Good morning all. Hope you had a lovely Christmas break. Mine was great, spent in a cottage on the coast with no internet and no phone signal unless you stood on a cliff top. Add to that the fact that it meant I avoided the snow that hit the Midlands and I was a happy girl. Now, unfortunately, I’m back to the grindstone – though at least it’s a short week.

One of the things I realised last week was how many books I have on my Kindle and iBooks that I haven’t read. I have an addiction I think to Amazon’s 99p Deal of the Day and iBooks free book of the week. As this time of year is all about “out with the old and in with the new”, I thought I’d crack on with some of these before starting on the pile of books that were waiting for me under the tree. So, this week, that means I’ll be reading some (definitely not all) of the following, which I’ve owned for at least six months, some at least a year:

Half Bad by Sally Green

Sixteen-year-old Nathan lives in a cage: beaten, shackled, trained to kill. In a modern-day England where two warring factions of witches live amongst humans, Nathan is an abomination, the illegitimate son of the world’s most terrifying and violent witch, Marcus. Nathan’s only hope for survival is to escape his captors, track down Marcus, and receive the three gifts that will bring him into his own magical powers—before it’s too late. But how can Nathan find his father when there is no one safe to trust, not even family, not even the girl he loves?

Keeper of the Light by Diane Chamberlain

Would you walk in a dead woman’s shoes to get your husband back?
You’re on duty in the emergency room when the victim of a gunshot wound loses her life. She is Annie O’Neill. Your husband’s mistress. Olivia can’t watch any longer as her husband grieves the love of his life. Desperate to understand who this perfect woman was, Olivia finds herself on Annie’s doorstep.

Water Music by Margie Orford

When an emaciated three-year-old is found on an icy hillside on the brink of death, profiler Clare Hart discovers no one has reported the dark-haired boy as missing. To further complicate matters, a distraught woman approaches Clare to find her granddaughter, a gifted cellist, who has abandoned her music scholarship and been lured in by a reclusive religious sect and its charismatic leader. As Clare investigates these two cases, the murder of a young couple makes her suspect they are linked in ways she initially finds impossible to fathom. But as the case becomes clearer, she realizes even more is at stake than one girl’s life…

Divergent by Veronica Roth – which I think everyone on the planet may have read but me!

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue–Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is–she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

And finally….

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the “toxic” dishes that he’d savored through their courtship, and spends hours each day to manic cycling. Then, when Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the airport, she doesn’t recognize him. In the years since they’ve seen one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me.

Like I said, I know I won’t be reading them all but they are the ones that appeal to me most out of the many that I have to read. Have you read any of them – what should I start with?

Emma x

p.s. Once again, I’m linking in with Sheila at Book Journey, who has a weekly linky post, It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? I’m also linking in with Sheila’s First Book of the Year, so we’ll see Thursday which of the above that will be.