Reading Groups Collection
The Diary of a Nobody | Eat, Pray, Love | Enemies of the Heart | Fixing Shadows | The Flight | For One More Day | The Friday Night Knitting Club | Friday Nights | The Garden of the Finzi-Continis | The Gathering | Gone Girl | Back to the List
The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
Mr Pooter is a man of modest ambitions, content with his
ordinary life. Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen,
impertinent office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care
son Lupin with his unsuitable choice of bride. Try as he might, he cannot avoid
life's embarrassing mishaps. In the bumbling, absurd, yet ultimately endearing
figure of Pooter, the Grossmiths created an immortal comic character and a
superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia - one which also sends
up late Victorian crazes for spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion
for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.
'The funniest book in the world'
Evelyn Waugh
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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Elizabeth
Gilbert is in her thirties, settled in a large house with a husband who wants to
start a family. But she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a rebound
fling later, Elizabeth emerges battered yet determined to find what she's been
missing.
So begins her quest. In Rome, she indulges herself and gains nearly two stone.
In India she finds enlightenment through scrubbing temple floors. Finally, in
Bali, a toothless medicine man reveals a new path to peace, leaving her ready to
love again.
'Utterly of the moment ... it would be a hard heart that did not warm to
Gilbert's intimate sharing of everything'
Guardian
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Enemies of the Heart by Rebecca Dean
Vicky
Hudson is only seventeen when she marries Berthold and moves from her idyllic
Yorkshire home to Berlin. Adjusting to
her new life isn't easy, not least when she discovers that the Remer family are
producing weaponry for the German army.
With war looming, Vicky flees with her children, leaving Berlin and her husband,
behind.
Striking dark-haired beauty Zelda Wallace is eager to meld into Berlin's high
society and sever all ties with her
American identity. But beneath her exotic looks, Zelda holds a deeply hidden
secret that if revealed, could threaten
everything she holds dear...
'An immensely satisfying, sweeping saga...it is one of those engrossing tales
that never seems to let up on incident as we belt through four decades
full of fascinating detail, skilfully written. A book to curl up with and lose
yourself in.'
Sarah Broadhurst
'A masterpiece among masterpieces'
George Bernard Shaw
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The Fixing Shadows by Susan Barrett
1873
- On the night the Duchess of Fainhope is delivered of the baby on whose head
the future of the title rests, her
governess, Miss Mantilla, secretly gives birth to an illegitimate son of her
own. But the noble heir who will secure his mother's status does not survive the
night, while the other, nameless boy thrives.
So a swap is arranged: the dead child for the living. The two women are locked into a pact that will seal their own fates, and that of the Duchess's empire. Embracing the little world of the great house and the teeming streets of London, Fixing Shadows is a wildly entertaining tale of unnatural ambition, mistaken identities, lost boys and disappointed love: a novel as packed full of lives, from the top to the bottom of society, as it is with life.
'There's a lovely, gloomy drollery to the writing... All the dialogue feels
right, as does the evocation of London'
Daily Telegraph
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The Flight by Bryan Melssa
It
is 1945. Twelve million ethnic Germans are forced to flee their ancestral homes
to escape the advancing Soviet army.
Ida is a mother with a single goal: to save her children. As they struggle
through the frozen Baltic landscape and across enemy lines, it becomes clear
that their survival will be entirely dependent on her strength. Ida's is a
terrifying passage, but her quiet bravery in the face of the depravity of war is
captivating.
'Sparse and beautiful, The Flight is a work of authenticity, restraint and
power, recounting one of the least known stories of World War II. Rendered in
understated prose, this vividly imagined landscape becomes all the more
powerful'
Observer
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For One More Day by Mitch Albom
Charley Benetto is a broken man, his life destroyed by
alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits rock bottom
after discovering he won't be invited to his only daughter's wedding. And he
decides to take his own life.
Charley takes a midnight ride to his small hometown: his
final journey. But as he staggers into his old house, he makes an astonishing
discovery. His mother - who died eight years earlier - is there, and welcomes
Charley home as if nothing had ever happened.
What follows is the one seemingly ordinary day so many of
us yearn for: a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain the family
secrets and to seek forgiveness.
'It will resonate with anyone who has suffered a
bereavement only to realise how much about the life of a loved one was unknown
and how many secrets went unshared.'
Sunday Express
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The Friday Night Knitting Club by Charlotte Bingham
It starts almost by accident: the women who buy their
knitting needles and wool from Georgia Walker's store linger for advice, for a coffee,
for a chat and before they know it, every Friday night is knitting night.
And as the needles clack, and the garments grow, the
conversation moves on from the patterns and yarn to life, love and everything.
These women are of different ages, from different backgrounds and facing
different problems, but they are drawn together by threads of affection that
prove as durable as they sweaters they knit.
'The mother of them all: The Friday Night Knitting Club
celebrates the power of women's independence.'
New Statesman
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Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope
It's
Eleanor who starts the Friday nights. From her window she sees two young women
with small children, separate, struggling and plainly lonely - and decides to
ask them in and see what happens.
What happens is that a group gradually forms of six different and disparate women, who become a circle of friends. They range in age from Jules, who is twenty-two and wants to be a DJ, to Eleanor herself, who is a retired professional and walks with a stick. They include one wife, three mothers, three singletons and five working women All of them, variously, value Friday nights.
And then one of them meets a man - an enigmatic, significant man - and the whole dynamic changes. The bonds that have been so closely forged are tested - and some of them break...
Trollope, as ever, can be relied upon to deliver a good read - Mail on Sunday
'Powerful and moving, and also surprisingly fun - a love story in every
sense'
Deborah Moggach
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
Aristocratic,
rich and seemingly aloof, the Finzi-Contini family fascinate the narrator of
this tale, a young Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara. But it is not until he is
a student in the 1938, when anti-Semitic legislation is enforced on the eve of
the Second World War, that he is invited into their luxurious estate. As their
gardens become a haven for persecuted Jews, the narrator becomes entwined in the
lives of the family, and particularly close to Micol, their daughter. Many years
after the war has ended, he reflects on his memories of the Finzi-Continis, his
experiences of love and loss and the fate of the family and community in the
horrors of war.
'One of the great novelists of the last century.'
Guardian
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The Gathering by Anne Enright
The
nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of
their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that
certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's
house, in the winter of 1968. His sister Veronica was there then, as she is now:
keeping the dead man company, just for another little while.
The Gathering is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations - starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman - showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
'She beautifully describes the way hurt can be inherited ... a daring writer -
witty, original and inventive ... Utterly compelling'
Daily Mail
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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
There
are two sides to every story... "" Who are you? What have we done to each other?"" These are the questions
Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly
disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from
him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't
made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what did happen to Nick's beautiful
wife?
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Page last updated: 21st March 2014