Reading Group Books
Various
24 favourite womens fictions authors including Wendy Holden, Cathy Kelly, Penny Vincenzi, Joanne Harris, Andrea Levy and Alexander McCall Smith have donated their fiction for a collection of stories. They tell of friendship, love, passion and betrayal.
Taken from Randomhouse website.
Achebe, Chinua
Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man's dangerous pride eventually destroy him?
Taken from the Penguin Classics website.
Adam Paul
University lecturer Tom Whitehead leads a boring sort of life in a city much like Sheffield, until one day he awakes to find himself arrested, in the full view of assembled media, for possessing child pornography on his computer. Faced with one of those crimes where you are guilty until proven innocent, Whitehead's life appears to be crumbling, until he finally discovers a credit card charge which proves he could not have been on his computer. It soon becomes obvious he is being stitched up, by person or persons official, but why?
Taken from Crimetime website.
Adam, Paul
A group of eco-terrorists trash fields of GM crops and break into the laboratory of the biotech company who are conducting the trials. Several miles from the site of the field trial, an organic farmer, his family and his animals fall victim to a mutant form of 'flu. Karl Housman, consultant virologist, realises that this new strain of influenza has the potential to kill more people than the 1918 epidemic, but no-one in authority will take his fears seriously, even when the first few victims die.
Published 2001. Taken from the TimesWarner website.
Adichie, Chimamanda
Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at a time of the vicious Nigeria- Biafra war in which more than a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. Three characters are swept up in the rapidly unfolding political events. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, is employed as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young, middle-class woman, has come to live with the professor, abandoning her privileged life in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charismatic idealism of her new lover. Richard is a tall, shy Englishman, in thrall to Olanna's twin sister Kainene, who refuses to belong to anyone. They are propelled into events that will pull them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives, their ideals – and their loyalties to each other – are severely tested.
Taken from Orange Prize website.
Ahern, Cecelia
Some people wait their whole lives to find their soul mates. But not Holly and Gerry.
Childhood sweethearts, they could finish each other's sentences and even when they fought, they laughed. No one could imagine Holly and Gerry without each other. Until the unthinkable happens. Gerry's death devastates Holly, but as her 30th birthday looms, Gerry comes back to her. He's left her a bundle of notes, one for each of the months after his death, gently guiding Holly into her new life without him, each note signed 'PS, I Love You'. As the notes are gradually opened, and as the year unfolds, Holly is both cheered up and challenged. The man who knows her better than anyone sets out to teach her that life goes on. With some help from her friends, and her noisy and loving family, Holly finds herself laughing, crying, singing, dancing and being braver than ever before.
Childhood sweethearts, they could finish each other's sentences and even when they fought, they laughed. No one could imagine Holly and Gerry without each other. Until the unthinkable happens. Gerry's death devastates Holly, but as her 30th birthday looms, Gerry comes back to her. He's left her a bundle of notes, one for each of the months after his death, gently guiding Holly into her new life without him, each note signed 'PS, I Love You'. As the notes are gradually opened, and as the year unfolds, Holly is both cheered up and challenged. The man who knows her better than anyone sets out to teach her that life goes on. With some help from her friends, and her noisy and loving family, Holly finds herself laughing, crying, singing, dancing and being braver than ever before.
Ambitious, sensuous, filled with intriguing characters, panoramic settings, and high drama, Red Poppies opens a window on a unique region of pre-occupation Tibet, dispelling many of the popular myths about a uniformly pacifist society. This historical tale does for Tibet what the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez have done for Columbia and William Faulkner's have done for the American South.
Taken from the Methuen website.
NEW Ali, Monica
At the heart of the book lies a marvellous depiction of an adulterous affair. As a good Bengali wife, Nazneen does not enter lightly into her sexual adventure, and her lover, Karim, a fierce young Muslim who wants to radicalise the local community, has deeply held beliefs against promiscuity. But as Karim comes to Nazneen's house day after day, bringing her the piecework for her sewing job, Ali shows how the physical attraction that explodes between them destroys their moral expectations.
