I read this as part of the Canongate read along, and it was so good I raced ahead and finished it way ahead of schedule! So, sorry to the publishers for that one 🙂

Goodreads Synopsis:

Newlyweds Asha and Cyrus build an app that replaces religious rituals and soon find themselves running one of the most popular social media platforms in the world.

Meet Asha Ray.

Brilliant coder and possessor of a Pi tattoo, Asha is poised to revolutionize artificial intelligence when she is reunited with her high school crush, Cyrus Jones.

Cyrus inspires Asha to write a new algorithm. Before she knows it, she’s abandoned her PhD program, they’ve exchanged vows, and gone to work at an exclusive tech incubator called Utopia.

The platform creates a sensation, with millions of users seeking personalized rituals every day. Will Cyrus and Asha’s marriage survive the pressures of sudden fame, or will she become overshadowed by the man everyone is calling the new messiah?

In this gripping, blistering novel, award-winning author Tahmima Anam takes on faith and the future with a gimlet eye and a deft touch. Come for the radical vision of human connection, stay for the wickedly funny feminist look at startup culture and modern partnership. Can technology—with all its limits and possibilities—disrupt love?

Our Review:

Love. Love. Loved this.

When Asha thought up her brand new, revolutionary start up, she had no idea the trouble it would cause. Along with her husband and best friend, she embarked on a journey of self discovery which revealed some ugly truths about the modern world we find ourselves in now.

I loved this one and couldn’t put it down to keep to the read along schedule with Canongate (thank you for my copy guys).

It’s so funny in all the right places, and it also has deeper lessons in going too far and self restraint. It touches on so many different topics – feminism, patriarchy, technology/AI, family dynamics, racism, sexism etc etc. All boldly explored with humour and sensitivity.

Congratulations to Tahmima Anam for a fantastic book, I will absolutely be reading this again in the future! (Also it has such a beautiful cover!)

Overall a fab read.

Goodreads Synopsis:

‘It was only a game’… Until a boy went missing.

‘No one was meant to get hurt’… But a body has been found.

‘Just some innocent fun’… Except one of them is a killer.

Ready or not, here I come.

It’s time to play hide and seek again.

DI Fleet is up against some of the most powerful people in the country as he attempts to discover the truth about what happened on the day of the game…

Our Review:

I loved the police procedural aspect of this one. One of my favourite sub genres. The book started off quite creepy, it’s told over two time lines – now, and when Ben originally went missing. So we can play along with the investigation to a point.

You are very much pointed toward one solution and I think this perhaps made it all the more obvious it wasn’t going that way. But the actual reveal at the end was very good.

If you want a creepy, police procedural and cold case then this is your book. Full of twists and turns and really great characters – most of which are horrible people 🙂

Thanks Viking books for having me on the book tour for this one.

Goodreads Synopsis:

The remote Irish village of Duneen has known little drama but when human remains are discovered on an old farm, suspected to be that of Tommy Burke—a former lover of two different inhabitants—the village’s dark past begins to unravel. As the frustrated sergeant PJ Collins struggles to solve a genuine case for the first time in his life, he unearths a community’s worth of anger and resentments, secrets and regret.

Our review:

This was chosen as a buddy read with a friend, and I was disappointed in the end, although the book absolutely had some really good bits in it. Characters were well written, the plot was good – it may have just needed some tweaking.

So as a quick sum up –

Quaint, cosy, a bit slow at times, but well worth a read if you want something a bit more chilled and not too brain heavy.

So a mixed bag of reads from the last few months.

Will you read any of these?

Happy reading

Becca and Kate