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Reading Groups Collection


Measuring the World | Middlemarch | Middlesex | The Moment You Were Gone | My Cleaner | Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead | Never Let Me Go | Not the End of the World| Notebook | The Novel in the Viola | Back to the List

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann

Book jacket for Measuring the WorldAt the end of the eighteenth century, two brilliant and eccentric young scientists set out to measure the world. Alexander von Humboldt swashbuckled his way across the globe, navigating ocean and jungle, eating with cannibals, swimming with electric eels, lowering himself into volcanoes and scaling the highest mountain known to man.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, on the other hand, stayed at home, using the power of thought to battle his way into exotic mathematical realms and the landmark realization that space is curved.
Addictively readable and slyly humorous, Measuring the World bends time and space to bring these two enlightenment geniuses to life, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.
'Pulsing with fictional energy... Here for once is a popular hit as sophisticated as it is engaging.'
Sunday Times

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Middlemarch by George Eliot

Book jacket for Middlemarch'George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories entwine, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

'The most profound, wise and absorbing of English novels... and, above all, truthful and forgiving about human behaviour'
Hermione Lee

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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Book jacket for Middlesex'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. To understand why she is not like other girls, Calliope has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns her into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.
'This is a truly original and compelling novel, by turns sad, funny and moving.'
Daily Mail

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The Moment You Were Gone by Nicci Gerrard

Book jacket for The Moment You Were GoneGaby and Nancy were inseparable when they were young. They had no secrets and believed nothing would break up their friendship, even when each found love - Gaby with Connor and Nancy with Gaby's brother, Stefan.
Then one day Nancy left Stefan, and walked out of all their lives. Gaby has not seen her now for nearly twenty years, and in all that time she has never known where Nancy went or why.
Now long married to Connor, Gaby is preparing to take their only son Ethan to university for his first term when, quite by chance, she spots Nancy on a television report about a flood in a tiny village in Cornwall. And in a recklessly impulsive moment, she turns up on Nancy's doorstep, unannounced.
Nancy's secret exploded into all their lives, wreaking havoc on long-held assumptions and beliefs, and Gaby is forced to examine her own past in order to try and save what is most precious to her.
'Subtle, poignant and tremendously skilful...'
Observer

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My Cleaner by Maggie Gee

Book jacket for My CleanerUgandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin - now twenty-two, handsome and gifted - is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary.
When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a startling climax on a snowbound motorway.

'My cleaner is both simple and subtle. It is structured around an elegant juxtaposition of the inner lives of two opposites: it's texture comes from the blunt repetition of their ungenerous thoughts, punctuated by occasional gusts of provisional warmth.'
TLS

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Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead by Nick Drake

Book cover of Nefertiti: The Book of the DeadNefertiti - the most beautiful, powerful and charismatic Queen of the ancient world. With her husband, Akhenaten, she rules over an Empire at the peak of its glory and domination. Together, they have built a magnificent new city in the desert on the banks of the Nile. They are about to host kings, dignitaries and leaders from around the Empire for a vast festival to celebrate their triumph. But suddenly, Nefertiti vanishes.
Rahotep is the youngest chief detective of the Thebes division; a Seeker of Mysteries who knows about shadows and darkness, and who can see patterns where others cannot. His unusual talents earn him a summons to the royal court. Rahotep is given ten days to find the Queen and return her in time for the festival. Success will bring glory, but if he fails, he and his family will die...

'Full of surprises from the very first line...Takes the reader on a magical mystery tour through palaces, secret passages, tombs and torture chambers'
Evening Standard

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Book jacket for Never Let Me GoIn one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
'Brilliant... Ishiguro's most profound statement of the endurance of human relationships [and] the most exact and affecting of his books to date.'
Observer

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Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson

Book jacket for Not the End of the WorldWhat is the real world? Does it exist, or is it merely a means of keeping another reality at bay? Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson's first collection of short stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know while
offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surface of our consciousness, a world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality.
From Charlene and Trudi, obsessively making lists while bombs explode softly in the streets outside, to gormless Eddie, maniacal cataloguer of fish, and Meredith Zane, who may just have discovered the secret of eternal life, each of these stories posits a skewed reality glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. When the worlds of material existence and imagination collide, anything is possible...

'Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom
Sunday Times

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The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

Book jacket for The NotebookSet amid the austere beauty of the North Carolina coast, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner recently returned from the Second World War. Noah is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only his memories... until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once again.
Like a puzzle within a puzzle, the story of Noah and Allie is just the beginning. As it unfolds, their tale miraculously becomes something different, with much higher stakes. The result is a deeply moving portrait of love itself, the tender moments and the fundamental changes that affect us all. It is a story of miracles and emotions that will stay with you for ever.
'Achingly moving and will have you weeping for the joy and tragedy of it all.'
Daily Mail

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The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

Book jacket for The Novel in the ViolaIn the Spring of 1938 Elise Landau arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay. A bright young thing from Vienna forced to become a parlour-maid, she knows nothing about England, except that she won't like it. As servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn, Elise wears her mother's pearls beneath her uniform, and causes outrage by dancing with a boy called Kit. But war is coming, the world is changing, and Elise must change with it. At Tyneford she learns that you can be more than one person - and that you can love more than once.

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Page last updated: 21st March 2014