This list may get us all thinking ~ What books would we like the St Yrieix Book Club to read & discuss in 2008. At our first meeting we will all have the chance to put our views forward.
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 27/12/2007
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Story: Set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's past 30 years, the novel tells the story of two generations of characters brought together by war, in particular two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila.
Random Acts of Heroic Love
Author: Danny Scheinmann
Story: In 1992, Leo Deakin wakes up in a hospital somewhere in South America. His girlfriend is dead and he does not know what happened. In 1917, Moritz Daniecki is a fugitive from a Siberian POW camp, trying to get home to his sweetheart. Scheinmann paints a portrait of two men sustaining their lives through the memory of love.
The Rose of Sebastopol
Author: Katharine McMahon
Story: Russia, 1854: Nurse Rosa Barr defies Florence Nightingale to travel to Balaklava to treat soldiers wounded in he Crimean War. Her cousin, Mariella Lingwood, follows her, and her search leads her deep into the heart of the conflict, where she finds she has much to learn about secrecy, faithfulness and love.
A Quiet Belief in Angels
Author: RJ Ellory
Story: Growing up in the 1950s, Joseph Vaughan's community was plagued by a series of killings of young girls. Ten years later, one of his neighbours is found hanging from a rope with articles about the dead girls around him. However, the killings resume and the secret of the murderer's identity lies in Joseph's own history.
Notes From An Exhibition
Author: Patrick Gale
Story: When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work - but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
Then We Came To The End
Author: Joshua Ferris
Story: The characters spend their days, and too many of their nights, at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage they find life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.
The Visible World
Author: Mark Slouka
Story: Talks about a doomed romance full of feeling and fervour that plays itself out in the heat of the Nazi occupation of Prague and then smoulders in the embers for decades before flaring into life again, thousands of miles away, with incendiary effects. A story about memory and concealed histories and about the way the most fiercely held secrets of the past eventually force their way to the surface.
Mister Pip
Author: Lloyd Jones
Story: It is Bougainville in 1991 - a small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. Eighty-six days have passed since Matilda's last day of school as, quietly, war is encroaching from the other end of the island. When the village's safe, predictable lives come to a halt. Bougainville's children are surprised to find the island's only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school, promising to introduce the children to Dickens.
Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
Author: Tim Butcher
Story: The Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher set out to recreate Henry Morton Stanley's epic journey along the Congo, travelling alone with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Almost 2,500 harrowing miles later, he reached the Atlantic Ocean a thinner and wiser man. His extraordinary account describes a country where giant steamboats lie rotting in the advancing forest and children hear stories from their grandfathers of days when cars once drove by.
The Welsh Girl
Author: Peter Ho Davies
Story: In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess. In Snowdonia, a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour. As their lives intersect, all three come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
No comments:
Post a Comment