Purple Coo Book Club Autumn Read 2014

 

 

Five suggestions: two  non-fiction, two fiction and one sort of half and half. Once again I think you'll find it very difficult to choose a favourite, but  as always, to vote, please make your 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below. After a count up, the title of the most popular book will be posted on the Purple Coo main site. It then becomes our Purple Coo Book Club Autumn Read for 2014

 

Chris by Mary Mackie

A moving, funny and heart-warming biography of a man who survived a bad beginning and made good. (I can only find this book on kindle, not paperback) 

Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier

Regency flashback, set in London at a time when Paris is undergoing a reign of terror, this is a story of a woman’s struggle to get by in a man’s world. Born in a slum but determined to be a ‘success’ she ends up first with a disastrous marriage, then as the mistress of great men, with the inevitable scandal or two thrown in. 

Mr Mack and Me by Esther Freud

It’s 1914 and architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife have moved to war-torn Waberswick in Suffolk only to find he is suspected of working as a German spy.

A skilled interlacing of fact and fiction, the story is told through the eyes of local publican’s son, who has a drunken father and 6 brothers in the local graveyard. 

Philomena by Martin Sixsmith

A true story, also made into a film, about a woman and the son she was coerced into giving away because she was an unmarried mother.  

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Widely considered to be one of the ‘Great American Novels’ this book is set in the roaring twenties and is largely about about a mysterious millionaire and his passion for a beautiful, spoiled young woman. Decadence, idealism, hubris, excess, this book has it all and more.

 

 The illustration is by Charles Rennie Mackintosh of course.