Reading Groups Collection
The Salt Path |
The Secret Life of Bees |
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle |
Shrines of Gaiety |
Shuggie Bain |
The Silence of the Girls |
The Silent Companions |
A Single Thread |
Songbirds |
Still Life |
Stone Blind |
The Storyteller |
The Summer of Impossible Things |
Swimming Lessons |
Swing Time |
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The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
In one devastating week, Raynor and her
husband Moth lost their home of 20 years, just as a terminal diagnosis took away their future together. With nowhere else to go, they decided to walk the South West Coast Path: a 630-mile
sea-swept trail from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. This ancient, wind-battered landscape strips them of every comfort they had previously known. With very little money for food
or shelter, Raynor and Moth carry everything on their backs and wild camp on beaches and clifftops. But slowly, with every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, the walk sets
them on a remarkable journey. They don't know how far they will travel, but - to their surprise - they find themselves on a path to freedom.
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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Lily
has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four years old. Now 14, she yearns for forgiveness and a mother's love. When her only friend, a black servant,
is beaten, the two become fugitives from justice, and end up following a trail left by Lily's mother.
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The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden - one of the guests
summoned to Blackheath for the party - can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle
is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath.
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Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
1926, and in a country
still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with
gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the
enigmatic eldest, Niven whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie's empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the
dazzle of Soho's gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.
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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and
good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright
(like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she
descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie
is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he
tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
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The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
When her
city falls to the Greeks, Briseis's old life is shattered. She is transformed from queen to captive, from free woman to slave, awarded to the god-like warrior Achilles as a prize of war.
And she's not alone. On the same day, and on many others in the course of a long and bitter war, innumerable women have been wrested from their homes and flung to the fighters. The Trojan War
is known as a man's story: a quarrel between men over a woman, stolen from her home and spirited across the sea. But what of the other women in this story, silenced by history? What words did
they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead?
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The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
Newly
married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge. With her new servants resentful and
the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. But inside her new home lies a locked room,
and beyond that door lies a 200-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself.
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A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
It is 1932, and the losses
of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiance and her brother and regarded by society as a 'surplus woman' unlikely to marry, resolves to escape
her suffocating mother and strike out alone. A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger
colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the
Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own
that could just change everything.
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Songbirds by Christy Lefteri
.jpg "Book cover of Songbirds by Christy Lefteri")
Nisha has crossed oceans to give her
child a future. By day she cares for Petra's daughter; at night she mothers her own little girl by the light of a phone. One day, Nisha vanishes. No one cares about the disappearance of a
domestic worker, except Petra, and Nisha's lover, Yiannis. As they set out to search for her, they realise how little they knew about Nisha. What they uncover will change them both forever.
Set in her native Cyprus, Christy Lefteri has crafted a triumphant follow up to `The Beekeeper of Aleppo`, which illuminates the power of the human spirit, and the enduring love of a
mother for her child.
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Still Life by Sarah Winman
1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a
Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian
and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a
particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn's talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses' mind that will shape the trajectory of his life - and of those who love him - for the
next four decades.
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Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
Growing up with her sisters,
Medusa quickly realises that she is the only one who gets older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know. When, in Athene's
temple, desire pushes Poseidon to commit the unforgivable, Medusa's mortal life is changed forever. Athene, furious at the sacrilege committed, directs her revenge on Medusa. The punishment
is that she is turned into a Gorgon: sharp teeth, snakes for hair, and a gaze that will turn any living creature to stone. Appalled by her own reflection, Medusa can no longer look upon
anything she loves without destroying it. She condemns herself to a life of solitude in the shadows to limit her murderous range. That is, until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch
the head of a Gorgon. This is the story of how a young woman became a monster. And how she was never really a monster at all.
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The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
For
seventy years, Josef Weber has been hiding in plain sight.
He is a pillar of his local community.
He is also a murderer.
When Josef decides to confess, it is to Sage Singer, a young woman who trusts him as her friend. What she hears shatters everything she thought she knew and
believed.
As Sage uncovers the truth from the darkest horrors of war, she must follow a twisting trail between terror and mercy, betrayal and forgiveness, love – and revenge.
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The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman
If
you could change the past, would you?
30 years ago, something terrible happened to Luna's mother. Something she's only prepared to reveal after her death. Now
Luna and her sister have a chance to go back to their mother's birthplace and settle her affairs. But in Brooklyn they find more questions than answers, until
something impossible - magical - happens to Luna, and she meets her mother as a young woman back in the summer of 1977. At first Luna's thinks she's going
crazy, but if she can truly travel back in time, she can change things. But in doing anything - everything - to save her mother's life, will she have to
sacrifice her own?
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Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
Gil's
wife, Ingrid has been missing, presumed drowned, for twelve years. A possible sighting brings their children, Nan and Flora, home. Together they begin to
confront the mystery of their mother. Is Ingrid dead? Or did she leave? And do the letters hidden within Gil's books hold the answer to the truth behind his
marriage, a truth hidden from everyone including his own children?
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Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Two girls
dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a
tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but
never quite forgotten, either. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, 'Swing Time' is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are
shaped by these things and how we can survive them.
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Page last updated: 1st November 2023