Tuesday Tipplers Book Club - newbies welcome

[susan_]

So we choose The Bees by Laline Paull for our next book and Tash agreed to choose a list for the following month (I think - tell me if I misheard!)

We meet again on Tuesday 8th March at 7:45 for 8, at the Tippler (we are usually in the seats by the front window)

@Jen - it was great to see you again, welcome back!

@kimp - you are very welcome, please do come along next month. You might like to subscribe (click Follow this Thread) so you get an email when there are new posts with the book lists and dates.

[overcaffeinated]

Hi all - here's the list for Tuesday's meeting; the theme is Young Adult fiction, from 'best of 2015' lists (really hope no-one hates YA!).

The Death House, by Sarah Pinborough

Many YA books thrive on conspiracy. There?s often a mystery to be uncovered, or a shadowy authority to outwit and overturn. In some ways, Death House is no exception. The book centres on a ragtag community of teens ? mostly boys but a few girls ? who are held on an island, guarded by nurses, teachers and a forbidding Matron. All have been told that they are ?defective?: sooner or later, one by one, they will sicken, and be taken to the sanatorium, where an unspecified horrific ?change? and eventual death awaits.

However, where Pinborough?s novel differs from more conventional fare, is in the fact that the book ultimately isn?t a story about defeating those in power, or overturning the status quo. Instead, as 16-year-old protagonist Toby falls for newcomer Clara, it becomes a love story (albeit a very sad one). In a world where death is everywhere, every breath, and every heartbeat becomes precious. Pinborough?s vivid writing ensures her readers feel every one.

Lost on Mars, by Paul Magrs

You can see that Paul Magrs, the author of several Doctor Who books, is comfortable writing about a vivid extraterrestrial setting, and this gripping sci-fi thriller is set on a futuristic Mars. The story is bold and you have to love a chapter that opens with the words: "It was late in our Martian autumn when we were allowed to hold the funeral for Grandma's leg." Lora, stubborn and complex, is at the heart of this first part of a trilogy about third-generation settlers on the desolate red planet. There's also a likeable and talkative robot called Toaster. It's also a novel about alienation. But watch out for the Martian flesh-eaters.

The Big Lie, by Julie Mayhew

"What choice did I have but to do along with it?" A moral question that underpins much of The Big Lie, a challenging YA book by Julie Mayhew set in a 2014 Britain that is under Nazi Rule. Teenager Jessika Keller is raised in a hard-core English Nazi family and as a dutiful daughter seems to accept the idea that she should just be a pure, potential baby-machine to populate the master race. When her friend Clementine dares to question society, Jessika also begins to doubt the truth of what her mother and father have taught her. The Big Lie is a compelling and mysterious tale of protest, obedience and identity and a novel to make you think.

Railhead, by Philip Reeve

Philip Reeve's fast-paced thriller is set in the Network Empire, a future human civilisation that is built around a network of railway lines that criss-crosses the galaxy, passing between worlds through hyperspace portals called K-gates. Railhead draws you in immediately. It's beautifully written ("giant gas planets tilting their rings like the brims of summer hats across a turquoise sky") and there is something wonderfully romantic about the author's use of trains instead of space ships. Railhead trains laugh softly to themselves or make "high, shuddering klaxon-shriek death cries". Into this futuristic world is thrown a young petty thief called Zen Starling, who is hired by a master criminal called to steal a mysterious black orb. His adventure is the core of the story, which will appeal to readers of different ages as well as young adult fiction fans. Although the technology is inventive and dazzling, the emotions of the characters (even the robot who wants freckles) draws you in wholeheartedly. Railhead is superb.

The Accident Season, by Mo?ra Fowley-Doyle

Cara is the daughter of a family afflicted every October by the ?accident season,? when they?re dogged by disasters ranging from scrapes to death. In the waning days of this year?s accident season, she starts noticing dark omens: a mysteriously missing classmate who shows up in the background of all her photos, a malevolent man who looks like her long-gone stepfather following her through town. The brewing weirdness?and her need for a distraction from her feelings for her stepbrother?inspire Cara to take a risk, spending the last day of the accident season throwing a wild Halloween party in an abandoned house on the edge of town, that just might hold the answers to the secrets of her past. Fowley-Doyle?s magical realism is both transporting and purposeful, weaving a narrative web that will haunt you.

The Game of Love and Death, by Martha Brockenbrough

In this shape-shifting, gorgeous novel, Love and Death?in the forms of a dapper man with a fever-inducing touch, and an uncanny woman who hungers for souls?run a high-stakes game, in which Death has always won. Each chooses a human player, creating a couple that will either choose love, and therefore life, or separation, and death. Previous players have included Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Romeo and Juliet?and now Flora, an African American pilot and jazz singer, and Henry, a white musician and errant foster son to a rich newspaperman. Love and Death take on human shapes and insinuate themselves into the story, as Flora and Henry must decide, in the face of terrible obstacles, whether to choose each other. The book gets better with every page.

