Purple Book Club

Autumn Reading for the Purple Book Club

Here is the list of suggested books.

Please make your 1^st and 2^nd choice in the comment box. I’ll collate the votes and put the most popular book choice on the Book Forum. Then we can all get reading!

A Toss of a Lemon

Padma Viswanathan

About Brahmin life in India over several generations of a woman's family. A great chronicle and narrative.

Daphne

Justine Picardie

The story begins in 1957 when Daphne du Maurier discovers her husband's affair. She's researching her biography of Branwell Bronte and the mysteries of the Bronte sister's manuscripts is the second storyline. The final interwoven strand is that of a modern day PhD research student with a du Maurier fascination.

Finding Pegasus

Terry Church

A true life story that later inspired the Horse Whisperer. One woman's search to have a greater understanding of her horses and inner peace for herself .

Notes from an Exhibition

Patrick Gale

The fragments of a successful, but enigmatic and tormented, artist's life are slowly revealed to her Quaker husband and their grownup children after her death.

Suite Francaise

Irene Nemrikovski

Irene Nemirovsky was a successful writer in 1930’s Paris. She’d been born in Russia and her family fled to France at the time of the Russian Revolution. When Germany occupied Paris, she and her husband fled to the countryside with their 2 daughters. Although she had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died. Her husband also later died there. After evacuating from Paris to a small town in the French Countryside, she had begun writing what would become Suite Francais

The Birth House

Amy McColl

Tradition clashes with modernity set in a small Nova Scotia village in the early 20th century, this is reminiscent of the works of Annie Proulx and Chris Bohjalian.
(infertility, difficult labour, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and even unfulfilling marriages, they're all in this book?)

The Brief History of the Dead

Kevin Brockmejer

O.K. I know I promised no more frozen waste stories but this comes well recommended.

'In a city between earth and heaven the inhabitants all have one thing in common. They all know Laura Byrd, and more importantly, she knows them. She stranded in the cold expanse of Antarctica oblivious to the importance of her survival, while they roam the city in search of the reason for their coming together.'

The Memory Keeper's Box

Kim Edwards

About a family who have a baby with Downs syndrome, there is a shocking act of betrayal. Lots of grief and secrets

The Friday Night Knitting Club

Kate Jacobs

Love, life, knitting and yarns and everything else - a bit like Purple Coo really

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Mary Anne Schaffer

Set in 1946, a writer receives a letter from a Guernsey farmer who has found a book she once owned. A wonderful correspondence ensues between the writer and various members of the Potato Peel Pie Society (romance , humour and tragic historical detail)

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennet

A deliciously funny novella that celebrates the pleasure of reading

Wintersmith

Terry Pratchet

3rd title in the Tiffany Aching (Discworld) series. An imaginative yarn. Winter mistakes Tiffany for the Summer Lady and falls in love with her - All of T.Ps usual magical larks.

44 Scotland Street

Alexander McCall-Smith

Vintage McCall Smith, tackling issues of trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but all with a great lightness of touch.

(The painting is The magician by Gustave Singier)