Book Choices for Spring

We will meet at Teresa's on Thursday 23rd March at 8pm. If you need to know how to find Teresa please email me, text me or give me a call. We will be discussing Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, and choosing our next book from the following selection. 

The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers

An England divided. 

From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. 

They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is 'clipping' - the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. 

A charismatic leader, Hartley cares for the poor and uses violence and intimidation against his opponents. He is also prone to self-delusion and strange visions of mythical creatures. 

When excise officer William Deighton vows to bring down the Coiners and one of their own becomes a turncoat, Hartley's empire begins to crumble. With the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, the fate of his empire is under threat. 

Forensically assembled from historical accounts and legal documents, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance that combines poetry, landscape, crime and historical fiction, whose themes continue to resonate. Here is a rarely-told alternative history of the North.

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison 

An exquisite and intimate novel about four people’s lives and our changing relationship with nature—for fans of Jon McGregor and Robert Macfarlane.

Howard and Kitty have been married for thirty years and now sleep in different rooms. It was always Kitty’s dream to move from their corner of north London into the countryside, and when the kids had left home they moved north, to the pretty village of Lodeshill with its one ailing pub and outlying farms. Howard often wonders if anyone who lives in this place really has a reason to be there—more reason than him.

Jack was once a rural rebel, a protestor who only ever wanted to walk the land in which he had been born, free and subject to nobody. After yet another stint in prison for trespass, he sets off once more to walk north up the country’s spine with his battered old backpack and notebooks full of scribbled poetry, looking for work in the fields and sleeping under the stars.

Jamie is a nineteen-year-old Lodeshill boy who works in a distribution centre and has a Saturday job at a bakery. He spent his childhood exploring the woods and fields with his grandfather and playing with his friend Alex, who lived in the farmhouse next door. Now, though, all he dreams of is cars—and escape.

As the lives of these four people overlap, we realise that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them but also locked into the landscape. A captivating novel, At Hawthorn Time, is about what it means to belong—to family, to community, and to place—and about what it is to take our own, long road into the unknown.

Circe by Madeline Miller

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--neither powerful like her father nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power: the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.