1st January is looming.......2008

New Year's Resolution.............

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Book adventures in 2008

Escaping into the future

Justine Jordan picks the highlights among forthcoming novels

Justine JordanSaturday December 29, 2007

GuardianAutumn was a thin season for fiction, publishers fearing that novels would be drowned in the ever-swelling tide of zany stocking fillers and celebrity biographies; so it's a welcome relief to look beyond the Christmas turkeys to find the 2008 schedules full of good things.

The year begins with a notable follow-up: 12 years after the international smash The Reader, in Homecoming (Weidenfeld, January) Bernhard Schlink again wrestles with Germany's wartime demons. As a child, his narrator becomes obsessed with an incomplete manuscript about a German POW; as an adult, he goes in search of the missing ending - and his own father, also apparently killed in the war. It's a quest for identity, forgiveness and love.

It's been a long wait, too, for Adam Mars-Jones's epic Pilcrow (Faber, April), investigating the rich internal life of a boy confined to bed, and for Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (Bloomsbury, March): after 2001's acclaimed The Death of Vishnu, Suri now turns his gaze on India in the aftermath of independence.

Meanwhile, Siri Hustvedt follows the elegant What I Loved with The Sorrows of An American (Sceptre, May), an absorbing study of family secrets handed down the generations. Hustvedt threads elements from a memoir written by her father about growing up in depression-era Minnesota with a tale of loneliness and love in modern-day New York, as a divorced analyst confronts traumatic memories from his immigrant roots. We'll have to wait until November for more Manhattan family secrets from Notes on a Scandal author Zoe Heller in The Believers (Fig Tree).

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (Canongate, February) is James Meek's follow-up to his acclaimed historical novel, The People's Act of Love. This is a contemporary tale of love, hubris and misunderstanding as a war reporter takes his own baggage to Afghanistan, hoping to turn the elusive, unpredictable Astrid into girlfriend material, and the turmoil of political events into material for a bestselling thriller. The world, needless to say, will not bend to his will, but the resulting novel is as gripping and acute as its predecessor.

There's fabulous escapism to be had as Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence (Cape, April) transports the reader to the 16th-century Mughal court, where a visitor from the Florentine world of Machiavelli wins the attention of the emperor himself. Rushdie sets up symmetries between east and west in a bejewelled extravaganza with shades of Borges.

Meanwhile, the dissident writer Ma Jian has written an epic novel about China's recent history in Beijing Coma (Chatto, May), in which a Tiananmen Square protester wakes from the 10-year coma caused by a soldier's bullet to find his country transformed.

In what looks set to be one of spring's most interesting novels, Gordon Burn is rushing the very recent past into print. From his award-winning debut novel Alma Cogan to his Fred West biography Happy Like Murderers, Burn has long blended fact and fiction, and in Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (Faber, April) he finds his natural subject: the news as entertainment. Twenty-four-hour rolling news, the blogosphere and digital interactivity feed our culture of speculation and spin. Burn takes a few highly charged weeks in 2007 - the summer of floods, terror attacks, the Blair/Brown changeover and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - to investigate media manipulation and the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Back in time from Blair's long goodbye to the dawn of New Labour: Crusaders by Richard T Kelly (Faber, January) is an impressive debut. Set in 1996, it sees a young clergyman struggling to set up a church in a deprived part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Kelly reflects in energetic, muscular prose on the history of the Labour movement and foreshadows the huge social change to come; this is a weighty book in both senses. Another northern epic also considers the changing state of the nation.

In The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate, April) Philip Hensher chronicles 20 years of British life from the mid-70s to the mid-90s through the interlinked fortunes of two Sheffield families. Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.

Hanif Kureishi also returns to the 70s, and the territory of his enduringly lovable The Buddha of Suburbia, with a much-tipped new novel, Something to Tell You (Faber, March). His narrator is an analyst looking back on the violence, confusion and first love of his youth, while deeply engaged in contemporary politics and culture: Kureishi's London landscape is a vivid kaleidoscope of larger-than-life characters.

Louis de Bernières's fictional worlds have ranged from Cephalonia to South America: in A Partisan's Daughter (Harvill Secker, March), set in north London during the Winter of Discontent, he comes closer to home. It charts the relationship between a middle-aged Englishman and a young Serbian woman, who tells him tales of her colourful past.
Two authors make literary journeys of their own.

Helen Dunmore continues the vogue for all things Latinate in Counting the Stars (Fig Tree, February), which tells the story of the poet Catullus's love for his secret mistress, set against the backdrop of Julius Caesar's Rome. Justine Picardie's Daphne (Bloomsbury, March) investigates Daphne du Maurier's fascination with the Brontë sisters' reprobate brother Branwell, in a literary mystery of stolen manuscripts.


To short stories, and Anne Enright follows her surprise Booker win with a glorious collection about women on the edge. Taking Pictures (Cape, March) is a compulsive series of vignettes, brimming with physicality and humour, which are desolate and witty by turns. Other collections to look out for include Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect (Cape, May) and Gerard Woodward's Caravan Thieves (Chatto, March). Woodward is known for his semi-autobiographical trilogy about a family of alcoholic eccentrics; here he adds a dash of surrealism.


