General Chat

Please make your suggestions (two books) for the next session. Dec 09 to Jan 2010
Review date 12th January.

Putting this up early as I have so much to so. However the vote will not be until Tues/ Weds as the proper date is 1st.

Have seen this. Will have to think ... oh dear, my brain hurts.

Tess

Greaders suggestion Dec 09 – Jan 2010 Kissing Gates
The Kissing Gates by Mackenzie Ford

When English soldier Hal strikes up a conversation with German Lieutenant Wlhelm during the ceasefire in no – man’s – land on Christmas Day 1914, he has no idea the impact this chance meeting will have. Wilhelm is in love with an English woman, Sam, and presses a photograph into Hal’s hand – if he survives the war Hal must promise to find Sam and give her this token of affection.

Invalided home while the battle rages on, Hal goes in search of Sam – but the moment he sees her he is in trouble. With Wilhelm’s photograph hidden in his pocket, Hal begins a life – and a love affair – meant for someone else.

A passionate, engrossing page-turner – an epic story of love, the corroding power of secrets, and a man at war with himself.

The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran

Ann More, fiery and spirited daughter of the Mores of Losely House in Surrey, and educated by her Grandfather in Latin and Greek, comes to London destined for a life at the court of Queen Elizabeth and an advantageous marriage.
And the she encounters John Donne, the darkly attractive young poet who is secretary to her uncle, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He is unlike any man she has ever met – angry, clever, witty – and in her eyes insufferably arrogant and careless of women. Yet as they are thrown together Donne opens Ann’s eyes to a new world of passion, wit and sensuality.

But John Donne – Catholic by background in an age when it is deadly dangerous, tainted by an alluring hint of scandal – is the kind of man her status conscious father distrusts and despises.
Set against the sumptuousness and intrigues of the dying years of Elizabeth’s reign. The Lady and the Poet tells the passionate story of the forbidden love between one of our most admired poets and a girl who dared to rebel against the conventions of her time.

First I thought something festive would be nice and my first suggestion is now in W H Smith.

LAST CHRISTMAS by Julia Williams

Catherine Tinsall is dreading christmas. As the 'Happy Homemaker' she is an online sensation, but the reality couldn't be more different. with her marriage in tatters, her children running wild and her mothers forgetfulness, seasonal cheer is running low.


My second book choice is

THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS by Isabel Allende

Spanning four generations, Isabel Allende's magnificent family saga is populated by a memorable, often eccentric cast of characters. Together, men and women, spirits, the forces of nature, and of history, converge in an unforgettable, wholly absorbing and brilliantly realised novel that is as richly entertaining as it is a masterpiece of modern literature.

The Sonnet Lover - Carol Goodman

Poet and Renaissance scholar Rose Asher teaches at a small but ambitious New York college that offers a summer program at La Civetta, a villa outside Florence. The resplendent, reputedly haunted villa is the setting for a film made by Rose's favorite student, who falls to his death immediately after the premier. Did Robin die because he discovered the long-lost work of an unknown Renaissance woman poet? Rose, involved in a secret affair with the suspiciously elusive college president, reluctantly returns to La Civetta, the site of her greatest love, to see if she can discover the truth about Ginevera de Laura. Was she the enigmatic Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets? Did her blood once stain the villa's marble floors?

Mutiny on the Bounty by John Boyne

This riveting account set in 1789 is narrated by 14-year-old John Jacob Turnstile, Captain Bligh's fictitious servant. Arrested as a pickpocket, he is offered a choice of jail or ship duty. As Turnstile adjusts to life aboard ship, he develops respect and admiration for his master. The later infamous William Bligh is portrayed as a shrewd navigator and devoted husband and father whose moodiness and rigid adherence to duty, loyalty, and honor often antagonize his crew. After six months on idyllic Tahiti, second-in-command Fletcher Christian leads 23 crew members in a mutiny, forcing Bligh and 18 loyal crew members into a 23-foot launch with only a compass and meager rations. Incredibly, with only one fatality, Bligh, Turnstile, and their companions row more than 3600 miles to a Portuguese settlement on Timor. Nursed back to health, the surviving crew returns to England where their story captures public attention. Imbuing the story with facts drawn from Bligh's personal documents, legal transcripts of his court martial, English naval protocol, and nautical history, Boyne has created a masterful adventure.

