Reading Groups Collection
The Keeper of Lost Things |
The Keeper of Stories |
Keeping the World Away |
Larchfield |
The Last Days of Leda Grey |
The Lauras |
Lessons in Chemistry |
Lethal White |
The Lie of the Land |
Life After Life |
Light Perpetual |
Little Fires Everywhere |
The Little Paris Bookshop |
Lost for Words |
Love is Blind |
Love Marriage |
Back to the List
The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan
Once
a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life lovingly collecting lost objects, trying to atone for
a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person
he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners. But the final wishes of the Keeper of Lost Things have
unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
The Keeper of Stories by Sally Page
Cleaner
Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them. From recently-widowed Fiona and her son Adam; to opera-singing Geordie; and the awful Mrs 'YeahYeahYeah' and
her fox terrier, Decius, Janice has a unique insight into the community around her. When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B - a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties - she finally meets
someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the keeper of stories, she doesn't have a story to tell. At least, not one she can share. Mrs B is no fool and knows there
is more to Janice than meets the eye. What is she hiding? After all, doesn't everyone have a story to tell?
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Keeping the World Away by Margaret Foster
Following the fictional adventures of an early 20th century painting, this novel also looks at the women whose lives it touches, and what it means to be a woman and an artist.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Larchfield by Polly Clark
It's
early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant,
she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon
shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually,
terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox
When journalist Ed Peters unearths a dusty old photograph of the silent film actress Leda Grey, he is instantly enchanted by her alluring beauty. He discovers she is still
living, in a decaying cliff-top house, and there, after a fifty-year silence, she's finally ready to share her haunting story. She tells of a volatile love affair, of obsession and jealousy,
and the darkly glamorous world of early cinema. She tells of a world filled with secrets and lies, and of a past more sinister than any of the silent films that Leda Grey once starred in.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
The Lauras by Sara Taylor
I didn't
realise my mother was a person until I was 13 years old and she pulled me out of bed, put me in the back of her car, and we left home and my dad with no
explanations. I thought that Ma was all that she was and all that she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong. As we made our way from Virginia to California,
returning to the places where she'd lived as a child in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was
in her life-before-me and the secrets she had kept - even from herself. But when life on the road began to feel normal I couldn't forget the home we'd left
behind, couldn't deny that, just like my mother, I too had unfinished business.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Chemist
Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings
Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things -
her mind. True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's
most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her
following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
When Billy,
a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike's office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled.
While Billy is obviously mentally distressed, and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. But before Strike can question him further,
Billy bolts from his office in a panic.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig
Quentin
and Lottie Bredin, like many modern couples, can't afford to divorce. Having lost their jobs in the recession, they can't afford to go on living in London;
instead, they must downsize and move their three children to a house in a remote part of Devon. Arrogant and adulterous, Quentin can't understand why Lottie
is so angry; devastated and humiliated, Lottie feels herself to have been intolerably wounded. Mud, mice and quarrels are one thing - but why is their rent
so low? What is the mystery surrounding their unappealing new home? The beauty of the landscape is ravishing, yet it conceals a dark side involving poverty,
revenge, abuse and violence which will rise up to threaten them.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
What if you had
the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During
a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live
your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
November 1944.
A German rocket incinerates a South London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant. Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone. But what if it were
possible to resurrect them - to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the twentieth century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances
and redemptions denied them? What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec? What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household? What would
become of Vern's greed - and his helplessness in the face of song? Would light or darkness fill Ben's fragile mind? And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Everyone
in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house
down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours
of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principal
is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and
rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
On a beautifully
restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop; or rather a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the
troubled souls of his customers. The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. But when an enigmatic new neighbour moves into his eccentric apartment building on
Rue Montagnard, Jean is inspired to unlock his heart, unmoor the floating bookshop and set off for Provence in search of the past - and his beloved.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Lost for Words by Stephanie Butland
Loveday
Cardew prefers books to people. If you look carefully, you might glimpse the first lines of the novels she loves most tattooed on her skin. But there are some
things Loveday will never show you. Into her refuge - the York book emporium where she works - come a poet, a lover, a friend, and three mysterious deliveries,
each of which stirs unsettling memories. Everything is about to change for Loveday. Someone knows about her past and she can't hide any longer. She must decide
who around her she can trust. Can she find the courage to right a heartbreaking wrong? And will she ever find the words to tell her own story? It's time to
turn the pages of her past.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Love is Blind by William Boyd
When Brodie is offered a job
in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous
pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again,
Brodie's love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be
grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiance, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin's parents get to
know Joe's firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she
holds most dear, she's also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a 'love marriage' actually means.
If you are logged in as a Reading Group Co-ordinator and want to request this book click back to the list of titles and tell us how many copies you would like.
If you are just browsing click here to search Arena for copies in your local library.
Page last updated: 1st November 2023