Two novels that will appeal to adult and teenager alike show that "crossover" doesn't have to mean wands and wizardry. In Out of Breath Julie Myerson (Cape, February) conjures a spare, absorbing tale of children on the run from threatening adult reality into the summer nights of the English countryside and their own imaginations: her trademark combination of emotional honesty and supernatural suggestion makes it near-impossible to put down. In Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, February), young newcomer Joe Dunthorne's cheerfully peculiar 15-year-old narrator is a worthy successor to Adrian Mole.

Other debuts to look out for include a wonderfully assured first novel from Sadie Jones, The Outcast (Chatto, February), in which a troubled young man kicks out against the hypocrisy and repression of 1950s society, and Junot Díaz's energetic portrait of Dominican immigrants in the US, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber, February). In June, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (Cape) weaves a fantastic narrative around the plane crash that killed Pakistani dictator General Zia in 1988, examining corruption, conspiracy theories and the road to 9/11; while there's a buzz building around The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (Canongate, September), which features the storytelling skills of a 700-year-old former nun.

A Renaissance investigation into the nature of angels makes up another autumn curiosity, as Karl O Knausgaard's A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven (Portobello, October) breathes new life into Bible stories. And with novels also promised from Peter Carey, Toby Litt, Will Self, Margaret Atwood and David Guterson, there should be more than enough to see the keen reader through any thin winter months.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Composition of the St Yrieix Group

Pat tells me that there are currently about 13 people who have expressed an interest in the Book Club starting on 18th January, 2008.

Hope all of you have your copy of "The Zahir" and are reading avidly.

Happy New Year!

Richard & Judy's Book choices for 2008 ~ What are ours????

Richard and Judy's ten for 2008

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.

French Health Issues

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French Health Issues

Writings by Paulo Coelho

Reflections on 11th September 2001


A year on, each of us can still remember exactly where we were and what we were doing on that day. I was in Munich, ready to go to a book-signing, when the representative from my publisher's knocked on the door of my room:
'Turn on the television! Quick!'
Every channel was showing the same pictures: one of the towers belonging to the World Trade Center in flames, the next plane approaching, a new fire and the collapse of both buildings: the disaster of 11th September 2001. No one will ever forget where they were, what they were doing and who they were with when the terrorist attack occurred.
It is always very hard to accept that a tragedy can, in some way, have positive results. As we gazed in horror at what looked more like a scene from a science fiction movie - the two towers crumbling and carrying thousands of people with them as they fell - we had two immediate responses: first, a sense of impotence and terror in the face of what was happening; second, a sense that the world would never be the same again.
It was with these feelings in my heart that I switched off the TV and headed for the bookstore where the book-signing was, in theory, to take place. I was convinced that no one would be there, since the next few hours were bound to be taken up with more news and more details and with the search for reasons why it had happened. I walked the deserted streets of Munich. Even though it was still only four o'clock in the afternoon, people had congregated in any bars that had radios and televisions turned on, trying to persuade themselves that it was all some kind of dream from which, sooner or later, they would wake up, saying to their friends that the human race does tend to suffer from this kind of recurring nightmare.
To my surprise, when I got to the bookshop, hundreds of readers were waiting for me. They weren't talking to each other, they were silent - it was a silence that came from the depths of their souls, a silence empty of meanings. Gradually, I understood why they were there: at such times, it is good to be with other people, because no one knows what might happen next. Gradually, we all came to realise that it wasn't a nightmare, but something real and palpable, which, from then on, would become part of the history of our civilisation.
That is what I would like to write about at the end of this year of upheavals. The world will never be the same, it's true, but, a year on from that afternoon, is there still a sense that all those people died in vain? Or can something other than death, dust and twisted steel be found beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center?
I believe that the life of every human being is, at some point, touched by tragedy: it could be the destruction of a city, the death of a child, a baseless accusation, an illness that appears without warning and brings with it permanent disability. Life is a constant risk, and anyone who forgets this will be unprepared for the challenges that fate may have in store for us. Whenever we come face to face with that inevitable suffering, we are forced to try and make some sense of what is happening.
However good we are, however well we try to live our lives, tragedies happen. We can blame others, we can find some justification or imagine how different our lives would have been without them, but none of that matters: the tragedy has happened, and that's that. From then on, what we have to do is to look again at our lives, overcome our fear and begin a process of reconstruction.
The first thing we must do when confronted by suffering and insecurity is to accept them. We cannot treat these feelings as if they had nothing to do with us, or transform them into a punishment that satisfies our eternal sense of guilt. In the rubble of the World Trade Center there were people like us, who felt secure or unhappy, fulfilled or still struggling to grow, with a family waiting for them at home or driven to despair by the loneliness of the big city. They were American, English, German, Brazilian, Japanese, people from all corners of the globe, united by the common - and mysterious - fate of finding themselves, at around nine o'clock in the morning, in the same place, a place which, for some, was pleasant and, for others, oppressive. When the two towers collapsed, not only those people died, we all died a little and the whole world grew smaller.
Some years ago, in Japan, a group of people studying Zen Buddhism were gathered together in a house in the country when the caretaker burst in on them, bringing news of a tragedy that had happened nearby: a house had burned down, leaving mother and daughter homeless. One of the female students immediately started a collection to help the family rebuild their house.
Amongst those present was an impoverished writer, and the girl decided not to ask him for any money. 'One moment,' said the writer, when she walked past him. 'I want to give something too.'
He spent a minute setting down on paper what had happened, then placed the sheet of paper in the jar being used as a collecting box. 'I want to give everyone this tragedy, so that we will always remember it when we think of the minor upsets in our own lives.'In the case of the attacks on 11th September, I think we can gain something more than the feeling that, however bad our own life may seem, it is much better than that of many other human beings. However hard it may be to accept what happened, it is important to understand that such moments give us the opportunity to make a radical change in our behaviour.
When faced by a great loss, material, spiritual or psychological, there is no point in trying to recover what has gone. In a sense, a large space has been opened up in our lives, and there it is, empty and waiting to be filled with something new. At the moment of loss, however contradictory this may seem, we are gaining a large slice of freedom. Instead of filling that empty space with pain and bitterness, there are other ways of facing the world.
In the first place, we need to remember the great lessons taught to us by the wise: patience and the certainty that everything in this life is temporary. From that point of view, let us take a new look at our values: if the world is not going to be a safe place again, at least not for many years, then why not take advantage of that sudden change and spend our days doing the things we have always wanted to do, but for which we always lacked the courage, believing that we had to keep to 'a daily routine', that everything was under control? On the morning of 11th September, how many people were in the World Trade Center against their will, following a career that didn't really suit them, doing work they didn't like, simply because it was a safe job and would guarantee them enough money for a pension in their old age?
That event has provoked a great change in the world, and those who were buried beneath the rubble of the two towers did not die in vain. They are making us rethink our own lives and values, and driving us towards the destiny that we always dreamed of for ourselves, but never had the courage to grasp. When the towers collapsed, they dragged down with them dreams and hopes, but they also opened up our own horizons and allowed each of us to reflect upon the meaning of our lives.
So, the moment has come to rebuild not just the Towers, but ourselves; for it is our attitude to what awaits us that will make all the difference. According to a story told about events immediately after the bombing of Dresden, a man was walking past a plot of land covered in rubble when he saw three workmen.
'What are you doing?' he asked.
The first workman turned round and said:
'Can't you see? I'm shifting these stones!'
Dissatisfied with the reply, he spoke to the second workman.
'Can't you see? I'm earning a wage!' came the reply.
Still unclear as to what exactly was going on, the man decided to try one last time. He turned to the third workman and asked him the same question.
'Can't you see?' said the third workman. 'I'm rebuilding a cathedral!'
Although those three workmen were all engaged on the same task, only one had a sense of the real meaning of his life and his work. Let us hope that in the world taking shape before us, each of us will prove able to lift ourselves out from beneath our own emotional rubble and rebuild the cathedral we always dreamed of but never dared to create.

