Book Clubs!

Many publishers have reading guides to their books available online which can be useful for starting a Book Club discussion or simply getting more out of a book.   Below are a small selection of links that may be of use:

Alone in Berlin does not place its attention on the dates, figures and events of political history during the Second World War but on the lives of ordinary citizens and their tribulations and hardships living under the Nazi regime in Berlin. Particular focus is on the interplay of characters surrounding one small but defiant campaign. Following their son’s death at the front, Otto and Anna Quangel wrote hundreds of postcards declaring their disgust and protest against the horror going on around them and against a state operating through surveillance, interrogation and, often, false confession. Their postcards led to an agitated response from the Gestapo that involved ruthless investigation, in which everyone was a suspect and innocents were tragically pursued.

Hans Fallada strikingly portrays this harrowing environment with its fearful, sometimes vicious paranoia; a place where ‘half the population is set on locking up the other half’.  Within this state, the looming oppression is also of a kind which can be unseen. Otto Quangel describes danger as ‘somewhere else but I can’t think where’ and goes on to say: ‘We’ll wake up one day and know it was always there, but we never saw it. And then it’ll be too late.’

Fear is the primary instinct pulsating throughout the book. Fallada writes in an honest, clear and gripping manner, unfolding a chase through horror within a grim, often visceral atmosphere. It is the afterword which jolts you into recognition of the fact that this story is not far from the truth. Alone in Berlin was written in 1946 just after Nazi defeat. Fallada was given the file of a working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, whose story became the basis of Quangel’s actions in the book.

However, this book is not completely despairing. If Alone in Berlin stands by a principle, it is to honour your own moral values. In an oppressive state where protest is deemed absolutely inexcusable, any seemingly ‘small’ defiant act is colossal in comparison to the rules that ‘the regime’ has put in place. The lives of these few characters captured so vividly in Alone in Berlin help to highlight and commemorate all those who protested and died from daring to resist the Nazi regime. The testimony of this book provides a painful but positive reminder that their efforts were not in vain. Hopefully the message of this book can also be used to open eyes and raise awareness about the continuing atrocities and oppression of tyrannical regimes across the modern world.

The First World War ended the day Sam Simoneaux`s regiment reached France, but he saw more than enough of its ravages. Returning to New Orleans, he determines to put mayhem and destruction behind him, and to make a fresh start with his wife. But when a little girl is abducted on his watch at a department store, he has no choice but to help find her. Sam takes a guard job on the Mississippi steamboat that her parents work on as musicians, hoping to unearth clues somewhere along the river.

As the boat heads upstream and calls in at ever more lawless settlements, offering excursions with dancing and jazz to its rowdy customers, Sam enforces tolerable behaviour on board. It is ashore the danger lies, where he makes a discovery that not only threatens everyone involved but casts new light on the murder of his own family decades earlier.

Steeped in the langorous rhythms and music of Prohibition Louisiana, The Missing vividly evokes a ragged frontier nation where violence is normal and the law easy to dodge. But Sam Simoneaux knows right from wrong, and what it means to lose a child. Relentlessly suspenseful and profoundly affecting, this is an enthralling tale of vengeance, conscience and redemption by an exceptional writer.

"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls's no nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit.

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery — personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

A Raven Favourite


She's Come Undone,
Wally Lamb

Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up.

In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.

The Tubridy Show Book Club are reading John Carlin's novel, Invictus, in February.

As the day of the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup dawned, and the Springboks faced New Zealand’s all-conquering All Blacks, more was at stake than a sporting trophy. When Nelson Mandela appeared wearing a Springboks jersey and led the all-white Afrikaner-dominated team in singing South Africa’s new national anthem, he conquered the hearts of white South Africa.

Invictus tells the extraordinary human story of how that moment became possible. It shows how a sport, once the preserve of South Africa’s Afrikaans-speaking minority, came to unify the new rainbow nation, and tells of how – just occasionally – something as simple as a game really can help people to rise above themselves and see beyond their differences.
The Ireland AM Book Club has chosen American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld for their February read.

In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell’s husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and controversial.

But it is Alice’s own story - that of a kind, bookish, only child born in the 1940s Midwest who comes to inhabit a life of dizzying wealth and power - that is itself remarkable. Alice candidly describes her small-town upbringing, and the tragedy that shaped her identity; she recalls her early adulthood as a librarian, and her surprising courtship with the man who swept her off her feet; she tells of the crisis that almost ended their marriage; and she confides the privileges and difficulties of being first lady, a role that is uniquely cloistered and public, secretive and exposed.

In Alice Blackwell, Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic and complex heroine yet. American Wife is not a novel about politics. It is a gorgeously written novel that weaves race, class, fate and wealth into a brilliant tapestry. It is a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable, and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare.

The Guardian Book Club is currently reading Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey.  This week, the author explains how a very secular kind of religious experience provided him with the incepting spark of inspiration.

Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force.

Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.
 

The BBC Radio 4 Book At Bedtime is the debut novel by Janet Skeslien Chales, Moonlight In Odessa.

A tragicomic look at the flourishing market for e-mail order brides, Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in pursuit of love and stability, and the lengths that we will go to to help – and hinder – each other in search of a happy ending.

Odessa, Ukraine, is the humour capital of the former Soviet Union, but with prices rising and employment prospects falling, there is little for Odessans to laugh about. After months of searching, Daria, twenty-three and armed with an engineering degree and perfect English, is offered a plum job as a secretary at a foreign company. But there’s a stone in every plum, and in this case it’s her new boss Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him should be the first item on her to-do list.

Loath to give up her new found perks (the taste of real coffee, a new apartment and a salary she and her grandmother can actually live on), Daria manages to evade Harmon’s advances by recruiting her neighbour, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress – a plan that ends up working only too well...

And so Daria finds herself moonlighting as an interpreter at Soviet Unions™, a dating agency specializing in finding gorgeous Odessan brides for lonely Americans. Daria – so adept at spotting the cracks in the relationships she facilitates – soon discovers that she is not immune to the temptations of the American dream herself. An email correspondence with an apparently shy and sensitive American teacher who offers her a new life in San Francisco, leaves her facing a choice between her beloved city – not to mention the attentions of Vlad, a worryingly attractive mafia gangster – and her long-dreamt-of escape to the land of the free.

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