Purple Coo Book Group Winter 2015

To Vote for our Purple Coo Book Club Winter Read 2015 please list your 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below, or let me know via the Purple Coo site or via Facebook. The most popular book will be announced on Purple Coo as soon as I've had the chance to add up your votes. Only 5 books to vote for this time, and all of them very worth reading, so it's going to be a close run thing. 

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

An unsentimental family story set in Baltimore, classic Anne Tyler country. Stolid, buttoned-up husbands and their more interesting wives, (three generations of them this time) who never lose their sense of belonging together right or wrong, with the customary mixture of grown up children, grandchildren and sibling rivalries thrown in. A nice twist is that the family home, a beautifully handcrafted house, is very much a character in its own right.

Nelly Dean by Alison Case

Lovers of Wuthering Heights may remember Nelly Dean to be a minor character, a loyal servant, well this book fills in the bits that Emily Bronte forgot to put in. Described as a ‘richly imagined’ story in its own right, it’s also a ‘gripping and heart-breaking’ homage to Emily Bronte’s wonderful novel.

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

A classic, pacy Willaim Boyd novel that charts the adventurous life of Amory Clay, a female photographer from her birth in 1908 until her later years, during which time she witnesses all the major conflicts, with profound emotional consequences. If you enjoyed Any Human Heart, and I admit I did, you’ll love this book too.

The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell

'I was hoping against hope that the penguin would survive because as of that instant he had a name, and with his name came the beginning of a bond which would last a life-time'

A true story about a single, free spirited young man who’s accepted a teaching position in a prestigious Argentine boarding school, so the very last thing he needs is a sick penguin in his life. Juan Salvador (yes, that’s the penguin’s name, honest!) has other ideas and refuses to leave Tom’s side.

Turning the Tide by (our own) Christine Stovell

A love story, between Harry Watling, a young woman with a man’s name and a failing boatyard left to her by her father. Oh! and there’s an ambitious young property developer as well who wants to get hold of the boatyard and build an upmarket housing complex. Hate at first sight … of course!

(the painting is Pink Roses by Samuel Peploe)

Purple Coo Book Group Autumn 2015

To Vote for our Purple Coo Book Club Autumn Read 2015 please list your 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below, or let me know via the Purple Coo site or via Facebook. The most popular book will be announced on Purple Coo as soon as I've had the chance to add up your votes. 6 books to vote for this time, all of them very worth reading. It's going to be a close run thing. 

A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley

An amateur codebreaker is set the task of unravelling a mysterious journal from the 1730s. It turns out to be an account of her part in a scandalous and dangerous intrigue. This book is an exciting account of Jacobites in Paris, with an enigmatic Highlander and young woman on a dangerous and perilous mission. What’s not to like?

A Spool of blue Thread by Anne Tyler

A wonderful, minute examination of middle-class American family life. Four generations living in the suburbs. A patriarch with a murky past, his hardworking son and his four grownup children and their mother. She's a maddening, meddling woman with a determination that her four children will, against all odds, tolerate if not love one another.

Confessions by Jaume Cabre

A monumental novel about the problem of evil via the story of a priceless violin and its secret past.

The Collector of Dying Breaths by M J Rose

The fine line between potion and poison, poison and passion … past and present. 
The Past - an orphan plucked from poverty to become Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, think exotic fragrances, potent poisons and a formula for a process to reanimate the dead.

The Present – a renowned academic becomes obsessed with the gothic tale with the inevitable dangerous and obsessive consequences.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

I howled with laughter, squirmed with embarrassment and wept genuine tears – yes really! - over this wonderful novel about a genius autistic genetics professor’s evidence based quest to find himself a wife. Moving and hilarious at the same time.

The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate Mosse

A pacy thriller concerned with avian taxidermy! A good gothic spooker very suitable for dark Halloween evenings. Set in 1912 on the edge of a drowned marsh near a small Sussex village where old superstitions still hold sway, a young woman gets involved with lots of spooky things, including a murder.

Photograph of Benacre by Alan Murray

Purple Coo Book Club Summer Read 2015

To vote for the Purple Coo Book Club Spring Read 2015 please list your 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below, or let me know via the Purple Coo Site or on Facebook. The most popular book will be posted on Purple Coo as soon as I've had the chance to add the votes up. I think you'll find some unusual choices this time.

Amy Snow by Tracy Rees

Abandoned as a baby and reluctantly given shelter at nearby Hatville Court, Amy doesn’t know about her family. Her only friend and advocate is the heiress of Hatville, but when she dies young, she leaves Amy a bundle of mysterious letters that contain a life changing secret. If only Amy can work out what it is.  

The Leipzig Affair by Fiona Rintoul

Two worlds collide with disastrous results, when a young and rather naïve Scott studying at Leipzig University in 1985 falls in love with an East German woman desperate to flee to the West. He fails understand, she’ll do anything to achieve her goals. She doesn’t care. 

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

A 1940s mystery novel about the arrest and investigation of an apparently blameless mother and daughter accused of kidnapping and abusing a local young woman. It seems unlikely, but the girl can back up her accusations with seemingly inconvertible evidence. 

From Sea to Shining Sea by Gavin Young

A travelogue about journeys in USA that uses the past to Illuminate the present, following in the footsteps of famous individuals like Steinbeck (my hero) and Raymond Chandler, who apparently went to school in Dulwich. Might make a nice change to read a different type of book?

The Russian Chocolate Maker’s Lover by Peter Sain Ley Berry

Following personal tragedy and a psychological breakdown, a young woman’s visit to St Petersburg results in her becoming embroiled in a struggle for control of a famous chocolate company. The experience enables her to come to terms with her own demons. Romance, history, treachery and sacrifice, set in 1990’s Russia emerging into the capitalist world.

