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Recommendations
Book Club Favourites #26
by Brandon King
The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing 80 but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?
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The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants.
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Girl A, by Abigail Dean
Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped. When her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her six siblings - and with the childhood they shared.
The party, by Elizabeth Day
Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn't wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent. But then he meets the dazzling, popular and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice, and gains admission to an exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts at the Fitzmaurice family's estate, as Ben becomes the brother he never had. But Martin has a secret. He knows something about Ben, something he will never tell. It is a secret that will bind the two of them together for the best part of 25 years.
Adventures of the Yorkshire shepherdess, by Amanda Owen
Millions of viewers of 'Our Yorkshire Farm' watched Amanda Owen, husband Clive and their nine children share their daily lives at Ravenseat, one of the most remote hill farms in the country. It's a beautiful place, high in the Dales, and a rewarding existence close to nature. But Ravenseat is a tenant farm and may not stay in the family, so when Amanda saw a nearby farmhouse up for sale, she knew it was her chance to create roots for the next generation.
The old house needed a lot of renovation and money was tight, so with her usual resourcefulness Amanda set about the work herself, with some help from a travelling monk, a visiting plumber and Clive. It's fair to say things did not go according to plan.
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Confessions of a bookseller, by Shaun Bythell
'Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?' Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should by an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what the shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.
The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measures, Confessions of a Bookseller will reunite readers with the characters they've come to know and love.
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The world I fell out of, by Melanie Reid
On Good Friday 2010, Melanie Reid fell from her horse, breaking her neck and fracturing her lower back. She was 52. Paralysed from the top of her chest down, she was to spend almost a full year in hospital, determinedly working towards gaining as much movement in her limbs as possible, and learning to navigate her way through a world that had previously been invisible to her. As a journalist Melanie had always turned to words and now, on a spinal ward peopled by an extraordinary array of individuals who were similarly at sea, she decided that writing would be her life-line.
The World I Fell Out Of is an account of that year, and of those that followed. It is the untold 'back story' behind Melanie's award-winning 'Spinal Column' in The Times Magazine and a testament to 'the art of getting on with it'.
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Under a pole star, by Stef Penney
Flora Mackie was twelve when she first crossed the Arctic Circle on her father's whaling ship. Now she is returning to the frozen seas as the head of her own exploration expedition. Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan, but his yearning for new horizons leads him to the Arctic as part of a rival expedition. When he and Flora meet, all thoughts of science and exploration give way before a sudden, all-consuming love.
The affair survives the growing tensions between the two groups, but then, after one more glorious summer on the Greenland coast, Jakob joins his leader on an extended trip into the interior, with devastating results.
The binding, by Bridget Collins
Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there's something you want to forget, he can help. If there's something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.
In a vault under his mentor's workshop, row upon row of books - and memories - are meticulously stored and recorded. Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it.
The lamplighters, by Emma Stonex
A heart-stopping novel inspired by true events, The Lamplighters is the story of three men who vanish from a remote lighthouse. The entrance door is locked from the inside, the clocks have all stopped and the table is set for dinner. Twenty years later, the mystery of their disappearance still haunts the heartbroken women left behind. The sea has kept its secrets, until now.
Knife edge, by Simon Mayo
7.15 a.m. A sweltering London rush hour. And in the last 29 minutes, seven people have been murdered. In a series of coordinated attacks, seven men and women across London have been targeted. For journalist Famie Madden, the horror unfolds as she arrives for the morning shift. The victims have one thing in common: they make up the investigations team at the news agency where Famie works.
The question everyone's asking: what were they working on that could prompt such brutal devastation? As Famie starts to receive mysterious messages, she must find out whether she is being warned of the next attack, or being told that she will be the next victim.
How to measure a cow, by Margaret Forster
Tara Fraser leaves London to start a new life in a Cumbrian town selected at random. She plans to obliterate her past, which contains a shocking event that had serious consequences, by becoming a completely different personality from her previous volatile self. She is going to be quiet, even dull, and very private. But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. She wants to become her friend. Equally determined not to be discarded are three old friends who Tara feels let her down when she most needed them.
Tara fights to keep herself to herself, but can she do it? And does she really want to? Slowly, reluctantly, she discovers the dangers of trying to supress the past and reject other people.
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