Mailbox Monday - May 13th

Mailbox Monday is a meme started by Marcia of To Be Continued. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. It now has a permanent home at the Mailbox Monday blog. Head over and check out other books received during the last week. 

Happy Monday! 
And a Happy Mother's Day to all my readers who celebrated Mother's day yesterday.

It turned out to be a gorgeous Autumn day where I am and we had a family BBQ lunch at home with my children, their partners and my grandchildren. We then travelled to see my mother and had an amazing afternoon tea set up by my daughter.  

 

The books I received during the past week.

From the publisher for review:

Allegra in Three parts by Suzanne Daniel
Publication date: 29th May 2019

Eleven-year-old Allegra shuttles between her grandmothers who live next door to one another but couldn't be more different. Matilde works all hours and instils discipline, duty and restraint. She insists that Allegra focus on her studies to become a doctor. Meanwhile free-spirited Joy is full of colour, possibility and emotion, storing all her tears in little glass bottles. She is riding the second wave of the women's movement in the company of her penny tortoise, Simone de Beauvoir, encouraging Ally to explore broad horizons and live her 'true essence'. Rick lives in a flat out the back and finds distraction in gambling and solace in surfing. He's trying to be a good parent to Al Pal, while grieving the woman linking them all but whose absence tears them apart.

Allegra is left to orbit these three adult worlds wishing they loved her a little less and liked each other a lot more. Until one day the unspoken tragedy that's created this division explodes within the person they all cherish most.

The Bells of Old Tokyo by Anna Sherman
Publication date: 14th may 2019 

From 1632 until 1854, Japan's rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns' city.

An exploration of Tokyo becomes a meditation not just on time, but on history, memory, and impermanence. Through Sherman's journeys around the city and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo follows haunting voices through the labyrinth that is the Japanese capital: an old woman remembers escaping from the American firebombs of World War II. A scientist builds the most accurate clock in the world, a clock that will not lose a second in five billion years. The head of the Tokugawa shogunal house reflects on the destruction of his grandfathers' city: "A lost thing is lost. To chase it leads to darkness." 

Crossings by Alex Landragin
Publication date: 28th May 2019

I didn't write this book. I stole it...

A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other.

The first, 'The Education of a Monster', is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, 'City of Ghosts', is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading. The third, 'Tales of the Albatross', is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time.

An unforgettable tour de force, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes. 

What am I looking forward to reading? 

I am so excited about Allegra in Three Parts  firstly because this is a debut novel and Allegra already sounds like a character everyone will fall in love with and secondly I will be part of the blog tour for this book and will be posting an interview with author Suzanne Daniel.

What Books did your postman deliver this week?

Post a link to your Mailbox Monday or simply list your books in the comments below.