Taken from Guardian website
Alvtegen, Karin
Begins with one of the novel’s most obvious ‘betrayals’. Eva, a high-powered executive accustomed to success, has always had a take-charge attitude to everything in life, including her marriage to Henrik, a stay-at-home writer and the father of their young son, Axel. But when Henrik finally musters up the courage to tell her that he wants to end their fifteen-year relationship because he just doesn’t ‘have fun anymore’, Eva’s ordered world suddenly spins out of control.
Taken from Laura Hird website.
Allan, Clare
Who is mad? Who is sane? Who decides?
Welcome to the Dorothy Fish, a day hospital in North London! N has been a patient here for thirteen years. Day after day she sits smoking in the common room, swapping medication and comparing MAD money rates. Like all the patients at the Dorothy Fish, N’s chief ambition is never to get discharged. Each year when her annual assessment comes round, she is relieved to learn that she hasn’t got any better. Then in walks Poppy Shakespeare in her six-inch skirt and twelve-inch heels.
Taken from Bloomsbury website.
Allende, Isabel
This transports us to a Latin American country in the grip of a military dictatorship, where Irene Beltran, an upperclass journalist, and Francisco Leal, a photographer son of a Marxist professor together discover a hideous crime. They also discover how far they dare go in search of the truth in a nation of terror . . . and how very much they risk.
Taken from Powells website.Alliott, Catherine
When Lucy Fellowes is offered a dream house in the country she leaps at it. It’s hard enough living in London on an uncertain income, but when you’re widowed with two small boys it’s even harder. And anyway a rural retreat will bring her closer to Charlie. Charlie? The only man in four years to make her heart beat faster. Perfect. Or it would be. If only he didn’t belong to someone else... A wickedly witty new novel about how complicated relationships get when you grow up, from the bestselling author of Rosie Meadows regrets… and Olivia’s Luck.
Taken from the Hodder Headline website.
Amis, Martin
Mike Hoolihan is a veteran homicide detective in the New York police department. Hoolihan gets called to investigate an apparent suicide. It turns out that the dead person, Jennifer Rockwell, is Hoolihan's friend and the daughter of her former boss, Col Tom Rockwell. Oh, yes - Mike is a woman. That's just one of the oddities in this seemingly conventional story. This looks like it is going to be a routine investigation. Jennifer is found nude, seated in a chair with a small caliber gun in her hand and a hole in the back of her head. Suicide is Hoolihan's first guess - indeed everyone's first guess. She gets a call from Colonel Tom to look into the case again. At that point, things start to get strange.
Taken from Post-Gazette website.
NEW Angelou, Maya
Maya Angelou describes her coming of age as a precocious but insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930s and subsequently in California during the 1940s. Maya's parents divorce when she is only three years old and ship Maya and her older brother, Bailey, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in rural Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom they call Momma, runs the only store in the black section of Stamps and becomes the central moral figure in Maya's childhood.
Taken from Spark Notes website
Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot is the title of Asimov's first collection of short stories. It consists of nine stories about positronic robots, united by a consistent narrative in which a reporter interviews the character Susan Calvin about her life working with robots. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are: 1 A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Taken from Asimov website.
Atkinson, Kate
Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George but he was all that was left. She really wanted to be Vivien Leigh or Celia Johnson but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby who tells the story of the family.
Winner of the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. Taken from the Transworld website.
Atkinson, Kate
As her sixteenth birthday unfolds, Isobel Fairfax is pulled into brief time warps and extended periods of omniscience, hurtled into the distant past where she meets the first Fairfax, to the roaring '20's, to World War II. Along the way she gradually learns the truth about her strange family, and about her mother, whose disappearance is part of the secret at the heart of the nearby forest.
NEW Atwood, Margaret
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.
Taken from Reading Group Guides website.
Austen, Jane
Anne Elliot, heroine of Austen's last novel, did something we can all relate to: Long ago, she let the love of her life get away. In this case, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by a trusted family friend that the young man she loved wasn't an adequate match, social stationwise, and that Anne could do better. The novel opens some seven years after Anne sent her beau packing, and she's still alone. But then the guy she never stopped loving comes back from the sea. As always, Austen's storytelling is so confident, you can't help but allow yourself to be taken on the enjoyable journey.
Taken from Online Literature website.
Austen, Jane
When Elizabeth Bennett first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited, while he struggles to remain indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever.
Summary taken from book jacket.
