Reading Groups Collection
Across the Bridge | Alentejo Blue | The Amateur Marriage | Amenable Women | Arthur and George | The Auschwitz Violin | Before I Go To Sleep | The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel | Big Brother | Birdsong | Bitter Sweets | Bleeding Kansas | Back to the List
Across the Bridge by Morag Joss
When
a bridge collapses in the Highlands of Scotland, dozens of people vanish into
the river below. A car hired by a woman tourist was filmed pulling onto the
bridge moments before it fell. Now numbered among the missing, the woman seizes
her chance to start her life over. But her new path takes her no father than a
wooden cabin on the riverbank, where she seeks rebirth and freedom from her old
self.
'Joss's narrative inventiveness has always been a marvel, but never more so than in this novel.' - The Washington Post
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali
For
some, Mamarrosa is a place you merely pass through. For others it is somewhere
from which you want to escape. Some people come here to disappear. A small town
in rural Portugal, it is on the way to other places, but you rarely stop there.
And those who do usually have a reason. Men and women, children and old people
all tell their stories, piece by piece, locals, expatriates, tourists alike, and
in so doing assemble the story of the town itself, a tale of exile and
belonging, rich with resonance and regret.
'A kind of Portuguese version of Under Milk Wood... wise, graceful and
supremely elegant'
Daily Telegraph
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
Michael
and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each
other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in the Polish
quarter of Baltimore, he was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervour,
they marry in haste. Pauline, impulsive, volatile, impractical, tumbles
hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious and judgemental, proceeds
deliberately. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. A
seventeen-year-old daughter disappears, and some years later this fractious pair
is forced to pick up the pieces from Haight Ashbury, and start being parents all
over again to a small boy called Pagan. Caught in what feels like a practice
marriage but which couldn't be more real, they seem to be tearing each other
apart - until someone, unexpectedly, shockingly, kicks over the traces.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
The Amenable Women by Mavis Cheek
Flora
Chapman is in her fifties when her dashing and infuriating husband, Edward, dies
in a bizarre ballooning accident. Ever pragmatic, Flora seizes upon her new
freedom and decides to finish Edward's history of Hurcott Ducis, the village
where they've spent their married life. A reference to Anna of Cleves, Henry
VIII's fourth wife, unkindly called the 'Flanders Mare', captures Flora's
attention and later her affection as she sets about her own research in the hope
of elevating Anna's place in history.
Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein's portrait of Anna senses the tug of a
connection and she begins to tell the real story of how she survived her
disastrous Tudor marriage.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
Arthur
and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in
shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire
village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in
Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while
George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they
are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at
the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings
to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two
very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago
constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high
spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all
it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what
we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
'A crime novel, a two-person biography, a romance, a historical novel, and a
philosophical speculation all rolled into one - I enjoyed it very much'
Spectator
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
The Auschwitz Violin by Maria Angels Anglada
In the winter of 1991, at a concert in Krakow, a woman with a marvellously pitched violin meets a fellow musician
who is instantly captivated by her instrument. When he ask her how she obtained it, she reveals the remarkable
story behind its origin... Imprisoned at Auschwitz, Daniel feels his humanity slipping away. Treasured memories of
the young woman he loved become hazier with each passing day. But when Daniel's former identity as a crafter of
fine violins is revealed, the Kommandant and camp doctor use this information to make a cruel wager. And so,
battling exhaustion, Daniel tries to recapture his lost art, knowing all too well the likely cost of failure.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson
Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past,
even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the
story. Welcome to Christine's life.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach
Enticed by advertisements
for a luxury retirement home in India, a group of strangers leave England to begin a new
life. On arrival, however, they discover the palace is a shell of its former self, the staff are more than a little
eccentric and the days of the Raj appear to be long gone. But, as they soon discover, life and love can begin
again, even in the most unexpected circumstances.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
Pandora has looked up to her older
brother Edison since they were children. Now she revels in the anonymity of her
suburban Iowa life, while her brother basks in the limelight as a New York jazz musician. But when Edison arrives
in Iowa, suddenly in need of a place to stay, Pandora literally doesn't recognize him. The once slim, hip pianist
has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? Soon Edison's appalling diet and know-it-all monolgues are driving
Pandora and her husband Fletcher insane. And it's only a matter of time before Fletcher delivers his wife an
ultimatum, it's him or me. With Shriver's distinctive wit and ferocious energy, 'Big Brother' not only examines why
we overeat, but asks more pressingly still: just how much should you sacrifice for someone who refuses to be saved?
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong captures the drama of that era
on both a national and personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young
Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. Over the course of the novel he
suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that
tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experience of
the war itself.
'One of the finest novels of the last forty years'
Mail on Sunday
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki
In 1950s Bengal, Henna Rub, a precocious, wayward teenager, brings off a
brilliant marriage to a wealthy romantic, Ricky Karim, trapping him with a web
of lies that she has spun with her wheeler-dealer father. And so on his wedding
night, believing himself married to an educated, sonnet-reading, tennis-playing
soul mate, Ricky is horrified to discover that his new bride is in fact a lazy,
illiterate, shopkeeper's daughter.
As Ricky and Henna uneasily tolerate their loveless marriage of convenience, the way is paved for a future of double lives and complicit deception - an unspoken family tradition that is inherited by their daughter Shona, who elopes with her secret love to live above a sub continental sweet shop in 1980s south London. But two decades later, with her own children grown, it is Shona who is forced to discover unpalatable truths about her loved ones, and come to terms with the lies which superficially hold the three generations of her family together and which are really keeping them apart.
'By turns witty, thought-provoking, sad and uplifting.'
Sunday Telegraph
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky
Two
families have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over a hundred and fifty
years, their lives connected through generations by history and geography.
Then Gina Haring, bringing with her the liberal air of the big city, moves into a dilapidated house near both farms. Almost every one of the Grelliers is drawn to her, but it is Susan a woman of ephemeral passions, whose involvement with Gina stirs up the wrath of the Schapen clan. The results for her own family will be cataclysmic.
Sara Paretsky's new standalone novel is a stunning exploration of the lives of ordinary people, affected by events over which they have no control, and a seaing portrait of the backbone of the United States of America as it is today.
Contact your local library to request copies from the Reading Groups
Co-ordinator.
Click here to see contact details for
all the libraries
Page last updated: 21st March 2014