A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman

We talked for a long time about this book but I can't say much here for fear of spoiling the story. This is a brilliant read and a great choice for a book group.  It is deceptively rich and full of surprises that command discussion. It's a beautiful, poignant and well-constructed story.

It took most of us a couple of chapters to find our way into the story and yet we all knew it was worth 'persevering'. Perhaps Fredrick crafted his work to achieve just this response? From therein the short episodes hang together in a flowing, entertaining tale of Ove from boy to man. Ove makes you chuckle, he makes you cry and he makes you reflect on your own life and attitudes.

Our group gave this book a 100% thumbs up and would recommend it to anyone as a really good reading experience.

Our next book is The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing and we will meet on Thursday 24th May to discuss our Spring reading experience, let's hope this one is as good as the last!

Book Choices for April and May 2018

Here are the choices for our next read.

Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende

In the early years of the conquest of the Americas, Inés Suárez, a seamstress condemned to a life of toil, flees Spain to seek adventure in the New World. As Inés makes her way to Chile, she begins a fiery romance with Pedro de Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro. Together the lovers will build the new city of Santiago, and they will wage war against the indigenous Chileans—a bloody struggle that will change Inés and Valdivia forever, inexorably pulling each of them toward separate destinies.

Inés of My Soul is a work of breathtaking scope that masterfully dramatizes the known events of Inés Suárez's life, crafting them into a novel rich with the narrative brilliance and passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.

The Good Terrorist

A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth-century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction 2007. In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical and determined, she is also easily exploited by the group and ideal fodder for a more dangerous and potent cause. Eventually their naive radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, but the aftermath is not as exciting as they had hoped. Nonetheless, while they may not have changed the world, their lives will never be the same again...

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Marakami

Oru Okada's cat has disappeared. His wife is growing more distant every day.

Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.

As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

We will choose which one to read at our next meeting on Thursday 15th March when we will discuss A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. See you then, at The Hundred, 8pm.