NEW Aylett, Steve
Lint is ostensibly a biography of Jeff Lint, the best science fiction writer in the world. However, Jeff Lint is a figment of the author’s imagination.
Taken from World Book Day website
Ballard, J G
When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London's fringe protest movements. He is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control until every certainty in his life is questioned.
Published 2003. Taken from the HarperCollins website.
Banks, Iain
'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.' Prentice McHoan has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring Scottish family. Full of questions about the McHoan past, present and future, he is also deeply preoccupied: mainly with death, sex, drink, God and illegal substances ...
Taken from the Iain Banks website.
Banks, Iain
Frank, no ordinary sixteen year old, lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations but when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare for his brother's return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly.
Taken from the Times Warner website.
Banks, Lynne Reid
An unmarried and pregnant young woman moves into the top room of a dilapidated shared house. She's lost interest in everything that matters, but her life is rekindled by the people with whom she shares a house.
Taken from BBC Radio 4's website.
Barker, Pat
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant phsychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim.
Taken from MT Mercy website.
Barnes, Julian
Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Catholic Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George a Birmingham solicitor, is happy in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley
NEW Basil, Priya
The novel focuses on the marriage between Sarna and Karam Singh, their various moves from India to Kenya, Uganda and England, their relationship with each other, their siblings and their children. The central source of plot is in Sarna’s attempts to forget about the illegitimate child she had before her marriage, and her struggle to live with her abandonment of her baby.
Taken from Lumiere website.
Benson, E F
Subtly brilliant comedy of social rivalry between the wars. Emmeline Lucia is an arch-snob of the highest order. In Miss Elizabeth Mapp of Mallards, Lucia meets her match. Ostensibly the most civil and genteel of society ladies, there is no plan too devious, no plot too cunning, no depths to which they would not sink, in order to win the battle for social supremacy.
Taken from the Penguin UK website.
Berendt, John
While it reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, it is actually a magical non-fiction rendering of a secluded and hauntingly beautiful city in which an infamous murder took place. The book contains one beguiling and outrageous story after another-all true-in which Berendt offers up a rogue's gallery of true-life rascals, eccentrics and proper society folk who live behind the stately facades of Savannah's grandest houses.
In the long hot summer of 1972, three events shattered the serenity of ten-year-old Marsha's life: her father ran away with her mother's sister Ada; Boyd Ellison, a young boy, was molested and murdered; and Watergate made the headlines. Living in a world no longer safe or familiar, Marsha turns increasingly to 'the book of evidence' in which she records the doings of the neighbours, especially of shy Mr Green next door. But as Marsha's confusion and the murder hunt both accelerate, her 'facts' spread the damage cruelly and catastrophically throughout the neighbourhood.
Taken from the Penguin Readers Group website.
NEW de Bernieres, Louis
Birds Without Wings begins in the early 1900s in an idyllic town in South West Anatolia during the declining years of the Ottoman Empire. It traces the fortunes of one small community in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries, and in which friendship, even love, can transcend religious differences.
Taken from Random House website.
NEW Bingham, Charlotte
As Walter Berrisford paints beautiful Katherine Garland, she asks him to put a ladybird on her finger without his knowing why. He is appalled when he discovers that Katherine is a Nazi. The outbreak of war means that her sister Caro and her friend Robyn join the FANYs, while former maids, Betty and Trixie, work in a factory. War brings frantic romance to all, including their flatmate Edwina O’Brien, but it is Betty, transferred to decode at the Park that alone discovers the truth about the Ladybird.
Taken from Random House website.
NEW Bourne, Sam
A pimp is found dead in a rough New York neighbourhood. A far-right extremist is fatally shot at his remote log cabin outside Seattle. An eighteen-year-old computer hacker is murdered on his way home from working at a call centre in India. One thing unites these victims. All had, at some point in their largely wasted and grubby lives, performed an act of exceptional goodness. Someone is murdering good people. Why?
Taken from Love Reading website.
