Archive for the ‘Book Club’ Category

For our book club meeting on Fri 13 May, we read The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende.

Jacket Synopsis:
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her overseas to live with an aunt and uncle in their opulent San Francisco mansion. There she meets Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family’s Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms, but following Pearl Harbor the two are cruelly pulled apart. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to reconcile her own troubled past, meets the older woman and her grandson, Seth, at Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.

Due to our last book club meeting being held at the end of February, we decided our next meeting would be on Fri 8 April. We discussed  My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout.

Jacket Synopsis:
A mother comes to visit her daughter in hospital after having not seen her in many years. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront her past,uncovering long-buried memories of a profoundly impoverished childhood: and her present, as the facade of her new life in New York begins to crumble, awakening her to the reality of her faltering marriage and her unsteady journey towards becoming a writer.

From Lucy’s hospital bed, we are drawn ever more deeply into the emotional complexity of family life, the inescapable power of the past, and the memories – however painful – that bind a family together. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a tender expression of the the meaning of familial love from one of America’s finest writers.

For our book club meeting on Fri 26 February, we are reading The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes.

Jacket Synopsis
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

So begins Julian Barnes’s first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master.

For our book club meeting on Fri 22 January, we read A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler.

Jacket Synopsis
Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn’t ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas’ heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII – where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus – and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven…

For our book club meeting on Wed 8 July, we read Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

Jacket Synopsis:
Take a trip deep into the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first century Russia, a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality.

When he arrives in Russia in the mid-00s, Londoner Peter Pomerantsev sees an opportunity in the booming TV industry, and gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the giant country: from propaganda gurus through to Siberian gangsters and the elite super-rich in London and the US. As Russia spins from decadence to madness, from glamour to fascism, he finds himself sucked further into Putin’s post-modern dictatorship as it rises to challenge the West.

For our book club meeting on Fri 5 June, we read The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates.

Jacket Synopsis:
When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanises her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice – of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what – and who – the “sacrifice” actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.