Book Choices - November 2014

As Winter draws in our fireside reads will include one of the following three choices:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife.

Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II.

In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014. 

Every Day Is For The Thief by Teju Cole

A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.
 
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.
 
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author,Every Day Is for the Thief—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.

The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally

Keneally's magnificent story of a young officer in a penal colony during the founding days of Australia transports readers through layer after layer of life in Sydney Cove, Australia. 

With the colony a little over 12 months old, the Governor commissions a play to celebrate George the Third's birthday in 2 months hence. The young protagonist, Ralph Clark, is given the responsibility of staging the play using convict actors. The stage is set for a clash of cultures - the respectable middle classes of the officer class and the underbelly of London represented by the convicts. The story opens the day after the hanging of a marine.

The characters and incidents described are based on fact, and is an excellent snapshot of Australian history.

We will make our book choice on Thursday 13th November, 8pm at the Ashendon Hundred when we will be discussing Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.