The following books are suggested as suitable reading for book clubs:
Fiction
Hardback
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes $29.95 (Jonathan Cape) Winner of the 2011 Mann Booker Prize
Tony
Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and
book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in
affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious
than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends
for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career, a marriage and a calm
divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is
imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to
prove.
Smut
by Alan
Bennett $24.99 (Faber)
The
Shielding of Mrs. Forbes: Graham
Forbes is a disappointment to his mother who thinks that if he must have a wife,
he should have done better. But this is Alan Bennett, so no matter the
importance of keeping up appearances, what is happening in the bedroom (and in
lots of other places too) is altogether more startling. The Greening of Mrs.
Donaldson: Mrs. Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on
the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others:
happy to begin with, and finally dull. However her mundane life becomes much
more stimulating ...
Paperback
The
Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje $29.95 (Jonathan Cape)
In
the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England.
At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly ‘Cat's Table’ with an eccentric
group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes
its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean,
the boys tumble from one adventure to another and at night they spy on a
shackled prisoner whose crime and fate prove a galvanizing mystery that will
haunt them forever. As the narrative moves from the decks and holds of the ship
and into the boys’ adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the
difference between the magical openness of childhood and the burdens of earned
understanding.
All
That I am by Anna Funder $29.95 (Hamish Hamilton)
'When
Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was
turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy
cheering.’ Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in
the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of
her past – and a part of history that has been all but forgotten. Another
lifetime away, it's 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller,
self-doubting revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room settling
up the account of his life. When Toller's story arrives on Ruth's doorstep
their shared past slips under her defences and she's right back among them,
those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything
they had to stop them.
Animal
People Animal People by Charlotte Wood $29.99 (Allen & Unwin)
Set in Sydney over a single
day, Animal People traces a watershed day in the life of Stephen,
aimless, unhappy, unfulfilled - and without a clue as to how to make his life
better. His dead-end job, his demanding family, his oppressive feelings for
Fiona and the pitiless city itself ... the great weight of it all threatens to
come crashing down on him. The day will bring untold surprises and disasters,
but will also show him - perhaps too late - that only love can set him free.
Sharply observed, hilarious, tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a
portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted nature of human-animal
relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling. Filled with shocks of
recognition and revelation, it shows a writer of great depth.
Transgression by
Geraldine Wooler $24.95 (Sid Harta)
Eleanor is returning to Italy after a fifteen-year absence. She is out to
lay old ghosts to rest and to examine at a distance the grief that stalks her.
The journey leads her to seek out old acquaintances: some she can take up with
again but others have moved on and her attempts to re-kindle an old relationship
prove futile. As she comes to grips with memories and a family tragedy in
Australia, she finds an unlikely conspirator in Dante’s birthplace. The
narrative unfolds with mingled compassion and warm humour. Eleanor’s old and
new escapades reveal that she is still a risk-taker, as she embraces her sexual
identity and makes her peace with her child’s father — and with herself.
The Misogynist by
Jomier has reached the age
of retirement, his children are grown up and his wife, after having an affair,
has left him. Embittered and humiliated, he lives alone in London, mourning the
disintegration of his marriage as he broods about the past and the present. When
he falls for Judith, things begin to improve. Yet he still cannot escape his old
habits and it is only when his daughter falls ill that he begins to reassess his
feelings towards those he loves and his ability to forgive. Darkly humorous,
ruthlessly satirical and surprisingly moving, The Misogynist is a
perceptive exploration of the ways in which we can unintentionally let past
disappointments affect our present, and how difficult it can be to move forward.
Faith
by Jennifer Haigh $24.99 (Harper Collins)
Jennifer
Haigh explores the repercussions of one family′s history of silence, when
a priest′s sex scandal forces his family′s untold past to surface.
Art, Sheila, and Mike are siblings in a large extended Irish-American family
from the Boston suburbs. Though their father is a non-believer, their mother is
lace curtain Irish-Catholic, having raised her children to keep family secrets
just that - secret - in a home where most subjects are taboo. Sheila is
concerned when Art, beloved priest leading a major Catholic parish outside
Boston, seems to fall off the grid just days before Easter. Then the news breaks
that he has been accused of sexual misconduct. The media coverage shatters the
community and pits Art′s family members against one another.
On
Canaans Side by Sebastian Barry $29.99 (Faber)
As they used to say in Ireland,
the devil only comes into good things. Narrated
by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns
the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was
forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life
through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger.
At once epic and intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense
of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has
touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war,
family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry's exquisite
prose and gift for storytelling.
Rules of Civility by
Amor Towles $29.99 (Sceptre)
In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she
couldn’t afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey
Kontent knew: The location of every old church in Manhattan; How to sneak into
the cinema; How to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine
million a year; and that if you can still lose yourself in the first chapter of
a Dickens novel then everything is probably going to be fine. By the end of the
year she’d learned: How to live like a redhead; How to insist upon the very
best: That the word yes can be a poison. A fine novel set in New York – which
is what we all want – is it not?