NEW Boyd, William
Here is the "riotous and disorganized reality" of Mountstuart's eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects. In his journals he recounts his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; his college years during the 1920s at Oxford, where he published his first book; his time in Paris with famous expatriates like Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, among others; and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, as an agent for Naval Intelligence, he becomes embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Taken from Reading Group Guides website
Boyne, John
Bruno is a nine-year-old boy growing up in Berlin during World War II. He lives in a five-storey house with servants, his mother and father and 12-year-old sister, Gretel. His father wears a fancy uniform and they have just been visited by a very important personage called the Fury, a pun which adult readers should have no trouble deciphering. As a consequence of this visit, Bruno's father gets a new uniform, his title changes to Commandment and, to Bruno's chagrin, they find themselves moving to a new home at a place called Out-With.
Link to the Age.com website. (Junior fiction)
Bradbury, Malcolm
Contains gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo.
Taken from Penguin website.
Bragg, Melvyn
When Sam Richardson returns in 1946 from the ‘Forgotten War’ in Burma to Wigton in Cumbria, he finds the town little changed. But the war has changed him, broadening his horizons as well as leaving him with traumatic memories. A taut and profoundly moving novel, which captures what millions experienced in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Published 1999.
Taken from the HodderHeadline website.
Brodrick, William
When Eduard Schwermann, an alleged Nazi war criminal, claims sanctuary at Larkwood Priory, the Church is thrown into a dilemma. Does it harbor him and risk a scandal in the media or cast him out into a world that wants to punish him for crimes he insists he did not commit? In the weeks leading up to Schwermann's trial, Father Anselm must find out why the Church had granted Schwermann sanctuary fifty years earlier and apparently helped him escape from France and assume a new identity in Britain.
Taken from the Penguin website.
Bronte, Charlotte
Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for each other grows, and the secrets of Mr Rochester's past are revealed.
Taken from Online Literature website.
Brookmyre, Christopher
Back when they were students Ray Ash and Simon Darcourt had dreams about what they'd do when they grew up. In both their cases, it was to be rock stars. Fifteen years later, their mid-thirties are bearing down fast and they're having to accept the less glamorous hands reality has dealt them. Nervous new father Ray takes refuge from his responsibilities by living a virtual existence in online games and for Simon it's serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination.
Published 2001. Taken from the TimesWarner website.
Brooks, Geraldine
Set during the American Civil War, March tells the story of John March, known to us as the father away from his family of girls in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic American novel. In Brooks telling, March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of a war that tests his faith in himself and in the Union cause when he learns that his side, too, is capable of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness in a Washington hospital, he must reassemble the shards of his shattered mind and body, and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.
Taken from the Harper Collins website.
Bryson, Bill
Before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of modern-day Britain, and to analyze what he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite, zebra crossings, and place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey, and Shellow Bowells. With characteristic wit and irreverence, Bill Bryson presents the ludicrous and the endearing in equal measure. The result is a hilarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain.
Taken from the Random House website.
Byrne, Paula
One of the most flamboyant women of the late-eighteenth century, Mary Robinson's life was marked by reversals of fortune. After being raised by a middle-class father, Mary was married, at age fourteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipated lifestyle landed the couple and their baby in debtors' prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry and met lifelong friend Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. On her release, Mary quickly became one of the most popular actresses of the day, famously playing Perdita in The Winters Tale for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. She later used his copious love letters for blackmail.
Taken from the Harper Collins website.
Cain, James M
Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class, but Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with , a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
Taken from Random House website.
Carter, Angela
The book follows the fortunes of the Chance twins, Dora and Nora, taking in the story of their show business family – the Hazards – over the past century. Born illegitimately, spurned by their father Melchior and brought up by their landlady, Mrs Chance, Dora and Nora learn to dance, and begin to forge a career, “two girls pounding the boards”. After the post-war decline of their careers they are reduced to performing in nude revues, while the latest generation of Hazards rise to fame as stars of television. Angela Carter's witty and bawdy new novel celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.
Taken from Random House website.
Cartwright, Justin
Two years earlier, Charles and Daphne Judd were settling into a somewhat uneasy retirement in Cornwall when their world was shattered by the news of their beloved daughter Ju-Ju’s conviction and imprisonment for her part in an art theft in New York.
Link to Bloomsbury website.
Cassidy, Anne
A gripping and emotionally searing novel from a talented author. Looking for JJ explores the circumstances and motives behind the murder of a child - by her friend. Six years later, JJ has now been released, and has a new identity. But is there any way that she can lead a "normal" life?
