The Boomers Book Club spring 2016

A warm welcome to our book club, spring 2016. We chatted amongst the team here to shed some light on why we Brits love book clubs, amongst the many reasons, the one which resonates is ‘we all love getting lost in a great read’ the book club allows us to share, discuss and review our choices. Winter, spring, summer & autumn our aim is to make a few suggestions we feel we’ll enjoy.

We’d love to hear your feedback and share the reviews in The boomers community, it’ll be fun to vote on a winner each season. If you click on the title and it’ll take you through to the listing on Amazon, there you can choose from paperback or tablet/Kindle (other great book retailers are available Amazon is usually very competitive on price?) Alternatively your local library may be an option.

Happy reading

Jemma

Our Endless Numbered Days

‘Extraordinary…From the opening sentence it is gripping’ – Sunday Times

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother’s grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.

Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.

Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.

The Sunday Times top ten bestseller

This house has our blood, sweat, love, laughter and betrayal seeped into its very bones. I might leave this place, but bits of me will remain here, tears soaked deep into the floorboards. You could hoover this place for ever and you’d never get rid of us completely.

Artist and illustrator Edwina Spinner used to have a busy family life. Now she lives alone, in a house that has grown too big for her. She has decided to sell it. As Edwina takes the estate agent from room to room, she finds herself transported back to her life as a young mother. Back to her twins, Rowena and Charlie, and a stepson she cannot bring herself to mention by name.

As the house reveals its secrets, Edwina is forced to confront her family’s past, and a devastating betrayal that changed everything. But Edwina doesn’t know the whole story. And to discover the truth, she will have to face the one person she vowed never to see again.

The Bones of You is a gripping psychological thriller from author Debbie Howells; a story of full of dark secrets, obsession and suspense.

I have a gardener’s inherent belief in the natural order of things. Soft-petalled flowers that go to seed. The resolute passage of the seasons. Swallows that fly thousands of miles to follow the eternal summer.

A community in shock

When eighteen-year-old Rosie Anderson disappears, the idyllic village where she lived will never be the same again. Local gardener Kate is struck with guilt. She’d come to know Rosie well, and thought she understood her – perhaps better even than Rosie’s own mother.

A family torn apart

Rosie was beautiful, kind and gentle. She came from a loving family and she had her whole life ahead of her. Who could possibly want to harm her? And why?

A gorgeously nostalgic saga from the SUNDAY TIMES bestselling author of THE SEVEN STREETS OF LIVERPOOL. It’s 1925 and Patricia, Tara and Aideen couldn’t be more excited about leaving Dublin with their father and heading for a new life in Liverpool. Yet it soon becomes clear that all is not as it seems, for the day after they arrive in England, Bernie hastily sweeps the girls onto a huge ocean liner heading to New York, leaving no forwarding address. When their father vanishes midway across the Atlantic, the grieving sisters prepare themselves for a new life in the big city, far from home, friends and family. For whatever their father was running from has every chance of catching up with the girls, unless they can do their best to build new lives in.

What if you had said yes . . . ?

Eva and Jim are nineteen, and students at Cambridge, when their paths first cross in 1958. Jim is walking along a lane when a woman approaching him on a bicycle swerves to avoid a dog. What happens next will determine the rest of their lives. We follow three different versions of their future – together, and apart – as their love story takes on different incarnations and twists and turns to the conclusion in the present day.

The Versions of Us is an outstanding debut novel about the choices we make and the different paths that our lives might follow. What if one small decision could change the rest of your life?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Penguin Modern Classics)

Pitching an extraordinary battle between cruel authority and a rebellious free spirit, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel that epitomises the spirit of the sixties. This Penguin Classics edition includes a preface, never-before published illustrations by the author, and an introduction by Robert Faggen.

A year of Marvellous Ways is the unforgettable and completely captivating new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT.

Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and has lived alone in a remote Cornish creek for nearly all her life. Lately she’s taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She’s waiting for something – she’s not sure what, but she’ll know it when she sees it.

The Girls from See Saw Lane: A novel of friendship, love and tragedy in 1960s Brighton.
Dottie and Mary forged a friendship over a bag of penny sweets when they were eight years old. They’ve shared everything together since then – the highs and lows of school, family dramas, hopes and dreams and now, at seventeen, they’re both shop girls, working at Woolworths.

As they go out in the world in pursuit of love and happiness, the simplicity of their childhood dissolves as life becomes more complicated. The heady excitement of first love will consume them both, but the pain of unintentional betrayal will test their friendship in ways neither of them could ever imagine…

‘This year’s hottest crime novel’
Independent

Nora hasn’t seen Clare for ten years. Not since the day Nora walked out of her old life and never looked back.

Until, out of the blue, an invitation to Clare’s hen party arrives. A weekend in a remote cottage – the perfect opportunity for Nora to reconnect with her best friend, to put the past behind her.

But something goes wrong.

Very wrong.

And as secrets and lies unravel, out in the dark, dark wood the past will finally catch up with Nora.

On 24 November Yasmin and her ten-year-old daughter Ruby set off on a journey across Northern Alaska. They’re searching for Ruby’s father, missing in the arctic wilderness.

More isolated with each frozen mile they cover, they travel deeper into an endless night. And Ruby, deaf since birth, must brave the darkness where sight cannot guide her.

She won’t abandon her father. But winter has tightened its grip, and there is somebody out there who wants to stop them.