The Lie Tree, by Frances Hardinge

Set in a mildly alternative Victorian England, it sees Faith, the daughter of a disgraced natural scientist moving to a fictional Channel Island, where she discovers the existence of a tree that, fed by lies, has the ability to alter reality. Hardinge injects evolution, feminism and a Hamlet-esque revenge plot into the mix ? and controls it with acuity, bringing everything together into a vivid, beautifully powerful whole, playing with genre, language and expectation along the way. Hardinge won the overall 2016 Costa Award for this superb novel.

[susan_]

Hey all, I've been let down by a colleague and have a few hours of work yet to go this evening....so I doubt I'll be able to make it tonight. I've chosen my votes and will send them to Tash to include in the vote.

I equally enjoyed and was annoyed by the Bees so was really looking forward to hearing what everyone else thinks.

Susan

[kennethw]

Hi, I won't be able to make it this evening. Happy to go with any choice on the list. Didn't get the Bees at all, unfortunately. See you all next month. Kenneth

[hollyt]

Is anyone coming?! If so, I'm sitting out the back with a glass of wine... Holly x

[sparklehorse]

Yes! See you in 5 ...

[hollyt]

We've voted on 'The Accident Season'. I'll do the book list next month and since it's International Women's Day, it will have a female theme... It will be on 5th April. Holly x

[susan_]

Hi all,

I have a 'required' work do on Tuesday so sadly I will not be able to attend on Tuesday. Really sorry to miss bookclub again! I'll PM my vote to Holly.

I'd be happy to do the next month's list if you're stuck for volunteers on the night - just let me know.

Susan

[hollyt]

Hello,

Here is this month's book list, the theme being 'Women'.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

A captivating read from a debut novelist, Brick Lane brings the immigrant milieu of East London to vibrant life. With great poignancy, Ali illuminates a foreign world; her well-developed characters pull readers along on a deeply psychological, almost spiritual journey. Through the eyes of two Bangladeshi sisters?the plain Nazneen and the prettier Hasina?we see the divergent paths of the contemporary descendants of an ancient culture. Hasina elopes to a "love marriage," and young Nazneen, in an arranged marriage, is pledged to a much older man living in London.

Ali's skillful narrative focuses on Nazneen's stifling life with her ineffectual husband, who keeps her imprisoned in a city housing project filled with immigrants in varying degrees of assimilation. But Ali reveals a bittersweet tension between the "two kinds of love" Nazneen and her sister experience?that which begins full and overflowing, only to slowly dissipate, and another which emerges like a surprise, growing unexpectedly over years of faithful commitment. Both of these loves have their own pitfalls: Hasina's passionate romance crumbles into domestic violence, and Nazneen's marriage never quite reaches a state of wedded bliss.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.

As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu?beautiful, self-assured?departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze?the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor?had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion?for their homeland.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God?s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity.

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under?maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational?as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classicnd for each other?they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Through six turbulent months of 1934, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps a journal, filling three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries about her home, a ruined Suffolk castle, and her eccentric and penniless family. By the time the last diary shuts, there have been great changes in the Mortmain household, not the least of which is that Cassandra is deeply, hopelessly, in love.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

In Homer?s account in The Odyssey, Penelope?wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy?is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife, her story a salutary lesson through the ages. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War after the abduction of Helen, Penelope manages, in the face of scandalous rumors, to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son, and keep over a hundred suitors at bay, simultaneously. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters, and sleeping with goddesses, he kills her suitors and?curiously?twelve of her maids.

In a splendid contemporary twist to the ancient story, Margaret Atwood has chosen to give the telling of it to Penelope and to her twelve hanged maids, asking: ?What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?? In Atwood?s dazzling, playful retelling, the story becomes as wise and compassionate as it is haunting, and as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing. With wit and verve, drawing on the story-telling and poetic talent for which she herself is renowned, she gives Penelope new life and reality?and sets out to provide an answer to an ancient mystery.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

With more than one million copies sold in Germany and rights snapped up in twenty-seven countries, Wetlands is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world.

Helen Memel is an outspoken eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a precocious sexual confidence. She begins her story from a hospital bed, where she?s slowly recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents? divorce. To distract herself, Helen ruminates on her past sexual adventures in increasingly uncomfortable detail, taking the reader on a sensational journey through Helen?s body and mind. Punky alienated teenager, young woman reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn?t smell, excrete, desire), bratty smartass, vulnerable, lonely daughter, shock merchant, and pleasure seeker?Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and young she truly is.

As Helen constantly blurs the line between celebration, provocation, and dysfunction in her relationship with her body, Roche exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma.

See you on Tuesday, Susan if you send me your preferences I'll add them in!

Holly xx

[marlowe]

Hello,

I used to come to the bookclub but moved out of London but have moved back to London so hope it's ok if I come along on Tuesday.

Rhian

[hollyt]

Definitely Rhian, look forward to seeing you.

