Top Ten Tuesday; Books With Colours In The Titles

It's Tuesday and time for a new Top Ten Tuesday post, courtesy of That Artsy Reader Girl. The theme of the week was books with colours in the titles.

My picks are;

Blue Is The Warmest Color by Julie Maroh

Description from Goodreads

Blue is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel about growing up, falling in love, and coming out. Clementine is a junior in high school who seems average enough: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school. When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Their attraction is instant and electric, and Clementine find herself in a relationship that will test her friends, parents, and her own ideas about herself and her identity.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Description from Goodreads

Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral Mrs Alice Drablow, the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House, unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. The house stands at the end of a causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose.

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Description from Goodreads

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously--and at great risk--documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives. Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.

The Burning Blue by James Holland

Description from Goodreads

Joss Lambert has always been a loner, constrained by a secret from his past, until he finds friendship and solace firstly with Guy Liddell, a friend from school, and then with Guy's family, who welcome him into their farmhouse home. Joss increasingly comes to depend upon the Liddells and treats Alvesdon Farm as the one place where he feels not only appreciated but also truly happy. The idyll cannot last. With war looming, Joss is forced to confront the past. He escapes through flying, becoming a fighter pilot in the RAF. But with the onset of war, even the Liddells's world is crumbling. As Joss is fighting for his life in the Battle of Britain, so he begins to fall madly in love with Stella - Guy's twin - but with tragic consequences. Leaving England and the Liddells far behind, he continues to fly amid the sand and heat of North Africa, until his hopes and dreams are seemingly shattered for good.

The Blackhouse by Peter May

Description from Goodreads

A brutal killing takes place on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland: a land of harsh beauty and inhabitants of deep-rooted faith.

A MURDER

Detective Inspector Fin Macleod is sent from Edinburgh to investigate. For Lewis-born Macleod, the case represents a journey both home and into his past.

A SECRET

Something lurks within the close-knit island community. Something sinister.

A TRAP

As Fin investigates, old skeletons begin to surface, and soon he, the hunter, becomes the hunted.

Scarlet Fever by David Stever

Description from Goodreads

He’s a hard-drinking ex-cop with nothing to prove. She’s a gorgeous mystery woman with everything to lose.

She needs his help. He just needs HER.

The mobsters won’t know what hit them.

Private investigator Johnny Delarosa’s seen it all. Cheating spouses, greedy embezzlers, insurance scammers—it’s all part of the game to him. But when a drop-dead gorgeous redheaded mystery woman walks into his bar and drops a $20,000 retainer in his lap, he knows he’s met his match.

Claire Dixon wants the hard-drinking Johnny to find $2 million that was stolen from her mob-wife mother thirty years ago, but the money is only half the mystery. When every lowlife in Port City suddenly comes out of the woodwork to claim their share of the take, suddenly Claire’s nowhere to be found—and the body count starts to climb.

With the help of a bright young amateur sleuth, can Johnny crack the case before the streets of his beloved Port City run scarlet?

With a wink and a nod to the hard-boiled detective fiction of yesteryear, David Stever offers up a heaping helping of old-school noir sure to satisfy every thriller lover, even genre purists. Scarlet Fever is the first book in the Johnny Delarosa Mysteries.

Fans of Sunburn by Laura Lippman, Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King, The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn, and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler are sure to love this book.

This book is for anyone who likes reading about:

Crime fiction

Hard-boiled detectives

Femme fatales

Gangsters and mob bosses

Mysteries and thrillers

The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abdulhawa

Description from Goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin, a novel about four generations of powerful Palestinian women in Gaza.

Violently pushed from their ancient farming village of Beit Daras, a Palestinian family tries to reconstitute itself in a refugee camp in Gaza. The men here, those who have escaped prison or the battlefields, worry over making ends meet, tend their tattered pride, join the resistance. The women are left to be breadwinners and protectors, too. Nazmiyeh is the matriarch, the center of a household of sisters, daughters, granddaughters, whose lives threaten to spin out of control with every personal crisis, military attack, or political landmine. Her brother’s granddaughter Nur is stuck in America; her own daughter’s son, traumatized in an Israeli assault, slips into another kind of exile; her daughter has cancer and no access to medicine. Their neighbor, the Beekeeper’s wife, will extract the marijuana resin to shrink her tumor, but it is also Nazmiyeh’s large heart and zest for life that heals, that will even call Nur back from the broken promise of America and set her on a new path. All Nazmiyeh’s loved ones will return to her, and ultimately journey further, to that place between the sky and water where all is as it once was, and where all will meet again.

Born of a troubling history that continues to rage forth and claim its dead, The Blue Between Sky and Water is a novel of survival and of the vivid, powerful women who manage to enlarge and enliven the everyday. It is a novel for our time—and one that is also timeless.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Description from Goodreads

Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.

As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed

Description from Goodreads

For fans of Half of a Yellow Sun, a stunning novel set in 1930s Somalia spanning a decade of war and upheaval, all seen through the eyes of a small boy alone in the world.

Aden, Yemen, 1935; a city vibrant, alive, and full of hidden dangers. And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world.

Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of East Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere.

And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camps, across the seas to Britain and freedom.

This story of one boy's long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people; a story of displacement and family.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Description from Goodreads

Paama's husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents' home in the village of Makendha, now he's disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones – the djombi – who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world.

Unfortunately, not all the djombi are happy about this gift: the Indigo Lord believes this power should be his and his alone, and he sets about trying to persuade Paama to return the Chaos Stick.

Chaos is about to reign supreme...