Book Choices - November 2016

Our next meeting is at 8pm on Thursday 17th November at The Hundred of Ashendon. We will be discussing The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. 

Here are choices for our next read: 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the "Jazz Age".

Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans

Eccentric, hilarious, and devilishly witty, this Wartime tale of an evacuee during the Blitz is like no other. Noel Bostock is a ten-year-old orphan sent, for safety, to live with 36-year-old Vera Sedge, in St Albans. Vera is a livewire, with money problems and a scheming mind – Noel provides the intelligence to her hair-brained ideas and together they make a great team. 

These explosive characters will have you in fits of laughter, as you fall head over heels for this book. All of which is less of a surprise when you learn that the author was a Former producer of Father Ted and a director of Have I Got News For You.

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco's parents send her overseas to live with an aunt and uncle in their opulent San Francisco mansion. There she meets Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family's Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms, but following Pearl Harbor the two are cruelly pulled apart. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to reconcile her own troubled past, meets the older woman and her grandson, Seth, at Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.