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Post by nashwa on Sept 20, 2016 22:23:43 GMT
What is your favourite book?
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.
Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.
They are Cora Seaborne and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.
Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.
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Post by herne on Sept 25, 2016 20:59:39 GMT
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of this young man whose name is Roderick Macrae. An account written by the accused makes it clear he is guilty, but this falls to the country s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such a merciless acts in violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers from his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows.
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Post by huyana on Sept 27, 2016 15:03:07 GMT
Cartes Postales from Greece by Victoria Hislop.
Week after week, postcards arrive, addressed to a name Ellie does not know, with no return address, each signed with an initial: A.
With their bright skies, blue seas and alluring images of Greece, these cartes postales brighten her life. After six months, to her disappointment, they cease. But the montage she has created on the wall of her flat has cast a spell. She must see this country for herself.
On the morning Ellie leaves for Athens, a notebook arrives. These pages foretell the story of this man's odyssey through Greece. Moving, surprising and sometimes dark, A's tale unfolds with the discovery not only of a culture but also with this desire to live life to the full once more.
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Post by bronwen on Sept 27, 2016 17:44:53 GMT
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.
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Post by minxy on Sept 28, 2016 20:30:55 GMT
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.
Rear Window meets Gone Girl, in this exceptional and startling psychological thriller. Is gripping, enthralling, a top-notch thriller and a compulsive read. S J WATSON, bestselling author of 'Before I Go To Sleep', Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning.
She knows this will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. "Jess and Jason": she calls them.
Their life she sees as perfect. If only Rachel could be happy. And then she sees something shocking, this is only a minute until the train moves on, but that's enough. Now everything's changed, Rachel has her chance to become a part of the lives she's only watched from afar. Now they'll see, she's much more than just the girl on the train.
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Post by seirian on Sept 28, 2016 21:59:16 GMT
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.
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Post by scamp on Sept 28, 2016 22:49:04 GMT
The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell (and Gelrev Ongbico).
This is a story about Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods from Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder and Feo is a wolf wilder in training. A wolf wilder is the opposite of an animal tamer: this is someone who teaches tamed animals to fend for themselves, to fight, to run and to be wary of humans.
When the murderous hostility from the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run. What follows is a story of revolution and adventure, about standing up for the things you love and fighting back. And of course about wolves.
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Post by shannon on Sept 28, 2016 23:49:15 GMT
After You by Jojo Moyes.
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Post by rebelgirl on Sept 29, 2016 14:34:14 GMT
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay by J. K. Rowling.
Fantastic Beasts is very much in the spirit of the Potter books, as with all Jo Rowlings' works, which aren't soft. There is material in all of his books that has a truth about life. Here, there’s darkness within. But there are also these creatures, and an awful lot of humour and heart, which I think will appeal to both young and old alike.
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Post by imp on Sept 29, 2016 17:06:17 GMT
The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson.
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island which became his adopted country. This hilarious book which resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation’s heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book which best represents Britain. To mark this twentieth anniversary for modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey around Britain to see what has changed.
Following, but not too closely, a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places where many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover this wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn’t altogether recognize any more.
Still, despite Britain’s occasional failings with more or less eternal bewilderments, Bill Bryson is still pleased to call our rainy island home. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history and having an extra day off at Christmas.
Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.
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Post by saiorse on Sept 30, 2016 20:23:01 GMT
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot.
At the age of thirty, Amy Liptrot finds herself washed up back home on Orkney. Standing unstable on this island, she tries to come to terms with her addiction which swallowed the last decade in her life. As she spends her mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, her days tracking Orkney's wildlife. Her nights searching the sky for Merry Dancers, Amy discovers how the wild can restore life and give her renewed hope.
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Post by rapscallion on Oct 1, 2016 15:47:12 GMT
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh.
The Christmas season offers Eileen Dunlop little cheer Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys' prison, she tempers her dreary days with dreams for escaping into the big city. In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes.
When this beautiful and charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. But soon, Eileen's affection for Rebecca will pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.
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Post by rogue on Oct 1, 2016 19:08:12 GMT
The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking.
In this beautiful and inspiring book, this author will help you become hygge. From picking the right lighting and planning a dinner party through to creating an emergency hygge kit, and even how to dress. Meik Wiking is the CEO of this Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. He is committed to finding out what makes people happy and has concluded that hygge is the magic ingredient that makes Danes the happiest nation in the world.
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Post by laquetta on Oct 1, 2016 20:30:51 GMT
The Widow by Fiona Barton.
The ultimate psychological thriller: We've all seen him, this monstrous man staring from the front page in every newspaper, stood accused about his terrible crime.
But what about her, this woman who grips his arm on the courtroom stairs, the wife who stands by him?
Jean Taylor's life was blissfully ordinary. Nice house, nice husband. Glen was all she'd ever wanted: her Prince Charming.
Until he became accused and monster portrayed on the front newspaper page. Jean was now married to her man everyone else thought capable with unimaginable evil. But now Glen is dead and she's alone for the first time, free to tell her story on her own terms.
Jean Taylor is going to tell us what she knows. Du Maurier's Rebecca meets where we need to talk about Kevin and gone girl in this intimate tale about this terrible crime.
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Post by kaniya on Oct 2, 2016 13:58:03 GMT
Exposure by Helen Dunmore.
London, November 1960 when the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When this highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused for passing information to the Soviets and gets arrested.
His wife Lily suspects that his imprisonment is part of a cover-up and that more powerful men than Simon will do anything to prevent their own downfall. She knows that she too is in danger and must fight to protect her children. But what she does not realise is that Simon has hidden vital truths about his past and may be found guilty of another crime that carries with it an even greater penalty.
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