Taken from the Scholastic website.
Chatwin, Bruce
As the title suggests, the novel is defined by its setting, a small Welsh farming community on the English border. The lives of the community members are structured by ties to family and land. Relatively few people leave, and many of those who do leave return. The novel centers on Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins who end their lives where they began, at the farmhouse in which their parents lived.
Taken from the Great Books Foundation website.
Cheek, Mavis
Janice Gentle, under pressure from her money-obsessed agent, writes delicate, romantic novels with one goal in mind: to make enough money to find the man she loved and lost twenty years ago. But when Rohanne Bulbecker, a successful New York publisher, asks for Janice's help with an extremely marketable idea, it's an opportunity for Janice to abandon her usual predictable genre and try something entirely new . . .
Taken from the Faber website.
Chevalier, Tracy
Tells the story of Griet, a 16-year-old Dutch girl who becomes a maid in the house of the painter Johannes Vermeer. Her calm and perceptive manner not only helps her in her household duties, but also attracts the painter's attention. Though different in upbringing, education and social standing, they have a similar way of looking at things. Vermeer slowly draws her into the world of his paintings - the still, luminous images of solitary women in domestic settings. As Griet becomes part of her master's work, their growing intimacy spreads disruption and jealousy within the ordered household and even - as the scandal seeps out - ripples in the world beyond.
Taken from the T Chevalier website.
Clark, Candida
A psychological thriller set in an English country house, is more firmly grounded in a contemporary reality of seedy businessmen and displaced singletons. Yet the opening scenes take place on terra incognita in the grounds of a luxury hotel on the West African coast. Here we are introduced to Katherine, a young British photographer who, tired of shooting palm, trees, starts snapping pictures of nearby industrial plants and rusting container ships. Within three weeks of her return to London, her flat is destroyed in an arson attack. The mystery of Katherine's post- Africa persecution gathers momentum when she returns to her childhood home in Kent "an early Victorian pile in reclaimed marshland". Keeping news of the fire from her father (soon to be remarried), Katherine feels no safer in Chatham than in Gabon or London. That she feels the house haunted by the spirit of her long- dead mother "also a photographer" adds to her growing paranoia.
NEW Clarke, Arthur C
Clarke's work is highly optimistic. In 2001, he envisions a world in which travel to the moon may not be commonplace, but it occurs frequently enough that children can be born at a lunar scientific base. A massive space station is being built in Low Earth Orbit and shuttles ply their way between Earth, the station and the Moon effortlessly. A trip to Saturn is possible and almost a matter-of-fact occurence.
Taken from SF Site website.
Cole, Martina
Donna Brunos worships her husband and is devastated when he is jailed for armed robbery. Georgio swears he’s been set up and persuades Donna to help him escape. Implementing ‘the jump’ takes Donna into a twilight world she never believed existed - a world of brutal sex and casual violence. Finally, she is confronted by a series of shattering revelations that threaten not only everything she believes in but also, ultimately, her own life.
Taken from the Hodder website.
NEW Collins, Wilkie
Opens with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison.
Taken from Penguin Website.
NEW Connolly, Karen
The lizard cage is a prison where Teza, a musician, is spending 20 years in solitary confinement for writing political protest songs. Prison conditions are barbaric; the guards are sadists. Connelly does not flinch from delivering graphic descriptions of starvation, torture, drownings, beatings, rape and the resulting physical consequences.
Taken from Wordpress website.
Conroy, Pat
A huge, brash thunder, storm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born.
Taken from the Random House website.
Cusk, Rachel
Amidst leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference.
For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties.
Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters lives.
Dahl, Roald
Twenty wickedly anarchic tales from the master of the unpredictable, chosen from his bestsellers Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. Stylish, outrageous and haunting, they explore the sinister side of the human psyche, with unexpected outcomes. There's the wife who serves up a murderous new dish to her husband, the gambler who collects little fingers from losers, the sound machine that can hear the grass scream, and the night-time seduction that has macabre consequences, to name a few ..
Taken from the Penguin website.
