2010 Spring Reading for the Purple Coo Book Club
Here is the list of book suggested by Purple Coo Book Club members. (Everyone who belongs to Purple Coo is automatically a member) Please make your 1st and 2nd choices in the comment box below. I’ll collate the votes and announce the most popular book on the Purple Coo Book Club Forum.
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
A bleak but witty tale about a woman’s journey from her childhood home in Lancashire to her eventual anorexic collapse. A ruthlessly demanding mother, with ultra high expectations, means Carmel has to succeed. “Stuffed with education” she eventually gets a scholarship and sets off for Tonbridge Hall, a retrograde women’s residence at London University and the trauma that brings.
One Day by David Nichols
Two students at Edinburgh University have a post finals fling on July 15, 1988; it is not meant to lead to anything permanent.
One Day, revisits the two students on this day over the next 20 years. Their paths diverge and they inhabit radically different worlds, but somehow they are better together than when they are apart.
Sacred Country by Rose Tremain
(Amazon review) "Sacred Country" is about a young girl, Mary Ward, who, at the age of six, realizes that she should be boy. The book is a chronicle of her life from that point on. I found the detailed descriptions of the odd things that captured Mary's curiosity as a child (and as an adult, in a different way) intriguing. I won't lie, this is a very sad story at times, and is hard to read in some parts because of Mary's loneliness. The loneliness is never stated and packs a harder punch because of it. All in all, this book explained to me in stunning writing, the process of finding all of the right worlds in oneself. And, dealing with them when they don't fit or express into a manageable form to the outside world. It is a coming of age story to the self and to life. I like to read to learn - about happiness, sadness, life - this book delivered in a big way for me."
The Little Stranger by Sarah Walters
A psychological thriller, a Gothic tale that focuses on a crumbling mansion in the English countryside in post WWII Britain. It covers the fall of the Ayres family, a dignified, middle aged mother, an unattractive, unmarried 27 year old daughter and her battle scarred brother, who finds himself reluctantly taking over the management of the family estate.
The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
The blurb on this book asks readers not to reveal what happens, so my lips are sealed, except to say it is compelling reading. (A tiny hint – a shocking encounter that reverberates from a Nigerian beach to middle England)
The Photograph by Penelope Lively
A man, who thinks he has been happily married for many years, finds a photograph of his late wife and unravels a side to her he never knew.
(Lily says this is one of the saddest books she’s ever read, but she wasn’t the only Purple Cooer to recommend it. Perhaps we all like a good weep.)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
... is about an emotionally abused 14 year girl old living on a rural peach farm in South Carolina with her cold, uncaring father. The girl is haunted by the memory of her mother, accidentally killed in front of her when the girl is only four years old. All she has to remind her of her mother is a picture of a Black Madonna with the words, Tiburon, South Carolina written on the back...
The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard
An examination of how the intimacies and entanglements of youth can often exert a stranglehold well into middle age. Marnie, a forty something museum curator finds herself summoned to the bedside of a dying friend, who she hasn’t seen since her early twenties.
With some trepidation she sets off for the dying man’s loch-side cottage, where she’s joined by Oliver, a mutual friend and together they set out to keep vigil by the man’s bedside. What emerges are the memories of the group’s highly charged past, a teenage love-triangle that carries with it all the angst of middle age.
(Psst! This is WW’s suggestion, so beware - you know how bossy she can be if we don’t do as we are told... it’s the first time she’s recommended anything that isn’t by Sir Terry P.)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The key events take place over a ten year period, 1520 to 1530, Henry VIII and his first two marriages and the resulting split with Rome. Although the events are inevitably based on fact, Hilary mantel has breathed life into them to make them all the more complex and enthralling
The picture is Periwinkle a floral design by Eugene Grasset
