Torch by Lin Anderson
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Desert Flower by Waris Dirie
The Olive Farm by Carol Drinkwater
The Smiling School for Calvinists by Bill Duncan
Troubles by J.G.Farrell
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
Diary of an Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
My Heart is my own - the life of Mary, Quuen of Scots by John Guy
Altered Land by Jules Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Alexander at the World's End by Tom Holt
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Pursuit of Happiness by Douglas Kennedy
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Singing Bird by Roisin McAuley
Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride
The Gulf Conspiracy by Ken McClure
The Road Dance by John MacKay
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Happy Accidents by Tiffany Murray
Our Street by Gilda O'Neill
The storyteller's daughter by Saira Shah
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Toast by Nigel Slater
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Driving over Lemons by Chris Stewart
The Assassin's Cloak - An Anthology of the Worl'd Greatest Diarists
The story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Precious Bane by Mary Webb
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

Anderson, Lin   Torch
When a young homeless girl dies in an arson attack on an empty building on Edinburgh’s famous Princes Street, forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is called in to help find the arsonist. Severino MacRae, half Scottish/half Italian and all misogynist, has other ideas. As Chief Fire Investigator, this is his baby and he doesn’t want help – especially from a woman. Sparks fly when Rhona and Severino meet, but Severino’s reluctance to involve Rhona may be more about her safety than his prejudice. As Hogmanay approaches, Rhona and Severino play cat and mouse with an arsonist who will stop at nothing to gain his biggest thrill yet.
Introducing what may be a new character for you – forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod, first met in the novel, “Driftnet.” Another quality read from the Luath Press, Edinburgh.
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Banks, Iain   The Wasp Factory
“Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again It was just a stage I was going through.”
The story focuses on Frank, a 16-year-old living with his father on a small Scottish island, part of the ultimate dysfunctional family. Frank's horrific history is revealed, as we learn that his brother - lately escaped from a secure hospital - makes his way back for a visit.
This book really does need a word of caution – you will like it or loathe it, but Ian Banks is hailed as one of the most talented and imaginative Scottish novelists of his generation. The Wasp factory, published in 1984, is his first novel, which is why it’s featured on this book list.
Do read some of the reviews just inside the front cover – it’s hard to appreciate they have been written about the same book. Many of the reviewers clearly hated it.
You have been warned!!
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Brown, Dan   The Da Vinci Code
Harvard professor Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call while on business in Paris: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been brutally murdered inside the museum. Alongside the body, police have found a series of baffling codes. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, begin to sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to find a trail that leads to the works of Leonardo Da Vinci – and suggests the answer to a mystery that stretches deep into the vaults of history. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle a stunning historical truth will be lost forever.
I know that by now most of you will probably have read this, but as so many suggested it for the new list I couldn’t exclude it. If you haven’t read it – you are in for an exciting, roller coaster of a read.
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Dickens, Charles   Little Dorrit
Against a background of administrative and financial scandal, Dickens tells the moving story of the old Marshalsea (debtors prison) prisoner who inherits a fortune and his devoted daughter’s love for a man who believes he has done with love. According to this Oxford Classic’s edition, Little Dorrit is highly regarded as one of the greatest novels in English literature, presenting both a scathing indictment of mid-Victorian England and a devastating insight into the human condition.
Many of you requested that some “classics” were included in the book list this year. It was difficult to decide which Charles Dickens to feature, but I took advice from an expert! Hopefully it may also be one of the ones you haven’t read yet.
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Dirie, Waris   Desert flower: the extraordinary life of a desert nomad
“This nightmare journey began because I was running away from my father. I was about thirteen at the time, and living with my family, a tribe of nomads in the Somalian desert, when my father announced he had arranged my marriage to an old man……while my father and the rest of the family were still sleeping, my mother woke me and said, “Go now.” I looked around for something to grab, something to take, but there was nothing, no bottle of water, no jar of milk, no basket of food. So, barefoot, and wearing only a scarf draped around me, I ran off into the black desert night.”
This is the true story of Waris Dirie’s life. She endured circumcision at five, a face-off with a tiger, a would be rapist, became a young runaway, and survived to become a Perelli calendar girl. In 1997 she was appointed by the United Nations as special ambassador for women’s rights in Africa, in its efforts to eliminated the practice of female genital mutilation.
The remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
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Drinkwater, Carol   The Olive Farm – a memoir of life, love and olive oil in the south of France
The Olive Farm is a double love story. It is a lyrical tale of the real-life romance between actress Carol Drinkwater and Michel, a television producer, and of an abandoned Provencal olive farm – Appassionata – which they fall in love with and buy. And as the olives turn from green to violet, luscious grape-purple to a deep succulent black, we are drawn seductively into Carol and Michel’s vibrant Mediterranean world. We experience the highs and lows of Provencal life: the carnivals, customs and local cuisine; the threats of fire, the adoption of a menagerie of animals and a ready-made family; potential financial ruin as well as the thrill of harvesting your own olives by hand – especially when they are discovered to produce the finest extra-virgin olive oil.
I had thought to include Peter Kerr’s Mallorcan books in this list, but thought that, as he’s a local author, many of you would have already read them. If you haven’t, I can highly recommend them!
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Duncan, Bill   The Smiling School for Calvinists
A first short-story collection which introduces a startling new voice in Scottish fiction. In tales that alternate between the enclosed, austere fishing community of Broughty Ferry and the implacably encroaching tower-blocks of nearby Dundee, Bill Duncan's debut collection creates a gallery of unforgettable characters from both the old world and the new: the Maist Ignorant Man in the World, who claims to have seen the only surviving man-eating eel on the east coast; ninety three year old Boat Rab, one of the old-style Ferry folk who has never once set foot outside the village; a father soothing his son to sleep with a story of a boy floating to Scandinavia; Big Sheila, who had a bit of bother in Safeway trying to conceal a frozen chicken under her Russian hat; a young man getting ready for a school reunion who feels again the pain of his first love; a man for whom a strand of hair on an unworn suit brings back memories of his departed wife and dead son. Haunting, evocative and eccentric, The Smiling School for Calvinists resonates with the voices of the living and the stories of the dead, memorably conjuring up a traditional community reluctantly confronting the modern world.
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Farrell, J.G.  Troubles
Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland - to the Majestic Hotel and to the fiancee he acquired on a rash afternoon's leave three years ago. Despite her many letters, the lady herself proves elusive, and the Major's engagement is short-lived. But he is unable to detach himself from the alluring discomforts of the crumbling hotel. Ensconced in the dim and shabby splendour of the Palm Court, surrounded by gently decaying old ladies and proliferating cats, the Major passes the summer. So hypnotic are the faded charms of the Majestic, the Major is almost unaware of the gathering storm. But this is Ireland in 1919 - and the struggle for independence is about to explode with brutal force.
A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning author
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Flagg, Fannie   Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
As eighty-year old Mrs Cleo Threadgoode tells Evelyn Couch about her life, she escapes the Rose Terrace nursing home and returns in her mind to Whistle Stop, Alabama in the thirties where the Whistle Stop Café provides good barbecue, good coffee, love and even an occasional murder.
Set in the southern USA, mostly in the 20’s and 30’s, but narrated in the eighties, it explores themes of love and friendship, the relationship between women, and the wonderful comfort of good food.
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Forster, Margaret   Diary of an ordinary woman
The author presents the ‘edited’ diary of a woman, born in 1901, whose life spans the twentieth century.  On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy and money troubles. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920’s her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London.  Spanning WW1 to Greenham Common it becomes clear that this fictionalised account of the life of Millicent King is about a woman who is many things, but certainly not “ordinary.”
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Fowler, Karen Joy   The Jane Austen Book Club
In California’s Sacramento Valley, six people meet once a month to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but all wounded in different ways, all mixed up about their lives and their relationships. Over the six months they meet marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and, under the guiding eye of Jane Austen some of them even fall in love.
A very light read which several of you suggested. I’ve since had mixed reports about it: some like, some loath, it. I’ll be interested to get your feedback on this one.
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Guy, John   My Heart is My Own – the life of Mary, Queen of Scots
To some she was a murderer, an adulteress and a traitor. To others she was courageous and principled, a heroine and a martyr. In this compelling biography John Guy returns to the archives to explode the myths and correct the inaccuracies in the dramatic life of Mary Queen of Scots – the most charismatic but unlucky monarch in British history.