© Translated by Margaret Jull Costa


*Copyright 2003 by Paulo CoelhoAll Rights Reserved

The Zahir

«On the way, I meet strong currents, winds and storms, but I keep rowing, exhausted, knowing that I have drifted away from my chosen course and that the island I was trying to reach is no longer on my horizon.» THE ZAHIR

Paulo Coelho

For anyone wishing to know more about Paulo Coelho please follow the link below:

In 1996 Paulo Coelho launched his website www.paulocoelho.com and since then it has received 6 million visitors and is available in 16 languages. His bi-weekly newsletter www.warriorofthelight.com has 120,000 subscribers and is distributed in 7 languages.



http://www.santjordi-asociados.com/about-us.htm

http://www.santjordi-asociados.com/

Paulo Coelho

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A little about the January Book club choice

O Zahir

It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession .

One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared, leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified – and increasingly fascinated – by her absence.

Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.His search for her – and for the truth of his own life – takes him from France to Spain, Croatia and, eventually, the bleakly beautiful landscape of Central Asia.

More than that, it takes him from the safety of his world to a totally unknown path, searching for a new understanding of the nature of love and the power of destiny.

With The Zahir, Paulo Coelho demonstrates not just his powerful and captivating storytelling, but also his extraordinary insight into what it is to be a human being in a world full of possibility.

Please check out the sections on Novels etc

When you are on this site it is possible to obtain updates and news items about novels, poetry, literature.

Just go to the bottom of the right hand page and click on a section which interests you.

First Book chosen for discussion

The January Book of the month is:“The Zahir’’ by Paulo Coelho

18th January 2008

Connect for Friendship Book Club ~ St Yrieix

Welcome to a new club being set up in the Limousin at St Yrieix La Perche.

In 2008, the Connect for Friendship organisation is setting up a Book Club open to members.

The club will meet throughout 2008 on the third Friday of the month at Cheval Blanc the hotel in the centre of the town.

The intention is to meet to discuss a book which everyone will have read prior to the meeting.

For anyone interested in joining, please come to a Connect FF meeting, give us a telephone call or leave your details in the comment box.

You are very welcome to join.

Thanks Pat Dixon & Vernon Goddard