Books from the Backlog

Books from the Backlog is a weekly linkup hosted by Carole's Random Life in Books. As she says, "Books from the Backlog is a fun way to feature some of those neglected books sitting on your bookshelf unread.  If you are anything like me, you might be surprised by some of the unread books hiding in your stacks."

I really haven't been able to make myself do a lot of reading lately. Just can't seem to settle down long enough. Keep feeling like I should be making masks or disinfecting something.

What I have been doing is spending a huge amount of time going through my "Want to Read" shelf at GoodReads. I started out thinking I would thin it out a bit, but of course just ended up adding more books to it. The thing that really surprised me was just how far back my TBR list goes – I started it back in 2008! One of the first books I added was Daphne, by Justine Picardie (first published 2006, by Bloomsbury).

Here's the description from GoodReads:

It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful and famous, despairs as her marriage falls apart. Restlessly roaming through Menabilly, her remote mansion by the sea in Cornwall, she is haunted by regret and by her creations—especially Rebecca, from her most famous novel. Seeking distraction from her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Brontë sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic scholar Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable. 

In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a fleeting courtship with a man considerably older than her, struggles with her Ph.D. thesis on du Maurier and the Brontës. Her husband, still seemingly in thrall to his brilliant, charismatic first wife, is frequently distant and mysterious, and she can't find a way to make the large, imposing house in Hampstead feel like her own. Retreating instead into the comfort of her library, she becomes absorbed in a fifty-year-old literary mystery… 

Daphne is a tale of obsession and possession, of stolen manuscripts and forged signatures, of love lost and love found: a tantalizing literary mystery that takes its reader into the heart of Daphne du Maurier's world. 

Daphne du Maurier's classic Gothic novel Rebecca is one of my favorite reads, and I've always been fascinated by the Brontës, too. So Picardie's book sounds like something I'd love. You wouldn't think it would take me more than ten years to get to it. Would you?

So what d'ya think? Sound good to you? Like something you'd read? Or maybe you've read this one already? I think I'll keep it on the Want-to-Read list. For now, anyway.

Happy reading, everyone!