General Chat

Vote will be at 5pm.

n

Thanks Alfie.

Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey.

The village of Wentworth is in Yorkshire and was surrounded by 70 collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain and belonged to the Fitzwilliam family.

It is England's forgotten palace which belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. Black Diamonds tells the story of its demise: inhereitance fights, rumours of a changeling,family feuds, connection to the Kennedys,forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth century British politics, lies at its heart.

This is the extraordinary story of how the fabric of English society shifted beyond recognition in fifty turbulent years in the twentieth century.

Excellent research!


Second choice.
Christmas Books by Charles Dickens.

Contains all the old favourite short stories.
A Christmas Carol.
The Chimes.
The Cricket on the Hearth.
The Battle of Life.
The Haunted Man.

Anyone seen May Blossom around, I wonder if she is away. And Helen in Kent too.

Vote will be tomorrow so if they haven't been on we will just go ahead.

n

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

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

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

Still five to go

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

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!

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.

n

Any more suggestions please.

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

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.

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.