaker by Anika Hussain
Except as she spends more time with Fahim, against her better judgement, she finds herself falling for him. Unable to talk to Mona about her mixed emotions, and with the mission veering dangerously off course, Saachi will have to embrace her role as a heartbreaker or potentially end up with her own heart broken . . .
Saachi would do anything for her best friend. So when school bad boy Fahim breaks Mona’s heart, Saachi is hellbent on getting revenge. It’s time to put him in his place once and for all.
And so begins Operation Heartbreaker: Saachi will make Fahim fall in love with her and then pull the plug on him – just like he does to every girl he’s ever dated. Simple. (Credit: Hot Key Books)
And There He Kept Her by Joshua Moehling
They thought he was a helpless old man. They were wrong.
When two teenagers break into a house on a remote lake in search of prescription drugs, what starts as a simple burglary turns into a nightmare for all involved. Emmett Burr has secrets he’s been keeping in his basement for more than two decades, and he’ll do anything to keep his past from being revealed. As he gets the upper hand on his tormentors, the lines blur between victim, abuser, and protector.
Personal tragedy has sent former police officer Ben Packard back to the small Minnesota town of Sandy Lake in search of a fresh start. Now a sheriff’s deputy, Packard is leading the investigation into the missing teens, motivated by a family connection. As clues dry up and time runs out to save them, Packard is forced to reveal his own secrets and dig deep to uncover the dark past of the place he now calls home. (Credit: Poisoned Pen Press)
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