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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:
Reading
Group Guides dot comBloomsbury Reading Guides Transworld Reading Guides Random House Reading Guides Pan Macmillan Reading Groups Picador Book Club Penguin Readers' Group Faber & Faber's Reading Groups Hodder & Stoughton Reading Guides Book Club Girl Blog ![]() ![]() ![]() Book
Club
Suggestions Alone In Berlin,Hans Fallada 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 Missing,Tim Gautreaux 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() Half Broke Horses,Jeannette Walls "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. ![]() ![]() ![]() Angle Of Repose,Wallace Stegner 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. |
If you are unable to find a suitable Book
Club
near you, there are numerous ones online, on TV and on the radio with
vibrant, stimulating
discussions. This month, the Barnes & Noble Book Club discussions include Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Beowulf, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith. ![]() ![]() ![]() This epic work tells the story of the Hemings family,
whose close blood ties to the third president of America had been
systematically expunged from history until very recently. Now,
historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemingses
from their origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal
after Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings'
siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets
the
family's compelling saga against the backdrop of revolutionary America,
Paris on the eve of revolution, 1790s Philadelphia and plantation life
at Monticello, Jefferson's estate in Virginia.![]() ![]() The Tubridy
Show Book Club are reading John Carlin's novel, Invictus, in February.
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. 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() 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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