| "TEA TIME" BOOK CLUB |
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5.30pm -7pm - Basement Bar Please ask for Maria
Sunday 9th October 2011 Sunday 11th September 2011 Sunday 14th August 2011 Sunday 17th July 2011 Sunday 12th June 2011 (amazon) Paris in the eighties. Four friends. Three men and one woman. Two affairs that destroy a life. Sunday 8th May 2011 "Red Dust Road" by Jackie Kay
In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move. Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love. (c) amazon
Sunday 10th April 2011 "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
(c) Amazon
"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" "Norwegian Wood" (Lennon/McCartney).
With Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status. The novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese "I" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises. Sunday 13th March 2011 "Room" by Emma Donoghue (C) amazon It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside . . . Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.
Sunday 13th February 2011 "The Lessons" by Naomi Alderman 
Hidden away in an Oxford back street is a crumbling Georgian mansion. Its owner is the charismatic Mark Winters, who gathers around him an impressionable group of students. For a time, they live in a world of learning, parties, and love affairs. But university is no grounding for adult life, and when, years later, tragedy strikes, they are entirely unprepared for the consequences. ©2010 Naomi Alderman Ltd; (P)2010 WF Howes Ltd
Sunday 9th January 2011 "Mary Ann in Autumn" by
(c) amazon Twenty years have passed since Mary Ann Singleton left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York.Now, a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, a gay gardener happily ensconced with his much-younger husband. Mary Ann finds temporary refuge in the couple's backyard cottage, where, at the unnerving age of 57, she licks her wounds and takes stock of her mistakes.Soon, with the help of Facebook and a few old friends, she begins to reengage with life, only to confront fresh terrors when her speckled past comes back to haunt her in a way she could never have imagined. Among those caught in Mary Ann's orbit are her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michael's transgendered gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson; and the indefatigable Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann's former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. Over three decades in the making, Armistead Maupin's legendary Tales of the City series rolls into a new age, still sassy, irreverent and curious, and still exploring the boundaries of the human experience with insight, compassion and mordant wit. (c) amazon "Deathtrap" a thriller in two acts (c) Amazon
Sunday 10th October 2010 "The Mermaids Singing" by Val McDermid
(c) amazon Gold Dagger Award winning serial killer thriller introducing Tony Hill, criminal profiler and now hero of 'The Wire in the Blood', the hugely successful TV drama series. You always remember the first time. Isn't that what they say about sex? How much more true it is of murder! Up till now, the only serial killers Tony Hill had encountered were safely behind bars. This one's different -- this one's on the loose. In the northern town of Bradfield four men have been found mutilated and tortured. Fear grips the city; no man feels safe. Clinical psychologist Tony Hill is brought in to profile the killer. A man with more than enough sexual problems of his own, Tony himself becomes the unsuspecting target in a battle of wits and wills where he has to use every ounce of his professional nerve to survive. A tense, brilliantly written psychological thriller, The Mermaids Singing explores the tormented mind of a serial killer unlike any the world of fiction has ever seen. (c) amazon Sunday 12th September 2010 "Carol" by Patricia Highsmith (c) Amazon
Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a
Sunday 15th August 2010 "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennesse Williams
(c) Amazon
"Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece has been the source of controversy since it was written five decades ago. It is the story of the fallen Southern belle Blanche Dubois, whose desperate dellusions of grandeur are rent to shreds by her earthy and realistic brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Touching on issues of prejudice, sexual codependence, mental breakdown, and rape, A Streetcar Named Desire is at times disturbing in its brutal honesty. Readings of this sultry play have found it to be anything from a critique of the conflict between the North and South in post Civil War America, to a subtle commentary on the struggles of Williams' life as a homosexual. The image of Stanley bellowing drunkenly to his wife Stella, as well as lines such as Blanche telling how she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers" have become so much a part of the American consciousness that they are recognizable even to those who are unfamiliar with Williams' work itself". Review by Issac Moyer
Sunday 11th July 2010 "Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford
(c) Penguin Books
Amazon.com ReviewFew aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love(1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.
Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts: A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?" Sunday 13th June 2010 "A Parisian Affair & Other Stories" "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving  
(C) Amazon A Prayer for Owen Meany is a novel by American writer Sunday 7th March 2010 "An Elegy for Easterly" by Petina Gappah
Sunday 7th February 2010
"The Other Hand" by Chris Cleave
A powerful piece of art... shocking, exciting and deeply affecting...[a] superb novel... Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters' ethical struggles, THE OTHER HAND delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.' (Independent 20080809) 'An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia...Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence. ' (Lawrence Norfolk, Guardian 20080803) 'totally believable... the author has a knack of explaining human suffering... I look forward to his next offering.' ( Daily Express 20080828) 'impresses as a feat of literary engineering... the plot exerts a fearsome grip.' ( Daily Telegraph 20080320) 'An exhilarating, disturbing read.' (James Urquhart, Independent (Books of the Year) 20080320) Sunday 6th December 2009
"The L Shaped Room" by Lynne Reid Banks
(c) Lynne Reid Banks An unmarried and pregnant young woman moves into the top room of a dilapidated shared house.
Sunday 1st November 09
"Forgotten Fruits" by Christopher Stocks
Christopher Stocks will be reading a passage from his book on the day
'This is my favourite book of the year.' Monty Don, Daily Mail 'A captivating book, written with a wonderfully light and assured touch.' Anna Pavord, Gardens Illustrated Forgotten Fruits"Britain has an extraordinarily rich heritage of traditional varieties of fruit and vegetables, but how many of us know the fascinating and sometimes eccentric stories behind them? Who was the Mr Cox, for example, who gave his name to Cox's Orange Pippins, now the most popular apple in the world? Which conference were Conference pears named after? Where do Victoria plums really come from? What is so mysterious about the apple called the Bascombe Mystery? What role did beetroot play in ending the slave trade, and how did gooseberries help Charles Darwin arrive at his theory of evolution? Who started the uniquely British love-affair with rhubarb and runner beans? When and where was growing potatoes illegal? And how was the Spanish Inquisition responsible for our carrots being orange? Forgotten Fruits is the first book to answer all these questions, bringing together the history of Britain's fruit and vegetables, from their origins - some of them ancient, but others surprisingly new - to their influence, over the years, on British society, the changing attitudes towards the food we eat and, more recently, the reasons for their disappearance from our supermarket shelves. Informative, entertaining and packed with intriguing insights into the past, Forgotten Fruits offers an entirely new way of looking at the history of British cooking, gardening and society. In it you will find onions named after islands, a tomato named after a yacht, an unknown variety of redcurrant discovered growing under a gooseberry bush, new kinds of apples found in gutters and on rubbish tips, even a parsnip named after a popular song." (C) Christopher Stocks
"In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners - mother, son and daughter - are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
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