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The Invention of Wings Sue Monk Kidd Set in the American Deep South “The Invention of Wings” unflinchingly describes the brutality of slavery in vivid and precise detail. The book is the fictionalised history of the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina (Nina), who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, wound around the intriguing life story […]
» Read moreMrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf This book follows a single day in 1923 in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class London society hostess, preparing for a party. The day interweaves her thoughts, reflections on the past, life choices and actions, with several other characters, including Septimus Smith (a war veteran, suffering from post traumatic stress) and Peter Walsh […]
» Read moreThis month we all read a book of our own choice. Coming ‘Highly Recommended’ were a variety of novels: ‘The Dry’ by Jane Harper. ‘And the Mountains Echoed’ by Khaled Husseini. ‘Nutshell’ by Ian Mcewan ‘Such a Long Journey’ by Rohinton Mistry ‘The Devil in the Marshalsea’ by Antonia Hodgson Also, ‘Eggs and Anarchy’ by William Sitwell, a bio-graphical […]
» Read moreThe Muse by Jessie Burton The Muse is a follow up novel to Jessie Burton’s very successful first novel The Miniaturist, which has previously been reviewed by the Page Turners. The story is told in two timelines and centres on two creatively gifted young women, Olive Schloss an artist in Spain in the l930’s at the time of the Civil […]
» Read more‘The Quality of Silence’ by Rosamund Lupton Yasmin who is an Astrologist, and her daughter Ruby, who is deaf from birth, have flown to Fairbanks to meet up with her husband Matt, who makes documentary wildlife films. They were met by a policeman who explained that Matt had been staying in Anaktue, a village north of the Artic Circle where […]
» Read moreThe Moonstone by Wilkie Collins This is a classic novel, written in 1868 and declared to be the first detective story. It is number 19 in the 100 best books on the Guardian list. To quote Carolyn G Heilbrun from Goodreads. “The Moonstone unfolds its amazing story through the recounting of several narrators, all of them enticing and singular. […]
» Read moreThe Year of the Runaways by Sanjeev Sahota This Booker-short listed novel traces the lives of three Indian immigrants over a year. The three young men, Tarlochan Kumar (Tochi), Avtar Nijjar and Randeep Sanghera, move into a house in Sheffield which is shared by numerous migrant workers. The fourth character in this story, Narinder Kaur, is a young British-raised devout […]
» Read moreThe Silk Merchant's Daughter by Dinah Jefferies. We met on 8th August to discuss it, and for once our stars aligned and all ten of us were present! We agreed that it was an amazing and captivating story, historical fiction maybe but we all learned a lot about French Indo-China in the early 1950s. Our average score for the […]
» Read moreWe had no set book this month, so we all chose a good read, some very successfully, others not quite so. The one 10/10 was by Rohinton Mistry “A Fine Balance” – an exceptional novel about India during The Emergency. (We as a group had read this author’s “Family Matters” and had loved it) Several highly recommended 9/10s: […]
» Read moreNo Time for Goodbye is a "thriller" novel written by Canadian author Linwood Barclay. Married and with a daughter of her own, it has been twenty five years since her family vanished without a trace but Cynthia Archer has never given up hope that they might one day all return and, as a result, has not been able to […]
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