The
Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt $29.99 (Granta) Shortlisted for the 2011 Man
Booker Prize
Oregon
1851, Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way
to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers
have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape
of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his
way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they
get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a
magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is
utterly gripping, darkly funny and oddly sad.
Pigeon
English by Stephen Kelman $29.99 (Bloomsbury)
Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize
Newly
arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison
Opoku lives in a block of flats on an inner-city housing estate. The second best
runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his
personalised trainers blissfully unaware of the very real threats all around
him. With equal fascination for the local gang, and the pigeon who visits his
balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England:
watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a
boy is knifed to death on the high street, Harri decides to start a murder
investigation of his own. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh
reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding
portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood.
The
Widower's Tale by Julia
Glass $21.95 (Random House)
Seventy-year-old
Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old
movies, and swimming naked in his pond. But his routines are disrupted when he
is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy
sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must
examine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden
death of his wife. With equal parts affection and humor, Julia Glass spins a
captivating tale about a man who can no longer remain aloof from his community,
his two grown daughters, or—to his great shock—the precarious joy of falling
in love.
The
Marriage Plot by Jeffrey
Eugenides $29.99 (Harper Collins)
Madeleine
Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn′t get the memo. While
everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed
with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little
too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend
whose college love life hadn′t lived up to expectations. But now, in the
spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course ′to
see what all the fuss is about′. And, for reasons that have nothing to do
with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she
falls in love with Leonard Morten -- charismatic loner and college Darwinist -
who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the
ecstasies of immediate experience!
Caleb's
Crossing By Geraldine Brooks
$32.99 (Harper Collins)
In
1665, a young man from Martha′s Vineyard became the first Native American
to graduate from Harvard College. When Bethia Mayfield, a spirited
twelve-year-old living in the rigid confines of an English Puritan settlement
meets Caleb, the young son of a Wampanoag chieftain, the two forge a secret
friendship. As Bethia′s father feels called to convert the Wampanoag to
his own strict faith, he awakens the wrath of the medicine men. Caleb takes his
place at Harvard and Bethia becomes entangled in Caleb′s struggle to
navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide their two cultures.
That
Deadman Dance by Kim Scott $22.99 (Picador)
The
novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful
and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting
whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the
fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where
he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm
in a liaison with a native. But slowly things begin to change. As the Europeans
impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's
Elders decide they must respond in kind and Bobby is forced to take sides…
State
of Wonder by Ann Patchett $29.99 (Bloomsbury)
Among
the tangled waterways of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is
developing a drug that could alter the lives of women forever. Dr Annick
Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress.
Anders Eckman, a lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting
his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders's colleague, is
their last hope. Marina leaves to journey into the heart of the South American
darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the mystery. What
Marina does not yet know is that she will face challenges beyond her wildest
imagination.
A Visit
from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan $24.99 (Corsair) (2011 Pulitzer Prize
Winner)
Jennifer
Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former
punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young
woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts,
the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of
other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales
as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. A
Visit from the Goon Squad
is a book about the interplay of time and music and survival.
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obrecht $19.99
(W&N) (2011 Orange Prize Winner)
As Natalia and a
friend travel across the former Yugoslavia immunising villagers, the body of her
grandfather turns up in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. She and her family
have no idea why. Recalling stories he told her as a child, she becomes
convinced that he went in search of the Deathless Man, a mythical figure that
her grandfather claimed to have met a number of times in his life. In her quest
to find out how her grandfather, a man of hard fact and science, could turn to
this fantasy, she discovers something particular about his childhood: a tiger
escaped from a zoo during World War II bombings and wandered deep into the
woods, settling just outside his peasant village. It terrorized the town, the
devil incarnate to everyone, except for her grandfather and 'the tiger's
wife'...
Wish You Were Here By
Graham Swift $32.99 (Picador)
On an
autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and
now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier
brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife
Ellie this will have a catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a
crucial journey – to receive his brother's remains, but it also takes him into
his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's
past.
The
Summer Without Men by Siri
Hustvedt $25.00 (Sceptre)
A new work from Siri Hustvedt
is always much anticipated and Summer
Without Men doesn’t disappoint. Darkly funny, it will have you yelping
with (painful) laughter from the first page. When Mia’s husband Boris declares
he needs a ‘pause’ in their relationship and moves out of their marital home
she completely falls apart and in the aftermath travels to spend the summer with
her mother who lives in a retirement
village in Minnesota. Her days are spent teaching poetry to teenage girls and
bonding with her mother and her mother’s kooky friends while pondering over
the strangeness of men. Letters from her daughter reveal all is not so swell in
the land of the ‘pause’ (who turns out to be
young, with significant breasts and an excellent mind) and ultimately Mia
must decide if the time and distance she has spent apart from Boris have allowed
her to step into a new future.
The
Paris Wife by Paula McLain $29.99 (Virago)
Chicago,1920: Hadley Richardson
is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness,
until she meets Ernest Hemingway. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the
pair set sail for Paris where they soon fall in with a circle of lively and
volatile expatriates, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound.
