Book recommendations for culture starved maternity leave!

[Imisscoffee2021]

Hello! I'd love some book recommendations please, I'm on maternity leave and due to sleep deprivation can't delve into anything particularly onerous or extremely wordy but would love to hear some suggestions of things people have read lately and loved! Would love to have a novel to look forward to when I'm nap trapped three times a day, I think I've read the whole Internet in the last 3 months 😅

My type of rereading book habit tends to be Austen, Pratchett, Tolkien, hiking, survival, history (social especially) etc as topics but I'm open to anything really (except horror or crime), just have to stop rereading the same novels atm!

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - a murder mystery but interwoven with fantasy and the supernatural too.

I can't even start to understand how the author plotted it out. But it's a great read, and I too read it slowly over a few months!

Fourth wing, the sequel Iron Flame is out tomorrow as well

Have you read Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St Mary's series? Good fun and would be easy to put down and be able to get back into it when you picked it up again.

A book that I enjoyed that is a bit different was Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn. It's non-fiction about places that have been deserted by humans and reclaimed by nature. I found it fascinating.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Woman-Photograph-Stephanie-Butland-ebook/dp/B07LDDJX1Q

Woman in the photograph

Lois McMaster Bujold. The Vorkosigan series is great fun and should keep you busy for a while. The Chalion books - very different genre but also very readable.

For Tolkien-type high fantasy, Helen Lowe's Wall of Night series is well worth it if you can bear that the final fourth book isn't out yet. It's beautifully written, female protagonist, and has a moral ambiguity in its basic setup that will be very interesting to see how it wiĺ be resolved in the final volume.

I really loved The Invisible Library series by Geniveve Cogman, they're fantasy set in an expansive world but not high fantasy so far easier to read and it's a decent sized series so plenty to keep you going.

I also recently got into the cosy mystery genre I know you said no crime thrillers but these are brilliant I've started a series set around a bakery called The Bakeshop Mystery Series by Ellie Alexander, they're such cute easy reads and I've been devouring the series.

Claire Keegan is easy to read but satisfying