This is a riveting read, a scholarly biography than almost reads like an historical novel.  If you don’t manage to finish this before the book group meeting (it is over 500 pages) I’m sure you’ll want to come back to it.
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Hardy, Jules   Altered Land
Joan is a single mother – beautiful, talented and desired. John is her adored son – growing up in the West Country, living a life outdoors. On his thirteenth birthday, Joan takes him to London to buy his first pair of Levi’s jeans. Unused to driving in the city, she takes a wrong turn. The repercussions of that moment’s hesitation are devastating.
A novel narrated in turns by mother and son, revealing the author’s deep understanding of the relationship between them, of physical and mental damage, of heartbreak and love.
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Hardy, Thomas   Far from the Madding Crowd
Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and respectable, middle-aged Farmer Boldwood. And while their fates depend upon the choice Bathsheba makes, she discovers the terrible consequences of an inconstant heart. Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy’s novels to give the name of Wessex to the landscape of southwest England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. Set against the backdrop of the unchanging natural cycle of the year, the story both upholds and questions rural values with a startlingly modern sensibility.
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Holt, Tom   Alexander at the World’s End
Alexander the Great conquered Greece, Egypt and the Persian Empire in the course of eight years. Although he died at the age of 33, he left behind a legacy that would change the world. For some people, however, life can be very different … Alexander at the World’s End is the story of two remarkable men, one of whom conquered empires with apparent ease and one of whom struggled with the day-to-day problems of a small provincial town. It is the story of two men whose paths crossed only briefly, but whose encounter changed both their lives – and the course of history. And it is a story which throws an extraordinary new light on the man who became Alexander the Great.
An historical novel which places the main character well and truly - in the background.
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Hosseini, Khaled   The Kite Runner
Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to gain the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan promises to help him – for he always helps Amir – but this is 1970’s Afghanistan and Hassan is merely a low-caste servant who is jeered at in the street, although Amir feels jealous of his natural courage and the place he holds in his father’s heart. But neither of the boys could foresee what would happen to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament, which was to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
We still have a huge waiting list for this book – it’s still very much in demand and greatly enjoyed by those who have read and returned it.
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Kennedy, Douglas   The pursuit of happiness
Manhattan, Thanksgiving eve, 1945. The war was over and Eric Smythe's party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara - an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked a gatecrasher, Jack Malone - a U. S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, and a man whose world-view did not tally with that of Eric and his friends. This chance meeting between Sara and Jack would have profound consequences on all their lives. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of post war New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch-hunts, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.
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Kidd, Sue Monk   The secret life of bees
Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother. She has her father’s account, as well as her own, 4 year old’s memory, of holding the gun. Now, at fourteen, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has just one friend, Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart.
South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lily’s harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world as about the mystery surrounding her mother.
A stunning, haunting debut
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Levy, Andrea   Small Island
It is 1948 and England is recovering from a war.  But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, what else can she do?
Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently.  Gilbert’s wife had also longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in
England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
Small Island explores a point in England’s past when the country began to change. In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit.
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year and Orange Prize for Fiction
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McAuley, Roisin   Singing Bird
The phone call comes out of the blue. It is the nun who, twenty-seven years earlier, set up the adoption of Lena Molloy’s baby girl in Ireland. Just tying up loose ends, she says, nothing to worry about.
But Lena is worried – and intrigued – and decides to go on a secret mission to the west of Ireland to trace the birth parents of her daughter, who is now making her international debut as an opera singer. As she slowly uncovers the extraordinary truths surrounding the adoption, a mystery far more troubling than she ever expected begins to unfold.
A touching, poignant and absorbing first novel.
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MacBride, Stuart   Cold granite
Set in Aberdeen, the oil capital of Europe.
A debut novel introducing Detective Sergeant Logan McRae, back on the job after a year off sick and heading up a major murder enquiry.
A killer stalking the Granite City; a diverse range of characters; terrible, harrowing crime, and yet written with a light, skilled touch, which manages to incorporate moments of joy and hope. All these elements combine to produce a novel that is entirely convincing and thoroughly enjoyable. Aberdeen’s answer to Ian Rankin?
