Mailbox Monday #17

 It's my first week of full freedom and I can.not.wait to sleep, read, cuddle my cat, drink coffee, lie in the sun, etc. I mean, the sun first needs to show itself but there is hope. I also finally booked train tickets to go see my mother for the first time since last September, so that is a definite highlight. I had a pretty good week last week, staying on top of the memes and posting three reviews:

• True Crime Story by Joseph Knox
• This one was a rollercoaster ride, would highly recommend!
• The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker
• This one was weird because I shared the review on NetGalley like 7 years ago but never posted it here.... I'm glad to say my thinking and writing has improved since then!
• Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
• Lippman is simply stellar!

But let's get into my new books! Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists. It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Home Sweet Home by Nicole Trope (Bookouture, 8/6/2021)

The most perfect families hide the most shocking secrets. You just have to look close enough…

Everybody wants to live on Hogarth Street – the pretty, quiet road in the suburbs, where everyone knows everyone, and they all look out for each other.

But one summer’s day they discover they don’t know the family across the street at all.

When the Wests moved in, they seemed perfect. Katherine and Josh were so in love, and their five-year-old twins George and Sophie were gorgeous. Except every marriage has problems and every family has secrets.

There is more to the Wests than their emerald-green lawn and ivy-covered gate. Behind closed doors, there are whispered arguments they don’t want the twins to hear. A wife who has made a mistake. A husband with regrets. A mother who will stop at nothing to protect her children.

One morning, everything that has been hidden comes out into the open. When the police are called, and sirens screech through the air, everyone will know the truth about the West family. And Hogarth Street will never be the same again.

A completely gripping psychological thriller about normal family, in a normal house, on a normal street – and their shocking secrets. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Sally Hepworth and Lisa Jewell will be totally addicted to this twist-packed page-turner.

Give me all the suburbian drama and crime! Show me all the messiness behind perfectly maintained exteriors! I will be reading this one asap.

Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva (Columbia University Press, 12/28/2021)

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted and enraptured by the force of his writing.

In this book, Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky’s work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking. Reading across his major novels and shorter works, Kristeva offers incandescent insights into the potent themes that draw her back to the Russian master: God, otherness, violence, eroticism, the mother, the father, language itself. Both personal and erudite, the book intermingles Kristeva’s analysis with her recollections of Dostoyevsky’s significance in different intellectual moments—the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Thaw-era Eastern Bloc, the debates over poststructuralism in 1960s France, and whether it could be said that “everything is permitted” today. Brilliant and vivid, this is an essential book for admirers of both Kristeva and Dostoyevsky. It also features an illuminating foreword by Rowan Williams that reflects on the significance of Kristeva’s reading of Dostoyevsky for his own understanding of religious writing.

Translated by Jody Gladding. Foreword by Rowan Williams.

I mainly know Kristeva through her academic writing on psychoanalysis and the Abject, so I'm really curious to see what she has to say about an author that has always intrigued me!

A Clockwork River by J.S. Emery (Head of Zeus, 10/7/2021)

A sister searches for her missing brother as a new power rises amid the splendour and the squalor of a once great city.

Lower Rhumbsford is a city far removed from its glory days. On the banks of the great river Rhumb, its founding fathers channelled the river's mighty flow into a subterranean labyrinth of pipes, valves and sluices, a feat of hydraulic prowess that would come to power an empire. But a thousand years have passed since then, and something is wrong. The pipes are leaking, the valves stuck, the sluices silted. The erstwhile mighty Rhumb is sluggish and about to freeze over for the first time in memory.

In a once fashionable quarter of the once great city, in the once grand ancestral home of a family once wealthy and well-known, live the last descendants of the city's most distinguished engineer, siblings Samuel and Briony Locke.

Having abandoned his programme in hydraulic engineering, Samuel Locke tends to his vast lock collection, while his sister Briony distracts herself from the prospect of marriage to a rich old man with her alchemical experiments. One night Sam leaves the house carrying five of his most precious locks and doesn't come back...

As she searches for her brother, Bryony will be drawn into a web of ancestral secrets and imperial intrigues as a ruthless new power arises. If brother and sister are to be reunited, they will need the help of a tight-lipped house spirit, a convict gang, a club of antiques enthusiasts, a tribe of troglodytes, the Ladies Whist Club, the deep state, a traveling theatrical troupe and a lovesick mouse.

Epic, rollicking and in love with language, Jacob and Sara Emery's sprawling debut novel of humble kitchen magics and awe-inspiring civil engineering is a rare and delicious commodity – the world's first hydropunk novel.

I very much enjoy the idea of hydropunk, I think this book will be ever so slightly mindblowing! I'm honestly so intrigued by the set-up of it!

What She Knew by Miranda Rijks (Inkubator Books, 7/18/2021)

Nine years ago, Stephanie’s best friend vanished. Now she’s back to haunt her.

Life has been good to Stephanie. Married to college professor, Oliver, with two adorable children, she lives in a lovely house, surrounded by beautiful things.

It hasn’t always been like this.

Nine years ago, Stephanie’s flatmate Alison vanished, presumed murdered. It was a horrible time, and Stephanie tries hard not to think about it.

But when a TV researcher working on a true crime series wants to interview her about the case, Stephanie is forced to confront the past and recognise that she has a deep need to answer one burning question – what happened to Alison?

It soon becomes clear that someone doesn’t want her digging for the truth and is willing to do anything to conceal a shocking web of lies. As her perfect life unravels, Stephanie realises that by opening a door into the past she has woken a sleeping monster. And now it’s her own life that is on the line…

This will be my next thriller read since it's out this month and I'm very into the idea of it already! Give me the True Crime fans within the thriller books, give me friends who have secrets from each other, give me a good life on the edge!

So those are my new books, a nice mix between thrillers, some Fantasy and a bit of Non-Fiction! What's in your Mailbox?