Ernest and Hadley are thrust into a life of artistic ambition, hard liquor and
spur-of-the-moment dashes to Pamplona, the Riviera and the Swiss Alps. However,
Jazz Age Paris does not lend itself to family life and fidelity. As Hadley
struggles with jealousy and self-doubt, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours
begin to bear fruit, and the couple faces the ultimate crisis of their marriage.
Quiet Chaos by Sandro
Veronesi $24.99 (Ecco)
On the shores of the
Mediterranean, exhausted from an afternoon of surfing, Pietro Paladini is shaken
out of his stupor by a distant noise. “Over there!” he cries to his brother,
Carlo, sunning beside him. “Over there!” So begins the adventure that will
tear a hole in Pietro’s life. For while he and his brother struggle to save
two drowning swimmers, a tragedy is unfolding down the road at his summer
cottage. Instead of coming home to a hero’s welcome, Pietro is greeted by the
flashing lights of an ambulance, the wide-eyed stare of his young daughter,
Claudia, and the terrible news that his fiancée, Lara, is dead. Life must go
on. Or does it? Pietro, a true iconoclast, has to find his own way. When he
drops Claudia off for the first day of school, he decides to wait outside for
her all day, and then every day. To wait for the heavy fist of grief to strike.
But as the days and weeks go by, the small parking lot in front of the school
becomes his refuge from the world as well as the place where family and
colleagues come to relieve their own suffering—among them, the woman he
rescued from the waves. And Pietro plunges deeper into the depths of his life
before seeing the simple truth before his eyes.
Cutting
for Stone by Abraham Verghese $24.95 (Vintage)
A
sweeping saga spanning half a century and three continents, Cutting for Stone
is the first novel by
The Man in the Wooden Hat by
Jane Gardam $24.95 (Vintage)
Another
masterpiece from Jane Gardam and the companion volume to Old
Filth - this time around written from the perspective of Filth’s wife
Betty. Filth is a successful lawyer when he marries
The
Last Sky by Alice Nelson Paperback $24.95 (Fremantle Press)
Adrift
in a failing marriage, Maya Wise is alone a strange world far from home, until
intrigued by an elderly Chinese man carrying a caged nightingale, she begins to
follow him through the streets of
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout $19.99 (Simon & Schuster) (Winner Pulitzer Prize for fiction)
Olive
Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, struggles to make sense of the changes in
her life as she grows older. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of others,
discerning their triumphs and tragedies. We meet and grow to understand her
relationship to the people around her; her husband who still yearns for the
mother he lost and her son who feels tyrannized by her overbearing
sensitivities. This is a vibrant exploration of the human soul in need. I t will
make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain and shed a tear or two.
Biography
That
Woman by Anne Sebba $35 Paperback (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
‘That
woman' was not only one of the most talked about women of her generation. In
death she has become one of the most written about and reviled. But she has also
become a symbol of female empowerment as well as a style icon. And yet Wallis
Simpson remains an enigma. A witty woman who lived on her wits. 'A woman can
never be too rich nor too thin' was one of her aphorisms. Neither beautiful nor
brilliant, both her assumed as well as her known moral transgressions add to her
aura and dazzle. Accused of fascist sympathies and Nazi friends, she is the
object of fascination that has increased with the years.
Why be Happy When You
Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson $29.95 Hardback (Jonathan Cape)
This
book is the story of a life’s work to find happiness. It is a book full of
stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night;
about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a
revolver in the duster drawer; about growing up in an northern industrial town
now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; about the
Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette
Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later
life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her
real mother. An important biographical background to Winterson’s unique body
of literary work.
Cocktail
Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller $29.99 Paperback (Simon
& Schuster)
This
fabulous biography by the author of Don’t
Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight tells the story of the author's mother, Nicola
Fuller. Nicola and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East
Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the
British Empire waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a
girl and a boy. However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to
Rhodesia to work as farm managers. They returned to England where the author was
born before returning to Rhodesia and to the civil war. The last part of the
book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi
Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of
Forgetfulness. A fascinating read about an eccentric couple.
The Last Resort by
Douglas Rogers Paperback $24.99 (Faber)
For
many years, Lyn and Ros Rogers were the owners of Drifters, a resort in
Zimbabwe. But when President Robert Mugabe launched his violent land reclamation
programme, everything changed. The Rogers found their home under siege, and
their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son Douglas pleaded with
them to do, they hauled out a shotgun and stayed. Soon afterwards, Douglas
returns to find the country of his birth in chaos, and his home transformed. And
yet, in spite of it all, the Rogers - with the help of friends and locals, black
political dissidents - hold on. And Douglas begins to see his parents in a new
light: unbowed, even heroic.
Wait
for Me by Deborah Devonshire Paperback $22.99 (John Murray)
Deborah
Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for
hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly
and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister
Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics
(while not being at all political herself), finally setting the record straight.
She writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those
who live and work in it. As Duchess of Devonshire, Debo played an active role in
restoring and overseeing the day-to-day running of the family houses and
gardens, and in developing commercial enterprises at Chatsworth. She tells
poignantly of the deaths of three of her children, as well as her husband’s
battle with alcohol addiction.