Book Club-autumn 2015 W.SOMERSET MAUGHAM The Boomers Book Club autumn 2015 A warm welcome to our inaugural book club, autumn 2015. 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 THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jeffries is a haunting, tender portrait of a woman forced to choose between her duty as a wife and her instinct as a mother… Nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper steps off a steamer in Ceylon full of optimism, eager to join her new husband. But the man who greets her at the tea plantation is not the same one she fell in love with in London. Distant and brooding, Laurence spends long days wrapped up in his work, leaving his young bride to explore the plantation alone. It’s a place filled with clues to the past – locked doors, a yellowed wedding dress in a dusty trunk, an overgrown grave hidden in the grounds, far too small for an adult… Gwen soon falls pregnant and her husband is overjoyed, but she has little time to celebrate. In the delivery room the new mother is faced with a terrible choice, one she knows no one in her upper class set will understand – least of all Laurence. Forced to bury a secret at the heart of her marriage, Gwen is more isolated than ever. When the time comes, how will her husband ever understand what she has done? The Tea Planter’s Wife is a story of guilt, betrayal and untold secrets vividly and entrancingly set in colonial era Ceylon. Lonely Girl from Sunday Times bestselling author Josephine Cox gets straight to the hope and heartbreak of family drama. One fateful night changes the course of a child’s life forever… Rosie’s mother is a cruel woman and has Rosie’s kind and loving father wrapped around her finger. Though John Tanner does his best to protect her, Rosie often bears the brunt of her mother’s rage. And his protection can’t last forever. In one tragic moment Rosie’s fragile world is shattered. Grieving and alone, Rosie is thrust into a harsh reality, and she must face the obstacles that fate has set in her path. But secrets will out, and Rosie must uncover the shocking truth behind her mother’s cruelty before she can hope for the love and happiness she deserves. > THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S FICTION PRIZE A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…’ This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century – four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home… The Sunday Times Bestseller behind the major new film from Ridley Scott starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Earth. I’m in a Habitat designed to last 31 days. If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love – and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel’s strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller’s classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. Joseph Heller’s bestselling novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man’s efforts to survive it. One of Sarah’s daughters died. But can she be sure which one? *THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING NOVEL* A terrifying psychological thriller perfect for fans of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. A year after one of their identical twin daughters, Lydia, dies in an accident, Angus and Sarah Moorcraft move to the tiny Scottish island Angus inherited from his grandmother, hoping to put together the pieces of their shattered lives. But when their surviving daughter, Kirstie, claims they have mistaken her identity – that she, in fact, is Lydia – their world comes crashing down once again. As winter encroaches, Angus is forced to travel away from the island for work, Sarah is feeling isolated, and Kirstie (or is it Lydia?) is growing more disturbed. When a violent storm leaves Sarah and her daughter stranded, Sarah finds herself tortured by the past – what really happened on that fateful day one of her daughters died? From the author of The Good German (made into a film starring George Clooney) comes a sweeping novel set in post-war Berlin. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start, things go fatally wrong. The new Sunday Times bestselling gothic novel from the author of THE WINTER GHOSTS, CITADEL and LABYRINTH. The clock strikes twelve. Beneath the wind and the remorseless tolling of the bell, no one can hear the scream . . . 1912. A Sussex churchyard. Villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will not survive the coming year are thought to walk. And in the shadows, a woman lies dead Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014. Douglas Petersen understands his wife’s need to ‘rediscover herself’ now that their son is leaving home. He just thought they’d be doing their rediscovering together. So when Connie announces that she will be leaving, too, he resolves to make their last family holiday into the trip of a lifetime: one that will draw the three of them closer, and win the respect of his son. One that will make Connie fall in love with him all over again. The hotels are booked, the tickets bought, the itinerary planned and printed. What could possibly go wrong?
