Members of the book group can get a discount of 20% on all Blue Lounge Book Group titles at Borders Teesside with their membership. Middlesbrough Libraries also have copies of the books
Autumn/Winter books
October 6
Talk of the Town By Jacob Polley
(NWN Simul-read)
It’s 1986, the last day of the summer holidays, and Christopher Hearsey is wondering why his best mate Arthur has suddenly disappeared, and whether lippy Gill Ross a few doors down might know anything about it. The great border city of Carlisle is buzzing with rumours following an act of terrible violence, and in order to begin his search Chris must face down his own dread, not only of the consequences of his own actions, but of local big man Booby Grove, and his psychotic sidekick Carl ‘the black’ Hole, who is keen to settle an old score. Populated by a menacing and hilarious cast of characters, and moving from the dark aggrieved streets of the city to the agricultural hinterland of the Solway Firth, this is the story of a boy desperate to get out of town, out of a bad situation, even out of his own skin. Written with a moving demotic brilliance, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, “Talk of the Town” is an exhilarating and terrifying odyssey.
November 3rd
A Perfectly Good Family By Lionel Shriver
(NWN choice)
Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family’s grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into ‘his’ house as well, it’s war. Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.
December 1st
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
(group choice)
Child 44 is a thriller set in the terror of 1950s Stalinist Russia, a brutal regime that executed anyone who disagreed with its dogma. It proclaimed to be a perfect society. So, when a series of brutal murders take place, no one is permitted to say that these are the work of a serial killer. In a perfect society there can be no crime.
One man, Leo Demidov, a State security agent, a man who has spent his entire career arresting innocent men and women, decides to redeem himself by catching this killer. To do so, he must buck the system, risking his life and the life of everyone he loves.
January 5th
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
(Natalie’s choice)
In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents’ home?
This is a novel about survival – both banal and heroic – and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.
Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.
Books we have read already…
March, 2008 Richard Milward – Apples
April, 2008 Paul Magrs – Something Borrowed
May, 2008 Marion Husband – The Good Father
July, 2008 Stella Duffy – The Room of Lost things
July, 2008 So Many Ways to Begin, Jon McGregor
Sept, 2008 Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nov, 2008 The Giro Playboy, Michael Smith
Jan, 2009 The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, Julia Darling
Feb, 2009 The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffeneger
March 2009 God’s Own Country, Ross Raisin
April 2009 Out Stealing Horses By Per Petterson
May 2009 Ten Storey Love Song, Richard Milward
June 2009 9987 by Nik Jones
July 2009 The Crow Road By Iain Banks
Sept 2009 Cold Earth By Sarah Moss
6 Responses to “The books”