Purple Coo Book Group Winter Read 2016

To vote for your books, please make you 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below then, after a count up I'll post the most popular title on the Purple Coo main site. It then becomes our Purple Coo Book Club Autumn Read 2016

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO OBE

Aged 18, in 1933, the author set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This is the first volume of a trilogy taking the reader as far as Hungary. Wonderful descriptions of countryside, culture and the people he meets of course, but with a fascinating undercurrent hinting of the political turmoil about to upset the whole of Europe.

Keeping On, Keeping On by Alan Bennet

Alan Bennet’s superb and playful memoir that shows him to be much more of a Tigger than an Eeyore. You may have heard some of this on radio 4 recently. I did while driving to the supermarket and had to stop my car I was laughing so much.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

It’s 1893 and on leaving London for Colchester, a widow and her boy hear rumours of a strange mythical beast that’s said to roam the marshes claiming human lives. A keen and rational naturalist, she sets out to seek the real truth.  Essex Gothic? This is the book everyone is raving about. Waterstones Book of The Year no less. In hardback it would make a lovely Christmas present.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Ostensibly a day in the life of a society lady sorting out the last minute details of a grand party, but as the day unfolds the reader discovers not only the woman’s troubled past but that of her friends as well that drives one of them to ... I won’t say more and spoil the plot but this is a landmark novel and the a mark of true genius.

The picture is by one of my favourite artists, Cheryl Culver