Davies, Martin
It seems a long time ago that Fitz and Gabby were together, when his work on extinct species was about to make him world-famous. Now, it’s his career which is almost extinct. Suddenly, though, the beautiful Gabby reappears in his life. She wants help in tracing the history of The Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, a creature once owned by the great 18th century naturalist Joseph Banks. It soon becomes clear that Fitz is getting involved in something more complicated – and dangerous, than the search for a stuffed bird. To solve the puzzle, he must first uncover the identity of the amazing woman Banks loved – a woman whose disappearance from history was as abrupt as that of the elusive bird itself.
Taken from the Rod Hall Agency website.
Deveraux, Jude
"It's Raining Men! Hallelujah! --- It's Raining Men! Amen!" Eden Palmer's life takes an unexpected turn once again when two handsome men come into her life at the same time, and Eden's temperature "is rising."
Taken from the Bookreporter website.
Desai, Kiran
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are claimed by his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. When an Indian–Nepali insurgency in the mountains interrupts Sai’s exploration of the many incarnations and facets of a romance with her Nepali tutor, and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they are forced to consider their colliding interests.
Link to Penguin website.
Diamant, Anita
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible her fate is merely hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the verses of the Book of Genesis that recount the life of Jacob and his infamous dozen sons. The Red Tent is an extraordinary and engrossing tale of ancient womanhood and family honour. Told in Dinah's voice, it opens with the story of her mothers - the four wives of Jacob - each of whom embodies unique feminine traits, and concludes with Dinah's own startling and unforgettable story of betrayal, grief and love. Deeply affecting and intimate, The Red Tent combines outstandingly rich storytelling with an original insight into women's society in a fascinating period of early history and such is its warmth and candour, it is guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of women across the world.
Taken from the PanMacmillan website.
Dickens, Charles
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the court of Chancery it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo a destitute little crossing-sweeper.
Summary taken from book jacket.
Donnelly, Jennifer
Based on a real-life murder, which shocked turn-of-the-century America. A Gathering Light is the story of the coming of age of a strong, selfless heroine. Mattie is torn between her familial responsibilities, her desire to be a writer, and the excitement of a first romance. Her dilemmas and choices are quietly reflected in the life of a young woman found drowned in a lake, a woman whom Mattie gets to know only through a bundle of letters left in her possession. The tale of the drowned girl merges with Mattie’s own story, giving her the courage to define her own future.
Taken from the Bloomsbury website.
Donovan, Anne
Anne Marie’s Da, a Glaswegian painter and decorator has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Centre, no one takes him seriously. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his wife. Cracks appear in their apparently happy family life, and the ensuing events change the lives of each family member.
Taken from the Cannongate website.
NEW Downham, Jenny
Tessa has been living with leukaemia for four years. And, by the end of the book, she will die. There's no use fighting this. It tells you right there in the title. Even with this foreknowledge, it's hard not to feel a stab of resentment as you're confronted by something as sentimentally sucker-punching as Before I Die.
Taken from Guardian website.
Doyle, Roddy
Two middle aged men, laid off from their jobs and living on welfare, refurbish a disgusting old fast-food van. The attempt to get rich selling fish and chips puts a strain on their friendship.
Taken from Emory website.
Du Maurier, Daphne
Last night I dream't I went to Manderley again ... Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place.... Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.
Taken from the Virago website.
Du Maurier, Daphne
When Mary Yellan, a farmer's daughter from Helford, obeyed her mother's dying wish and went to live with her aunt near Bodmin, she had no idea that her attractive, laughing relative was married to the landlord of Jamaica Inn, miles from anywhere on Bodmin Moor. As the coachman warned her: 'Respectable folk don't go to Jamaica any more', and as her evil giant of an uncle soon told her, after a few glasses of brandy: 'I'm not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forgotten spot, and why I'm the landlord of Jamaica Inn.'
Taken from the Dumaurier website.
Dubus, Andre
In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Niccolo is a recovering alcoholic and addict whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.
Taken from the Random House website.
Duchen, Jessica
This debut novel is captivating, imaginative and fascinating. The questions that were posed very poignant, both from a musical and personal perspective. The pace builds powerfully to a dramatic and ultimately very moving conclusion. Completely gripping!’.
Taken from the Jessicaduchen website.
