Category: Clubs & Societies

‘We order our lives with barely held stories’ This month we read another novel set in the aftermath of WW2 – Michael Ondaatje’s 2018 ‘Warlight’. It is narrated by Nathaniel, now 28 years old looking back on the strange adventures of his adolescence.
The novel is in two parts. The first is set in 1945 in the twilight world of post-war London and much of the action takes place at night. Fifteen year old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel have been left by their parents in the care of a mysterious figure called The Moth. Their parents have ostensibly gone to Singapore for their father’s’ job but it is their mother, Rose, who is behind the flight and we gradually discover that she leads a double life as a spy. Continue reading “Book Review – ‘Warlight’ by Michael Ondaatje”

‘Life without complications isn’t really a life’

Our choice in July was ‘Love is Blind’ by William Boyd. Like many of Boyd’s novels (e.g. ‘Any Human Heart’) it follows the protagonist’s life, in this case ten years of Brodie Mancur’s life at the beginning of the 20th century as he flees around the world from a pursuer bent on revenge. It is therefore a picaresque adventure story owing much to one of Boyd’s heroes, Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as to Chekhov – another influence on his writing. Continue reading “Love is Blind by William Boyd”

Becoming’ opens with an anecdote that sets the tone of warmth throughout the book. She tells how, having left the White House, and hungry in the night, she goes down to her own kitchen and makes a cheese toastie to eat on her back doorstep, suddenly becoming aware of her newly-found freedom to do something that would be impossible in the White House. So starts the memoir of a woman who grew up in a humble black-district in the south side of Chicago and rose to become America’s First Lady with many achievements in her own right. Continue reading “‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama – ‘wife, mother, dog lover’”

‘ It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again.’

Last month the Book Club read Ali Smith’s ‘Autumn’. Published in 2016 soon after the Referendum, it is the first of four seasonal state of the nation novels and was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize. It is a novel that has haunted me since reading and re-reading it, largely due to the poetic flow of the language, which has been described as ‘a beautiful poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities’, but also to the complexity of the ideas, the richness of literary allusions, the use of symbolism and the treatment of time. It is an elusive, multi-layered novel. Continue reading “Autumn by Ali Smith”

“There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud”

Carol Shields was born in 1936 and died in 2003. She had five children and her first novel was accepted in the week she turned forty. She went on to become a prizewinning novelist and an academic with an interest in women’s rights. The ‘Stone Diaries’ 1993 is her most famous book. it was shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize and went on to win the Pulitzer prize and the Governor General’s award in Canada. In many ways it reflects her own domesticity as well as her wider aspirations. Continue reading “The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields”