ideas if you get stuck with books

[Annabel]

I was looking on the library website and saw this:

Book club favourites #1
Written by Brandon King on 14 Mar 2014. Filed under: Book club lists, Book lists.

Caleb's Crossing
Martha’s Vineyard, 1650s: Bethia Mayfield is a young girl growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor, amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless, bright and curious, but denied the education that her brothers receive, she slips away as often as she can to explore the island’s wild landscapes and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At the age of twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the children form a secret friendship that gradually draws each into the alien world of the other.

The Death of the Heart
Set amongst London’s fashionable high society in the late 1930’s, Bowen’s admired novel is a haunting depiction of innocence lost and a subtle blend of comedy and tragedy.

The Rosie Project
Meet Don Tillman. Don is getting married. He just doesn’t know who to yet. But he has designed a very detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect woman. One thing he already knows, though, is that it’s not Rosie. Absolutely, completely, definitely not.

Stoner
The son of a midwestern farmer, William Stoner comes to the University of Missouri in 1910 to study agriculture. Stoner tells of love and conflict, passion and responsibility against the backdrop of academic life in the early 20th century.

The Secret History
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

Wonder
Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life. Now, for the first time, he’s being sent to a real school – and he’s dreading it. All he wants is to be accepted – but can he convince his new classmates that he’s just like them, underneath it all?

The Light Between Oceans
A boat washes up on the shore of a remote lighthouse keeper’s island. It holds a dead man and a crying baby. The two islanders, Tom and his wife Izzy are about to make a devastating decision.

The Interestings
On a warm July night in 1974, six teenagers play at being cool. The friendships they make this summer will be the most important of their lives. But decades later not everyone can sustain in adulthood what had seemed so special in adolescence. As their fortunes tilt precipitously over the years, some of them dealing with great struggle, others enjoying wealth and success, friendships are put under the strain of envy and crushing disappointment against the backdrop of a changing America.

The Burgess Boys
Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their hometown for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a legal aid attorney who idolises Jim, has always taken it in his stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan – the sibling who stayed behind – urgently calls them home.

Defending Jacob
When a boy is discovered dead in the woods, a wave of shock ripples through the community of Newton, outside of Boston. Assistant DA Andy Barber is used to dealing with murder, but when evidence emerges that ties his son Jacob to the crime, Andy faces a very different challenge: preventing his son from being convicted of murder.

The Art of Falling
Penelope Sparrow, a 28-year-old dancer, has spent her entire life focusing on the perfection of her body. But when she wakes up in a Philadelphia hospital unable to move after a near-fatal accident, she can’t remember the events leading up to her crushing 14-story fall. Now, with a second chance at life, Penny must find a way to reconnect with her past and come to terms with the limitations of her body.

Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time
Taking in old age, the context of one’s life and times, memory, reading and writing, and the identifying cargo of possessions – two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others – this is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

The Round House
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, wife and mother Geraldine Coutts is brutally attacked on her North Dakota reservation. Traumatised and afraid in the aftermath, she shuts herself in her bedroom, and shuts everyone out, including her 13-year-old son Joe. While Geraldine’s husband, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with his father’s official investigation and sets out with his best friends Cappy, Zack and Angus, to seek answers of his own.

The Shadow of the Wind. (JANUARY 2015)
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is a labyrinthine library of obscure & forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. A man brings his 10-year-old son to the library & allows him to choose one book to keep. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find.

[Annabel]

book club favourites #2
Written by Brandon King on 05 Sep 2014. Filed under: Book club lists, Book lists.

The Pure Gold Baby
Spanning a period of fifty years from the 1960s to the present day, Margaret Drabble’s latest novel tells the story of Jess Speight, an anthropologist, who becomes pregnant during an affair with a married professor.

The professor leaves and Jess becomes a single mother; she puts her career on hold, sets up home in North London, and manages to get by working as a freelance writer:

“She wrote quickly, easily, at an academic or popular level. She became an armchair, study-bound, library-dependent anthropologist.”

