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Book Clubs! |
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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 com Bloomsbury Reading Guides Penguin Readers' Group Faber & Faber's Reading Groups Book Club Girl Blog  No One Is Here Except All
Of Us,Ramona Ausubel In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.  Ethan Frome,Edith Wharton Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Samantha Harvey It is late summer in London. Leonard Deppling returns to the capital from Scotland, where he has spent the past year nursing his dying father. Missing from the funeral was his older brother William, who lives in the north of the city with his wife and three young sons. Leonard is alone, and rootless - separated from his partner, and on an extended sabbatical from work. He moves in with William, hoping to renew their friendship, and to unite their now diminished family. William is a former lecturer and activist - serious, defiantly unworldly and forever questioning - a man who believes that happiness and freedom come only from knowing oneself, and who spends his life examining the extent of his ignorance: running informal meetings with ex-students. Leonard realises he must drop his expectations about the norms of brotherhood and return to the 'island of understanding' the two have inhabited for so long. Yet for all his attempts at closeness, Leonard comes to share his late father's anxieties about the eccentricities of William's behaviour. But it seems William has already set his own fate in motion, when news comes of a young student who has followed one of his arguments to a shocking conclusion. Rather than submit, William embraces the danger in the only way he knows how - a decision which threatens to consume not only himself, but his entire family. Set against the backdrop of tabloid frenzies and an escalating national crisis, All Is Song is a novel about filial and moral duty, and about the choice of questioning above conforming. It is a work of remarkable perception, intensity and resonance.  Ed King,David Guterson In 1962, actuary Walter Cousins makes the biggest mistake of his life. When mild-mannered Walter – ‘a man who weighs risk for a living’ – sleeps with the sharp-tongued, not-quite-legal British au pair, Diane Burroughs, he can have no sense of the magnitude of his error. For this brief affair sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions, upending Sophocles's immortal tale of fate, free will, and forbidden desire. At the centre is Ed King, an infant given up for adoption who becomes one of the world's richest and most powerful men. But beneath the sizzling story of Ed's seemingly inexorable rise to fame and fortune is a dark and unsettling destiny, one that approaches with ever-increasing suspense as the book reaches its shattering and surprising conclusion. An assured, propulsively written epic novel of unstoppable force, Ed King is a classic of contemporary American life: a daringly told story of a man and a myth, of blindness and narcissism, and of the precarious foundations on which carefully constructed lives are built – and timeless stories are created. From the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars, a dazzling, darkly funny, extraordinary modern take on an ancient tragedy  The Family Fang,Kevin Wilson Caleb and Camille Fang have dedicated their lives to making great art. But for their children, Annie and Buster, who have been unwillingly involved in their parents’ crazy performances for as long as they can remember, their ‘art’ is an embarrassment. As soon as the children grow up they flee home, desperate to escape the chaos of their parents’ world. But when the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have no choice but to go back. And whether the kids agree to participate or not, Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance that will finally determine what’s more important: their family or their art. The Family Fang is an utterly unique, moving and hilarious novel about one of life’s greatest mysteries: the relationship between parents and their children.  Sanctuary Line,Jane Urquhart Set in the present day on a farm at the shores of Lake Erie, Jane Urquhart's stunning new novel weaves elements from the nineteenth-century past, in Ireland and Ontario, into a gradually unfolding contemporary story of events in the lives of the members of one family that come to alter their futures irrevocably. There are ancestral lighthouse-keepers, seasonal Mexican workers; the migratory patterns and survival techniques of the Monarch butterfly; the tragedy of a young woman's death during a tour of duty in Afghanistan; three very different but equally powerful love stories. Jane Urquhart brings to vivid life the things of the past that make us who we are, and reveals the sometimes difficult path to understanding and forgiveness. |
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, engaging
discussions. The full Spring 2012 selection from the Richard & Judy Book Club is here, and from the TV Book Club is here. The Ireland AM Book Club is reading Kevin Barry's City of Bohane in January.  Forty years in the
future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast
of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split
along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town,
but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the
tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs
of Big Nothin' that the city really lives. For years, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there's trouble in the air. They say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight... And then there's his mother. City of Bohane is a visionary novel that blends influences from film and the graphic novel, from Trojan beats and calypso rhythms, from Celtic myth and legend, from fado and the sagas, and from all the great inheritance of Irish literature. A work of mesmerising imagination and vaulting linguistic invention, it is a taste of the glorious and new. Watch an interview with the author here. 
Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the
lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are
on the move, in the air and on the make in David Lodge's
satirical Small World.
It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement,
where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners
of the globe, and romance is in the air... The BBC Radio 4 Book Club is reading The Beatles, the authorised biography by Hunter Davies.  There's only one book
that ever truly got inside the Beatles and this is it.
The landmark, worldwide bestseller that has grown with
the Beatles ever since. During 1967 and 1968 Hunter Davies spent eighteen months with the Beatles at the peak of their powers as they defined a generation and rewrote popular music. As their only ever authorised biographer he had unparalleled access - not just to John, Paul, George and Ringo but to friends, family and colleagues. There when it mattered, he collected a wealth of intimate and revealing material that still makes this the classic Beatles book - the one all other biographers look to. The BBC Radio 4 Book At Bedtime is Louisa Young's award-winning My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You.  Set on the Western
Front, in London and in Paris, My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You is a moving and
brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and
how war affects those left behind as well as those who
fight.While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead? The BBC Radio 4 Book Of The Week is A Shed Of One's Own by Marcus Berkmann.  For
many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due
warning. One day you are young, free and single; the
next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird
tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it
seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect,
but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a
motorbike.Marcus Berkmann isn’t having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men is now determined to find some light in the all-consuming darkness. Musing over birth, death and all the messy stuff in between, he concludes that however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years’ time. His brutally candid dispatch from the frontline is not for the faint-hearted, which is to say anyone under thirty-five. The New Yorker Book Club is reading Chad Harbach's novel, The Art of Fielding.  In The Art of Fielding,
we see young men who know that their four years on the
baseball diamond at Westish College, "a little school in
the crook of the thumb of the baseball glove that is
Wisconsin," are all they have left of their sporting
careers. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder,
Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his
dream – and theirs, vicariously – alive, until a routine
throw goes disastrously off course, and the fates of
five people are upended. After his throw threatens to ruin his roommate Owen’s future, Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his; Mike Schwartz, the team captain and Henry’s best friend, realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own; college president Guert Affenlight, a longtime widower, falls unexpectedly and dangerously in love; and his daughter, Pella, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warm-hearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment – to oneself and to others. |
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