 

 

( The picture is Still Life with Roses by S J Peploe)

 

 

The Purple Coo Book Club Spring Read

Hi Everyone, you may remember a while back I suggested we choose our next book for the Purple Coo Book Club Spring Read from the list of 20 most Mood-boosting titles.  After deleting the handful we've already read and rejecting those that are poetry based, the first five on the list are:

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Written during WW2, when Dodie Smith was living in California and desperately homesick, she writes of a happier time loosely based in 1930s. An eccentric family, the Mortmain’s do their best to survive in genteel poverty while the castle they live in crumbles around their ears. It’s a wonderful coming of age story told via teenage Cassandra Mortmain’s diary.

Miss Garnet’s Angel by Sally Vickers

A retired schoolteacher of the old fashioned type travels to Venice prompted by the death of her friend. She finds the Guardi panels which tell the story of Tobias and the Angel. The book intertwines the story of Tobias and the Angel alongside Miss Garnet’s own choices in life. It’s essentially two tales coming together to show that human nature doesn’t fundamentally change – there are demons and angels regardless of race, place or time – and it's up to the individual to choose their own path between them. 

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

This book is so good I read it twice, yes honestly and I can’t wait to read it again. WW1 veteran, Tom Birkin, coping with the trauma of his experiences in the war along with a broken marriage, arrives in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, where he is to restore a medieval mural in a local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by countryside and uncovering a doom painting of the apocalypse, he finds himself restored to a new and hopeful attachment to life. A truly wonderful book. 

A Sea Change by Veronica Henry

Jenna doesn’t mind being known as The Ice Cream Girl. There are far worse jobs than selling ice-cream on Everdene beach. Surfing mad Craig is a policeman who spends as much time as he can in the beach hut he rents with a few of his mates. One weekend he’s down there on his own when he notices a girl on the beach. He’s young, free and single and she catches his eye. But from then on both Jenna and Craig’s lives change, but not necessarily in the way you might expect.

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

The sixteenth Discworld novel by the late and much missed Sir TP. If you've come across the Discworld novels you’ll know the magical, vaguely medieval, bonkers early modern world he’s created. In this case you’ve rock and roll music, stardom with near disastrous consequences, along with an introduction to death’s granddaughter. Yes, it’s as wonderful and as crazy as it sounds.

 

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 Spring Read for 2015

 

( The painting is by Andre Derain)

 

 

Purple Coo Book Club Winter read, 2015

 

 

It should be easier to choose this time as we've only three suggestions, but what suggestions they are. A book of short stories - we've never had one of those before - and two historical, one set in the 1940s, the other from 1686.   

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 Winter Read for 2015

The American Lover by RoseTremain

 

We’ve never had a book of short stories before. Only recently published, these are about love, loss and longing, and those turning points, the pivotal moments in life when everything can change forever. It includes, ‘The Jester of Astapovo,’ a fictionalised account of Tolstoy’s death. (Kindle price is £5.99, paperback £12.10 on Amazon.)

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Set in 1686 Amsterdam, newly married Nella is given a wedding gift by her husband, a cabinet sized replica of their house. Her marriage is not what she hoped for and when she comes to furnish her tiny house, with the help of a mysterious miniaturist, she discovers secrets and dangers.  

The Unexploded by Alison Macleod

This book is set in Brighton in the days after Dunkirk.  Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont, together with her snobby mother and all the other inhabitants of this seaside town are having to cope with the threat of invasion.   It is unsettling for them all, but particularly for Evelyn, who comes into contact with Otto Gottlieb, a German artist in the local internment camp. His presence, plus the war itself, changes their lives for ever.

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

 

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.

 

Purple Coo Book Club Summer Read 2014

Five suggestions this time and for the first time ever 4 of them are non-fiction, but they are all such startling stories, I'm sure you'll have difficulty choosing your favourite. 
As always, to vote, please make your 1st and 2nd choices in the comments box below then, 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 Summer Read for 2014

Angel in the Rubble By Genelle Guzman-McMillan

(Non fiction) A true account of the miraculous rescue of the last person to be brought out alive from the rubble of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Genelle is trapped for 27 hours in what she describes as a “...sealed coffin of concrete and steel.” Unable to get out and aware of the likelihood of her approaching death, she has time to reflect on the life she’s lived and how she’s drifted from the faith she once knew. It is only when she remembers the miraculous recovery of her aunt in Trinidad that Genelle starts to have the hope ... just maybe ... God has a miracle for her as well.

Summer by Bill Bryson

(Non fiction) A compelling account covering the happenings of the summer of 1927, the year Linbergh flew from New York to Paris and Al Capone was arrested.

Priscilla by Nicholas Shakespeare

(Non fiction – Nicholas Shakespeare is Priscilla’s nephew) A fascinating account of his aunt’s adventures, including her arrest and internment by the Gestapo, liaisons with high ranking German Officers and two marriages: to a French nobleman and an English mushroom farmer no less.

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

(Non fiction) A magnificent and brilliantly written account by Vera Brittain, of how she was about to go up to Oxford when WW1 broke out. Four years later her life – and the lives of her whole generation – has irretrievably changed. A brilliant suggestion for this Centenary year. (If you liked Crimson Field – this is the real thing and infinitely better)

The Collector of Dying Breaths by M J Rose

A novel of suspense and intrigue set in Florence, Italy – 1533. An orphan, plucked from poverty becomes Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, and brings with him secret recipes not only for exotic fragrances and potent medicines, but also  covert poisons and a formula said to reanimate the dead. Yet he little knows the tragic and personal consequences for which his lethal potions will be responsible.

(The image is by Robert Delunay)