When Jess’s baby, Anna, is born, the pure gold baby of the title, she is a peaceful, contented child, ready to smile at everyone and everything around her and is no trouble at all.

However, after a time, Jess notices that Anna is not developing at the same rate as other children of the same age, and although she hopes that Anna is merely a late developer, she knows her child is different. And Jess is right; Anna is different and, after visits to doctors, she is identified as a child with special needs.

Narrated by Jess’s friend, Eleanor, as she looks back over the years, The Pure Gold Baby is the story of Jess’s and Anna’s journey together and the sacrifices and the decisions Jess has to make for Anna. During the course of the story, through Eleanor, we learn not just about Jess’s and Anna’s shared life, but also the lives of the group of friends around them; we read of love affairs, separations, illness, death, successes and failures.

Double Negative
Engaging and interesting read set in Apartheid South Africa where photography is used to analyse and examine a society on the brink of enormous change. I went to hear him read in June, alongside J.M.Coetzee, in Norwich, and was, like everyone else, really impressed by the excerpt he read from Double Negative.

All the Birds, Singing
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she likes it. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Rosemary’s young, just at college, and she’s decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we’re not going to tell you too much either: you’ll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.

Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone, vanished from her life.

There’s something unique about Rosemary’s sister, Fern. And it was this decision, made by her parents, to give Rosemary a sister like no other, that began all of Rosemary’s trouble. So now she’s telling her story: full of hilarious asides and brilliantly spiky lines, it’s a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice.

Lost for Words
The judges of the Elysian Prize for Literature have to read hundreds of submissions and they may all be looking for something different. Satire on prize culture written by the author of At Last which was inexplicably omitted from the 2011 Booker longlist…

The Luminaries
2013 Booker winning doorstep of a novel. An 800 page mystery with a plot as complex and a cast as motley as any 19th-century classic. A vivid tale of lies and deceit, fraud and vengeance, set in the goldfields of Western New Zealand in the 1860s.

Without You
Set in Suffolk in 1984, this is a very dark, intense read. It tells the story of a family struggling to come to terms with the fact that their daughter, Eva is missing at sea, presumed drowned. Her parents, Clara and Max don’t seem to be drawing comfort from each other and their marriage seems to be falling apart at the seams.

What they don’t know is that Eva survived and is being held captive on a nearby island The story revolves around the relationship (or non–relationship) that develops between Eva and her captor, especially as we delve into her captor’s past to find the key that sets in motion the events in the book.

Americanah
The story of Ifemelu, her early life in Nigeria, her time as an expat working in America, and her return to her home country.

It is the story of her family, friends, and lovers. It is an account of the expatriate African experience in America and the UK, and of the expatriate returning to Nigeria. It is the story of Ifem’s hair as it changes to match her self perception. Above all it is a love story about Ifemelu and Obinze, “the Zed”.

Adichie writes in a style bursting with colour and vitality. This is well worth considering for your group.

The Outcast
The author’s style is deceptively simple – spare prose which manages to convey an awful lot. The way she draws her characters by going into minute detail about their everyday actions is particularly effective.

The story centres on a very damaged young man who doesn’t get the help and understanding he needs because this is the 1950’s. There are issues of self harm, prejudice and domestic violence. Not an easy read but a compelling one.

The Light Between Oceans
Stunning debut novel set in a post WW1 Australia. Tom Sherbourne is demobbed and gets a job as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock. Soon after he marries, and he and his wife come to love their isolated idyll.

Their paradise becomes tainted by their inability to have children and following her third miscarriage Isabel is cracking under the strain of the grief, when one night a boat is shipwrecked on their shores. It contains a dead man and a newborn baby.

Believing God has answered their prayers Isabel persuades Tom not to report the wreck and they pass the child off as their own. Enormously moving and brilliantly told, this is one you will remember long after you have finished reading it.

[Annabel]

also found this on - https://www.goodreads.com/book/popula...

amazon 100 books to read - http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&n...