Archive for the ‘Book Club’ Category

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.

For our meeting on August 17th we read Great House by Nicole Krauss.

Jacket Synopsis
In New York a woman spends a night with a young Chilean poet before he departs, leaving her his desk. Later, he is arrested by Pinochet’s secret police… In north london, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret… In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis. One item remains missing…

Spanning continents and decades, weaving an intricate web of its characters’ lives, Great House tells a soaring story of love, loss and survival against the odds.

For our meeting on July 6th, we read Gillespie and I by Jane Harris.

Jacket Synopsis
As she sits in her Bloomsbury home, with her two birds for company, elderly Harriet Baxter sets out to relate the story of her acquaintance, nearly four decades previously, with Ned Gillespie, a talented artist who never achieved the fame she maintains he deserved.

Back in 1888, the young, art-loving, Harriet arrives in Glasgow at the time of the International Exhibition. After a chance encounter she befriends the Gillespie family and soon becomes a fixture in all of their lives. But when tragedy strikes – leading to a notorious criminal trial – the promise and certainties of this world all too rapidly disorientate into mystery and deception.