Dunmore, Helen
When Nina goes to help her sister Isabel after the difficult birth of her first child she expects only to be a source of comfort and support. She finds Isabel, weak from the birth, caught up in a fearful love for her new son and in retreat from the rest of the world. Both Nina and Isabel's husband are deeply concerned for her mental and physical welfare but eventually find themselves drawn into an obsessive affair. As the heat of the summer intensifies so do relationships within the household. Nina begins to remember scenes from her childhood with Isabel, in particular, disturbing memories of their brother Colin who died at three months, supposedly of cot death. The pace of the narrative quickens as it works towards its shocking climax when Isabel goes missing.
Dunmore, Helen
Disturbing love and underlying horror govern the hermetic world of this Gothic novel set in early twentieth-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother abandons them whe, n they are young, and their father dies after being institutionalized. The children live with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their dependable maid, Kate, and a malicious tutor, Miss Gallagher. Together they forge a passionate refuge for themselves while the world outside moves to the brink of war. Against this backdrop, cruelty and eroticism lurk beneath every surface. Kate and Rob finally leave for Canada and then the war comes, taking most of the neighboring men with it, so that Cathy is left with her ailing grandfather on the farm. It's only when the war ends, and she is alone that she is ready to break away and be redeemed by love.
Taken from readinggroupguides website.
Eclair, Jenny
The story of Anna, a butter side up sort of woman; Anna's neighbour Jo, the kind of woman who can ask for a pound of sausages without the butcher smirking; their sons and daughters - nancy-boy Jed, snivelling Henry, prepubescent überbitch Georgina and fat Pandora; Jo's husband Nigel, a terrible one for casual sex; and Anna's husband 'good old Chris', the worm that turns.
Taken from the Camberwell Beauty website.
Eliot, G G
Ella is not your average girl aged fourteen and three quarters. She is mad about playing football and doesn’t mind getting dirty while in goals. Ella is a better football player than most of the boys that she plays with, which, has earned her the respect of being treated just like one of the lads. However, things have started to change and the boys are now staring at her oddly.
Elton, Ben
The hero, Inspector Douglas Kingsley, has a wife with golden curls and shapely ankles. When Kingsley becomes a conscientious objector, said golden-haired spouse leaves a white feather in the matrimonial bed and the cook gives notice. Kingsley is dragged from prison and drafted into the army under a false name. He is sent to Flanders to find the murderer of an aristocratic officer who has apparently been shot by a shell-shocked soldier whom he disciplined.
Taken from the Independent website.
Farrell, J G
The spring of 1857, and the onset of the Sepoy rebellion in India. This is the backdrop for J G Farrell’s exploration of race, culture and class. The reader is introduced to a large cast of characters as Farrell paints a vivid picture of the Victorians’ recreational and genteel pastimes. However, when Krishnapur is finally attacked, the British are reduced to eating insects and consorting across class lines. Farrell’s descriptions evoke the horror and tension of the period, whilst also unleashing a dark humour.
Faulks, Sebastian
Set in France before and during World War I, this is the story of a young Eng, lishman who is propelled through a series of extreme experiences, including a traumatic love affair which tears apart the bourgeois French family with whom he lives.
Fforde, Jasper
There is another 1985, somewhere in the could have been, where the Crimean war still rages, dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is deeply disappointed by the ending of 'Jane Eyre'. In this world there are no jet liners or computers, but there are policeman who can travel across time, a Welsh republic, a great interest in all things literary - and a woman called Thursday Next. In this utterly original and wonderfully funny first novel, Fforde has created a fiesty, loveable heroine and a plot of richness and ingenuity.
Taken from the HodderHeadline website.
Flaubert, Gustave
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a me, diocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for pass, ion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
Taken from the Penguin website.
Fletcher, Susan
As she awaits the birth of her first child, the almost thirty year old Eve Green gazes into the past to the years when she first arrived at her grandparents' farm, after her mother dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Devastated, the child has difficulty adjusting from city life to the country, where city sounds are replaced by "straw, dung, petrol, the stench of dead water, the tang of wood smoke".
Taken from the CurledUp website.
Forster, E M
E M Forster unveils the English character as never before, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups - a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty. The source of their conflict Howards End, a house in the countryside which ultimately becomes a symbol of conflict within British society.
Taken from the Penguin Classics website.
Forster, E M
When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon fi