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Reading Groups Collection


The Tattooist of Auschwitz | These Dividing Walls | This Is How It Always Is | The Thread | Three Daughters of Eve |
Tin Man | To the Bright Edge of the World | Together | Transcription | The Travelling Cat Chronicles | Tulip Fever |
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The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

Book cover of The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris This novel is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews, who survived Auschwitz and eventually made their home in Australia. In that terrible place, Lale was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival - literally scratching numbers into his fellow victims' arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.

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These Dividing Walls by Fran Cooper

Book jacket for These Dividing Walls by Fran CooperIn a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building. Within its walls, people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone, while others wish they did not. A woman with silver-blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else's, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers. Into this courtyard arrives Edward. Still bearing the sweat of a channel crossing, he takes his place in an attic room to wait out his grief. But in distant corners of the city, as Paris is pulled taut with summer heat, there are those who meet with a darker purpose.

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This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Book jacket for This Is How It Always Is by Laurie FrankelRosie and Penn always wanted a daughter. Four sons later, they decide to try one last time - and their beautiful little boy Claude is born. Life continues happily for this big, loving family until the day when Claude says that, when he grows up, he wants to be a girl. As far as Rosie and Penn are concerned, bright, funny and wonderful Claude can be whoever he or she wants. But as problems begin at school and in the community, the family faces a seemingly impossible dilemma: should Claude change, or should they and Claude try to change the world?

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The Thread by Victoria Hislop

Book jacket for The Thread by Victoria HislopThessaloniki, 1917. As Dimitri Komninos is born, a devastating fire sweeps through the Greek city where Christians, Jews and Muslims live side by side. 5 years later, Katerina Sarafoglou's home in Asia Minoris destroyed by the Turkish army. Losing her mother in the chaos, she flees across the sea to an unknown destination in Greece.

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Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak

Book cover of Three Daughters of EvePeri, a wealthy Turkish housewife, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past - and a love - Peri had tried desperately to forget. The photograph takes Peri back to Oxford University, as an eighteen year old sent abroad for the first time. To her dazzling, rebellious Professor and his life-changing course on God. To her home with her two best friends, Shirin and Mona, and their arguments about Islam and femininity. And finally, to the scandal that tore them all apart.

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Tin Man by Sarah Winman

Book cover of Tin ManThis novel begins with a painting won in a raffle: 15 sunflowers, hung on the wall by a woman who believes that men and boys are capable of beautiful things.
And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael, who are inseparable. And the boys become men, and then Annie walks into their lives, and it changes nothing and everything.

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To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

Book cover of To the Bright Edge of the WorldLieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester receives the commission of a lifetime when he is charged to navigate Alaska's hitherto impassable Wolverine River, with only a small group of men. The Wolverine is the key to opening up Alaska and its rich natural resources to the outside world, but previous attempts have ended in tragedy. Forrester leaves behind his young wife, Sophie, newly pregnant with the child he had never expected to have. Adventurous in spirit, Sophie does not relish the prospect of a year in a military barracks while her husband carves a path through the wilderness. What she does not anticipate is that their year apart will demand every ounce of courage and fortitude of her that it does of her husband.

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Together by Julie Cohen

Book cover of TogetherOn a morning that seems just like any other, Robbie wakes in his bed, his wife Emily asleep beside him, as always. He rises and dresses, makes his coffee, feeds his dogs, just as he usually would. But then he leaves Emily a letter and does something that will break her heart. As the years go back all the way to 1962, Robbie's actions become clearer as we discover the story of a couple with a terrible secret - one they will do absolutely anything to protect.

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Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Book cover of Transcription by Kate AtkinsonIn 1940, 18-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realise that there is no action without consequence. 

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The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

Book cover of The Travelling Cat ChroniclesNana the cat is on a road trip. He is not sure where he's going or why, but it means he gets to sit in the front seat of a silver van with his beloved owner, Satoru. Side by side they cruise around Japan through the changing seasons, visiting old friends. There's the brusque farmer for whom cats are just ratters; the warm-hearted couple who run a pet-friendly B&B; the mournful husband whose cat-loving wife has just left him. And even a dog who forces Nana to reassess his disdain for the canine species. But what is the purpose of this road trip? And why is everyone so interested in Nana? Nana does not know and Satoru won't say. But when Nana finally works it out, his small heart will break.

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Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

Book jacket for Tulip Fever by Deborah MoggachDeborah Moggach examines sexual betrayal and human failings in 17th century Amsterdam as the characters in 'Tulip Fever' move inexorably towards a grand deception and a tragic climax.

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Page last updated: 1st November 2023