Reading Choices for Autumn

As the colder nights close in we will need a warm-hearted book to read, with that in mind here are our choices for Autumn. 

We will meet at 8pm on Thursday 26th September in The Hundred of Ashendon to discuss Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner and then choose our next book from the below.  

The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul by Deborah Rodriguez 

The story of a remarkable coffee shop in the heart of Afghanistan, and the men and women who meet there — thrown together by circumstance, bonded by secrets, and united in an extraordinary friendship.

Sunny is a thirty-eight-year-old American whose pride and joy is the Kabul Coffee House where she brings hospitality to the expatriates, misfits, missionaries, and mercenaries who stroll through its doors.

Working alongside Sunny is the maternal Halajan, who vividly recalls the days before the Taliban. Their customers include Isabel, a British journalist; Jack, a consultant from Michegan; Candace, a wealthy and well-connected American; Yazmina, a young Afghan kidnapped from a remote village. 

As this group of men and women discover that there’s more to one another than meets the eye, they’ll form an unlikely friendship that will change not only their own lives but the lives of an entire country.

Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent

A memoir of the author’s friendship with an elderly gentleman who was the father of one of her long time friends. Isabel meets Edward shortly after the death of his beloved wife, Paula, who he was married to for sixty-nine years. 

Isabel is invited to dinner at Edwards apartment at the behest of his daughter who is afraid that her father is giving up on life despite his promise to Paula that he would make the effort to keep going for the sake of their two daughters, Valerie and Laura. Valerie tells Isabel, ‘He’s a great cook’. Perhaps it is this, or the fact that Isabel’s own marriage is unravelling. Whatever the reason, she agrees to the arrangement. It is the start of a mutually valued friendship.

Each chapter opens with the menu for dinner. Isabel and Edward usually meet, alone or with other friends of Edward, over a delicious meal that he has put much thought, time and effort into creating.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.

A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.

(Toni Morrison, died aged 88, on 6th August 2019. She was the only African American writer and one of the few women to have received the Nobel prize for literature.)