My to be read pile is more like a few stacks than a pile. And when I say stacks I mean a room. I have a TBR room. In fact, it’s more like two rooms. I’m planning on asking one of the neighbours if I can buy their house soon so that my family have somewhere to live when the books take over.  It obviously doesn’t stop me from adding to it regularly or visiting the library for a temporary rehoming of books, because books.

I will admit though that I occasionally forget which books are loitering on the bookcase. So I thought I’d start having a rifle through and see what jumped out at me. Sadly for you, inspiration struck and I thought a good way of highlighting them would be looking at older books, newer books and borrowed ones. So the obvious extension was to through in something blue.

So, in each post I will showcase a book that has been on my TBR for some time, a new one, be it one I’ve recently bought or a book with a future publication date, a book I have borrowed and one with a blue cover.

The old book this time is Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey, published by Simon and Schuster on 23 April 2015.

1943, in the ruins of Blitzed London…
Stella Thorne and Dan Rosinski meet by chance and fall in love by accident. Theirs is a reluctant, unstoppable affair in which all the odds are stacked against them: she is newly married, and he is an American bomber pilot whose chance of survival is just one in five.
… He promised to love her forever
Seventy years later Dan makes one final attempt to find the girl he has never forgotten, and sends a letter to the house where they shared a brief yet perfect happiness. But Stella has gone, and the letter is opened by Jess, a young girl hiding from problems of her own. And as Jess reads Dan’s words, she is captivated by the story of a love affair that burned so bright and dimmed too soon. Can she help Dan find Stella before it is too late?
Now forever is finally running out.

The new book is The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Radcliffe, published by William Collins on 6 February 2020.

How do you learn to be a grown-up when you’ve never got over the death of a parent? What makes a ‘happy family’? What happens if you can’t stop thinking about an ex? And what does commitment really mean?

In this genre-defying memoir, Sophie Ratcliffe travels through time, space and great literature to capture the complex and often messy nature of life, love – and grief. Beautifully crafted, painfully funny and frank about things that most people keep to themselves, The Lost Properties of Love is a game-changing exploration of the human heart.

The borrowed book is, appropriately enough, a library copy of The Librarian by Salley Vickers, published by Penguin on 1 November 2018.

In 1958, Sylvia Blackwell, fresh from one of the new post-war Library Schools, takes up a job as children’s librarian in a run down library in the market town of East Mole.

Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. But her love affair with the local married GP, and her befriending of his precious daughter, her neighbour’s son and her landlady’s neglected grandchild, ignite the prejudices of the town, threatening her job and the very existence of the library with dramatic consequences for them all.

The Librarian is a moving testament to the joy of reading and the power of books to change and inspire us all.

Finally, the blue book this time is The Wild Book by Juan Villoro, published by Hope Road on 19 September 2019.

Thirteen-year-old Juan’s summer is off to a terrible start. First, his parents separate. Then, almost as bad, Juan is sent away to his strange Uncle Tito’s house for the entire holiday! Who wants to live with an oddball recluse who has zigzag eyebrows and lives inside a mysterious library? As Juan adjusts to his new life among dusty shelves, he notices something weird: the books move on their own! Uncle Tito lets his nephew in on a secret: Juan is a Princeps Reader, which means books respond magically to him, and he’s the only one who can find the elusive, never-before-read Wild Book.

So there we are, four different books just waiting to be read. Have you read any of them? Do you have your own list of old, new, borrowed and blue? Do let me know.