Holly x

[Red_Cat]

So sorry but I'm not going to be able to make it tonight. Holly am going to try and pm you my vote!

[JenniferJ]

Hey - should be there about 8.30!

Jen x

[hollyt]

Oranges are not the only fruit was the winner from tonight and we'll meet on 10th May.

Holly x

[hollyt]

Rhian is going to do the book list, the theme will be books that have been turned into films x

[marlowe]

Hello all,

I've done a list of books that have been turned into films. More tricky than I thought as I've read most of the good books that have been made into films. Anyway, here goes:

Atonement

by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan?s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.On a hot summer day in 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment?s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia?s childhood friend. But Briony?s incomplete grasp of adult motives?together with her precocious literary gifts?brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime?s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece

The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover?then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

This powerful first novel tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, the privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces. But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in The Kite Runner, are only a part of this story. Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence, forces that continue to threaten them even today.

Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time. In the two main characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, contemptuous Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless story of survival under the harshest of circumstances, she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet.

Breakfast at Tiffany?s

By Truman Capote

In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator becomes friends with Holly Golightly. The two are tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Holly is a country girl turned New York caf? society girl. As such, she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she hopes to marry one of them. According to Capote, Golightly is not a prostitute but an "American geisha." Holly likes to shock people with carefully selected tidbits from her personal life or her outspoken viewpoints on various topics. Over the course of a year, she slowly reveals herself to the narrator, who finds himself fascinated by her curious lifestyle.

Rebecca

by Daphne Du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier tells the story of a young, unnamed protagonist who meets a handsome, older gentleman, Maxim de Winter, in Monte Carlo. It is well-known that Maxim's widely adored wife Rebecca, has recently drowned at sea and the local people of Maxim's home county are devastated. The main character quickly falls in love with Maxim and the couple enter into a whirlwind marriage despite Maxim's troubled past. On arriving home to Maxim's West Country estate 'Manderley' after their honeymoon, the unnamed protagonist faces a painful struggle against the 'other woman' Rebecca, whose presence at Manderley remains overbearing even from beyond the grave. Maxim's new wife is constantly compared to Rebecca, who was loved and admired by all, and faces cruelty from the malevolent Mrs Danvers, Rebecca's old maid. As the new lady of the house, the main character struggles to adjust to Maxim's more privileged way of life and to find her own identity amongst Rebecca's legacy. However, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Rebecca was not as angelic as people had believed her to be and her death is not as tragically accidental as it would seem...

About Schmidt

Louis Begley

A recent widower,Schmidt, seemingly a poster boy for the now fading world of the cultured, wealthy WASP, is vaguely melancholy, faintly discontented, stranded in his wife's handsome beachfront house in Bridgehampton. His self-involved daughter Charlotte announces her intention to marry Jon Riker, a humourless lawyer from Schmidt's firm. Schmidt, who had built a very lucrative legal career on his ability to be ?always demonstrably and impeccably right,? begins to feel the first stirrings of self- doubt. And, with some amazement, he finds himself beginning an affair with a frank, exuberant waitress, a woman younger than his daughter. As Schmidt attempts to navigate increasingly turbulent waters, Begley deftly introduces long hidden pieces of Schmidt's former life. He was, it turns out, a tireless womanizer and a less-than-devoted dad. He's charmingly condescending toward those unlucky enough to be neither WASPS nor wealthy. He is, in fact, a bit of a cad. But it's one of the pleasures of Begley's increasingly dark narrative that he both reveals Schmidt's self-satisfied shortcomings and makes him nonetheless a fascinating character. And, as Schmidt faces a series of alarming problems, it's hard not to root for his success, for his newly aroused pleasure in life.

See you on the 10th.

Rhian x

[cazzyr]

Hello

I'd like to join your group if possible. Could i ask do you read all books in list each month or pick a few?

Many thanks Carolyn

[hollyt]

We just pick one, we vote on the night. Looking forward to meeting you :-)

[susan_]

Hi all, I'm not likely to attend tomorrow due to work (again!)

Annoying as I read the book and was looking forward to the conversation! I've PMed my votes to Rhian and look forward to the results. See you soon.

Susan

[kennethw]

Hi, won't make it tonight, happy to go with whatever is picked, and hopefully see you all next month.

[Red_Cat]

Sorry am also unlikely to make it due to still at work and no finish in sight! I'll try and pm my vote

[hollyt]

Is anyone going tonight? I don't want to be Billy-no-mates! Holly x

[JenniferJ]

I was planning on coming tonight but let me know if you change your mind.

Jen x

[Red_Cat]

Not sure if I'm going to make it or not, still stuck at work 😞 if I do get there it will be late, by which time you may have gone anyway...

[sparklehorse]

Just on my way home from work now, think I am going to come by for some dinner,, but sadly haven't read the book ... Unless you count 20 years ago. Pretty sure I won't be able to blag it ...