Reading Choices for the Festive Season

So, we need a good read for the Christmas period, in readiness for a nice long session at our local pub in cold and Frosty January.  The choices are here.

We will meet at 8pm on Thursday 21st November in The Hundred of Ashendon to discuss The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and then choose our next book from the below.

I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

"Pilgrim" is an American former intelligence agent known as the "Rider of the Blue" who later writes a book on forensic pathology. Pilgrim becomes involved in a case in New York City where a mysterious woman uses his book to commit untraceable murders in the aftermath of 9/11.

The "Saracen" is a Saudi who becomes radicalised by watching his father's beheading. He later trains as a doctor and fights in the Soviet–Afghan War. Pilgrim is recalled to the intelligence community who have detected a threat involving the Saracen, who has created a vaccine-resistant strain of the variola major virus.

Early One Morning by Virginia Baily

Two women's decision to save a child during WWII will have powerful reverberations over the years.

Chiara Ravello is about to flee occupied Rome when she locks eyes with a woman being herded on to a truck with her family.

Claiming the woman's son, Daniele, as her own nephew, Chiara demands his return; only as the trucks depart does she realize what she has done. She is twenty-seven, with a sister who needs her constant care, a hazardous journey ahead, and now a child in her charge.

Several decades later, Chiara lives alone in Rome, a self-contained woman working as a translator. Always in the background is the shadow of Daniele, whose absence and the havoc he wrought on Chiara's world haunt her. Then she receives a phone call from a teenager claiming to be his daughter, and Chiara knows it is time to face up to the past.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterful portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.