For our meeting on Wed February 1st, we read Death Comes To Pemberley by P.D. James.

Jacket Synopsis:
The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the Pemberley nursery, Elizabeth’s beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley, live within seventeen miles, the ordered and secure life of Pemberley seems unassailable, and Elizabeth’s happiness in her marriage is complete. But their peace is threatened and old sins and misunderstandings are rekindled on the eve of the annual autumn ball. The Darcys and their guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley’s wild woodland, and as it pulls up, Lydia Wickham, an uninvited guest, tumbles out, screaming that her husband has been murdered.

In a pitch-perfect recreation of the world of Pride and Prejudice, P.D. James elegantly fuses her lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen with her talent for writing detective fiction.

Our Rating: ★★★¼☆ 

For our meeting on Wed January 11th, we read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Jacket Synopsis:
It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead – charismatic loner and college Darwinist – suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange – resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, they will be forced to re-evaluate everything.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, pre-nups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Our Rating: ★★★½☆ 

For our meeting on Fri December 16th, we read The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore.

Jacket Synopsis:
Judith Hearne is a single woman of modest means, a middle-aged Catholic spinster who teaches piano to a handful of students. Her only social activity is tea with the O’Neill family, who secretly dread her weekly visits. But when she moves into yet another Belfast bedsit, her lonely existence appears to be at an end. Here she meets the lively and debonair James Madden, recently returned from New York. Charmed by what she sees as his amorous pursuit of her, Judith begins to dream of a brighter future – is she too late for love, or dare she let herself hope?

For our meeting on Wed November 16th, we read Painted Ladies by Siobhán Parkinson.

Jacket Synopsis:
“Late in the nineteenth century, a beautiful young art student from Copenhagen arrives in Paris, breathless with excitement and longing to become a painter. Surrounded by artists in bustling cafés, Marie is swept away into a vivid and colourful world of mistresses and fourth wives, painted fishermen and cramped Parisian studios, ultimately leading her to the acclaimed painter Soren Kroyer.

But despite the friendship that grows between Marie and fellow artist Anna, Marie is always on the outside of Kroyer’s artistic circle, unsure as to whether she can ever become more than a painted lady.”

For our book club meeting on Wed October 19th, we read Solace by Belinda McKeon.

Jacket Synopsis:
“Mark Casey has left home, the rural Irish community where his family has farmed the same land for generations, to study for a doctorate in Dublin, a vibrant, contemporary city full of possibility. To his father, Tom, who needs help baling the hay and ploughing the fields, Mark’s pursuit isn’t work at all, and indeed Mark finds himself whiling away his time with pubs and parties. His is a life without focus or responsibility, until he meets Joanne Lynch, a trainee solicitor whom he finds irresistible. Joanne too has a past to escape from and for a brief time she and Mark share the chaos and rapture of a new love affair, until the lightning strike of tragedy changes everything.

Fresh, sensitive and genuinely brave, Belinda McKeon is a startling new talent in the great Irish mould, and Solace is a work to admired equally for its spare, intense lyricism as its range, understanding, and deeply compassionate portrayal of life as it is now.”

For our book club meeting on September 7th, we read The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst.

Jacket Synopsis
In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at ‘Two Acres’, the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever.

Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance.

At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in The Line of Beauty, his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, The Stranger’s Child is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.