Southern Lights - by Danielle Steel
Alexa has been appointed to try an accused killer but when threatening letters are sent to her daughter, it seems that a case which could make her career could also destroy her life.

Under the Dome - by Stephen King
Everything is normal until the moment an invisible force field seals it off from the rest of the world. Planes smash into it and cars explode on impact.

N

Jackdaws by Ken Follet

Two weeks before D-Day, the French Resistance attacks a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications – but the building is heavily guarded and the attack fails disastrously.


Flick Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the ‘Jackdaws’ and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But, unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless Intelligence colonel, Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flick’s trail...


Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler

When mysterious black obsidian skulls and other artefacts of an exceedingly ancient culture begin to turn up in odd places, Pitt jumps in with both feet. It soon becomes dangerously apparent that a powerful, amoral group of fanatics calling itself the Fourth Empire wants the strange discoveries to remain underground. Pitt teams up with a beautiful red-haired expert in ancient languages to decipher the meaning of the artefacts. They were made 10 millennia ago in a then-temperate Antarctica by a seafaring civilization advanced enough to predict its own destruction by a comet impact. Now the Fourth Empire (whose literal and figurative progenitor comes as no surprise) is predicting a similar disaster in only a matter of months and preparing to take control of the earth

xJill

n

Any more suggestions please.

n

My first suggestion is-

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village.
Arthur becomes a Doctor, then a writer, George a Solicitor in Birmingham.
Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity.
But as the new century begins, they are bought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as "The Great Wyrley Outrages"
With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just the long forgotten case, but also the inner workings of these two very different men.
This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporay echoes. A novel about low crime and high sprituality; guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race.
Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differances between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

My second suggestion is-

"Keeping Mum" - A Wartime Childhood by Brian Thompson

What's it like to be the man of the house when you're still only a boy?
Mum and Dad (Squibs and Bert), were a complete mystery to Brian Thompson as he grew up in Cambridge and London during the 1940s.
His mother danced all night with the Yanks and slept all day under a ffaux fur coat, and when his father bothered to come home he discouraged brian in everything.
Whilst other children were evacuated out of the big cities, Brian found himself travelling to London, and spent much of the Blitz with an eccentric crowd of indolent, ribald relations.
Brian Thompson describes a boyhood as rich and mysteious as anything fiction can provide.

P.S. Sorry, I clicked on delete instead of edit!

Monica McInerney for both of mine.

Her name has come up before and whilst her book 'Those Faraday Girls" is over 600 pages long, but you really do not want it to end, it is amusing, absolutely believable charming story - it spans thirty years of family life. As the cover says it is about five sisters, one little girl and a lifetime of secrets.

The other book by her is for those who may want to give a book a go but do not have the time as they are busy doing family trees etc. This book has several short stories and a novella. Easy to read and the Novella is a good start into reading more of her books. It is called "All Together Now"

Cheers

Norma

Still five to go

Well what a struggle this month, had the thread up early too. Please let me know if you are not interested this month.

Sorry Ann, been away for a few days and only just got back on my computer. Here are my suggestions -

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

This is a love story: the tale of Lata’s – and her mother’s – attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world’s population faces its first General Election and the chance to map its own destiny.

One Way To Venice by Jane Aiken Hodge

The anonymous letters start soon after Julia Rivers has given up the search for her lost child. Taunting, teasing, full of hate, they remind her strangely of the terrible time back in South Carolina, when an unknown enemy sought her death, and, narrowly failing in that, succeeded in destroying her marriage. Now she is offered an anonymous booking, one way to Venice, to search for her child.

Pam

Thanks Pammy wondered if you were away as you are usually so prompt.