General Chat

I seem to remember that I said this month i would put the book choice thread up early as I am going away next week and it will be easier to have the vote etc before I get involved with packing etc. The review will still not go up until Monday. Please choose two normal and one classical, vote to be on Sunday evening. Ann Glos

Good evening Ann I have already chosen 3 for this month and here they are The Earl of Petticoat Lane – Andrew Miller When Henry Freedman met Miriam Claret in 1929, he was a barrow boy and she was a milliner’s apprentice. In 1953, they were presented to the Queen. A rags to riches story -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Small Island – Andrea Levy It is 1949, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she aggress to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, what else can she do?? Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adam Bede – George Elliot This book goes deep into the dark recesses of human nature and sets forth a coherent philosophy of conduct and inexorable retribution for wrongdoing. Set in the countryside of the English Midlands at the beginning of the 19th century, the book relates a passionate story of seduction, crime, remorse and suffering, but is also enlivened by the humorous rustic aphorist, Mrs Poyser, and the inspirational preacher, Dinah Morris

Hi, Haven't got a classical one. Hope that's not a problem. Just read Peter Kay's autobiography The Sound of Laughter, very funny. Martina Cole's latest called The Close. Very good and gritty. Just started on James Patterson's non-fiction book The Innocent Man. Aileen xxx

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters [bit explicit apparently :-) ] Divided into three parts, the tale is narrated by two orphaned girls whose lives are inextricably linked. It begins in a grimy thieves kitchen in Borough, South London with 17-year-old orphan Susan Trinder. She has been raised by Mrs Sucksby, a cockney Ma Baker, in a household of fingersmiths (pickpockets), coiners and burglars. One evening Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers, a handsome confidence man, arrives. He has an elaborate scheme to defraud Maud Lilly, a wealthy heiress. If Sue will help him she'll get a share of the 'shine'. Duly installed in the Lillys' country house as Maud's maid, Sue finds that her mistress is virtually a prisoner. Maud's eccentric Uncle Christopher, an obsessive collector of erotica (loosely modelled on Henry Spenser Ashbee) controls every aspect of her life. Slowly a curious intimacy develops between the two girls and as Gentleman's plans take shape, Sue begins to have doubts. The scheme is finally hatched but as Maud commences her narrative it suddenly becomes more than a tad difficult to tell quite who has double-crossed who. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katle, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely. Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier 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.' In her first famous novel Daphne du Maurier transferred the world of the Bronte's to Cornwall in the early nineteenth century. In the dark events along the Cornish coast, in the ugly brutality of Joss Merlyn, and in the enigmatic character of his brother Jem, the reader gets an exciting foretaste of her next novel, Rebecca.

By the way Ann, I forgot to say have a good holiday ;-)))

My three are Sky Burial by Xinran In the early 1960s a rumour circulated through China that one of its soldiers in Tibet had been brutally fed to the vultures. Xinran was a little girl: the tale frightened and fascinated her. She knew nothing about the Tibetan custom of 'Sky Burial' - indeed few Chinese at the time knew or understood such rituals. But thirty years later, Xinran me a Chinese woman who could tell her the astonishing story that lay behind the legend. Her name was Shu Wen and she had spent most of her adult life lost on the Tibetan plateau. In this haunting book, Xinran recreates Shu Wen's extraordinary journey in an epic story of love, loss, loyalty and survival. Moving, shocking and, ultimately, uplifting, Sky Burial paints a unique portrait of a woman and a land, both at the mercy of fate and politics. Atonement by Ian McEwan On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy Jude Fawley, a stone-mason, has already suffered. His academic ambitions were thwarted by his poverty and class: trapped into a loveless marriage, he is now alone but not free. He comes to love his cousin Sue who, seemingly emancipated, is herself miserably married. Sue's words to Jude are prophetic, for although together they defy conventional morality to seize a chance of happiness, they are ultimately defeated by both circumstance and the flaws within their own nature. Daisy

Better add my choice. I am going to change one of my books, found a better one. The Virgin Blue Tracy Chevalier The compelling story of 2 women born centuries apart and the ancestral legacy that binds them. Ella Turner tries hard to fit in to the small, close-knit community of the French town she has moved to. She even changes her name back to Tournier, and knocks the rust off her high school French. isolated and lonely, she is drawn to investigate her Tournier ancestry with heart wrenching results. Isabella du Moulin, known as La Rousse because of her red hair is tormented and shunned in her village - suspected of witchcraft and reviled for her association with the Virgin Mary. When she becomes pregnant she has no choice but to marry into the arrogant Tournier family. tormentor becomes husband and a shocking fate awaits her - as Ella discovers four hundred years later. Rita Bradshaw Candles in the storm Daisy Appleby is born into a fishing family in a village in the north of Sunderland in 1884. When her mother dies of fever a few years later it falls to daisy to run the household and care for the family. Life is hard, the sea barely yields a living, and then there is always the anxious wait for the men to return. In the storm that takes her father and 2 brothers Daisy risks her life to save a young stranger from certian death. (A gritty rags to riches Northern saga) Classic The great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Glos

Better keep this near the top for the others. Ann Glos

Running out of time - so busy lol my choices are Margaret Attwood The Blind Assassin '10 days after the war ended my sister laurau drove a car off a bridge' More than 50 years on Iris Chase is remebering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of 2 sisters and their secrets. set against a panoramic backdrop of 20th century history, an epic tale of memory,intrigue and betrayal. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Byrne This work was set in Berlin, 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. But, Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than what meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences. The classic - emmm im stuck this month so im gonna go for Dickens - Tale of Two Cities

Must be some more! ann Glos

There's me Ann! I've been a little delicate today after the annual cricket club do last night! lol. Am I ok to add tomorrow if I don't get it done tonight?

Hello Ann and all the Greaders I have nominated: The Accidental Ali Smith The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. 'The Accidental' is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time. Black Swan Green David Mitchell England, 1982, and the cusp of adolescence. Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village (Black Swan Green) in the dullest county (Worcestershire) in the most tedious nation (England) on earth. And he stammers. 13 chapters, each as self-contained as a short story, follow 13 months in his life and through Jason's eyes, we see what he doesn't know he knows - and watch unfold what will make him wish his life had been as uneventful as he had believed. Classic: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Kaz x

No problem jeanette. Ann Glos

For those of you who read Rebeeca ........the sequel Mrs DeWinters by Susan Hill

For those still to post suggestions

some good choices again, and one of them is on my reading list ;-))))

nudge for Jeannette

come on Jeanette!!

Sorry peeps! I've been a bad girl this month and haven't managed to read any of the books chosen. I have been very selfish and just read a couple of books that I've wanted to read for a little while! So this month, if you don't mind, I won't make any choices or take part in the voting. I shall just read any of the chosen ones that I fancy. Go ahead peeps and cast your votes! lol Jeanette x

* gets cane out for Jeanette * * puts it away again cos she will enjoy it too much * Maz. XX