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McClure, Ken   The gulf conspiracy
When a vaccine designed by British scientists becomes contaminated in a freak accident, military leaders decide it must remain a secret. Twelve years later, veterans are dying from a Gulf War Syndrome. A chilling and tense military thriller.
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MacKay, John   The Road Dance
Life in the Scottish Hebrides can be harsh – “the edge of the world” some call it. For the beautiful Kirsty MacLeod, the love of Murdo and their dreams of America promise an escape from the scrape of the land, the repression of the church and the inevitability of the path their lives would take.
But as the Great War looms Murdo is conscripted. The villagers hold a grand Road Dance to send their young men off to battle. As the dancers swirl and sup, the wheels of tragedy are set in motion.
A powerful first novel from what may be a familiar face to you – John MacKay is a journalist and presenter on Scottish TV’s  Scotland Today programme.
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Mistry, Rohinton   A fine balance
In 1975, in an unidentified Indian city, Mrs Dina Dalal, a financially pressed Parsi widow in her early 40s sets up a sweatshop of sorts in her ramshackle apartment. Determined to remain financially independent and to avoid a second marriage, she takes in a boarder and two Hindu tailors to sew dresses for an export company. As the four share their stories, then meals, then living space, human kinship prevails and the four become a kind of family, despite the lines of caste, class and religion. When tragedy strikes, their cherished, newfound stability is threatened, and each character must face a difficult choice in trying to salvage their relationships.
This novel has been, without a doubt, the most popular title of all the book group books so far. So much so that many members of the original book groups insisted that this was included once more, to allow those in the more recently set up groups the opportunity to read it. A highly recommended, a multi-award winner.
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Mitchell, David   Cloud atlas
This is a most definitely a complex novel!
Six lives are connected, against a backdrop of time and place. The stories nudge and merge into each other. The19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific are subsequently unearthed 80 years later by Frobisher, who corresponds with Rufus Sexsmith, a leading nuclear scientist. Rufus is murdered and an account of an investigation into his death finds its way to Cavendish, a London publisher. Somehow Cavendish is linked with a genetically engineered fast food waitress – you’ll need to persevere to get this far! According to the blurb this story is
“one amazing adventure. In a narrative that circles the globe and reaches from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of time, genre and language to offer an enthralling vision of humanity’s will to power, and where it will lead us.”
It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004
Enough said!
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Murray, Tiffany   Happy accidents
Kate Happy’s favourite books are Jane Eyre and Salem’s Lot, because they’re English and American and so is she.  It’s the early eighties and Kate is being brought up by her grandparents on their huge sprawling farm, somewhere between England and Wales.  Gran has been homesick for Coney Island for 38 years, hating her husband but determinedly donning her best pink Chanel suit and high heels to step out into the muck-splattered farmyard.  Grandpa is bonkers, an ex-naval captain who wanders round the house shouting sea-faring commands.  Mum’s gone AWOL since she ran over Kate’s dad in her soft-top Triumph Spitfire.
An intriguing and funny debut novel from an established British columnist
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O’Neill, Gilda   Our Street – East End life in the Second World War
It was a time of poverty and overcrowding. Food was rationed and gas masks had to be carried everywhere. The constant threat of death and destruction from German bombers - “I remember the sound of the doodlebugs and how everyone seemed to hold their breath and wait to hear whether the engine cut out before it reached your house, overhead or beyond it” - meant that nights were spent in air raid shelters – and when you emerged the next day you could never be sure if your house or street would still be standing.  Focusing on the personal stories of East Londoners, Our Street tell their funny, sad and sometimes shocking stories, of what it was like to live through the six long years of the Second World War and how they managed to survive them. It’s also an affectionate record of a fondly remembered, more communal, way of life that has all but disappeared.
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Shah, Saira   The storyteller’s daughter
After a childhood in rural Kent spent listening to her father’s stories of a magical and exotic Afghanistan, 21 year old Saira Shah set out to discover this wonderful, shattered land for herself. What she found was a devastated country quite unlike that of her father’s stories. Worse, as a modern Western woman, she felt despised and powerless. The truths she learned about the people she belonged to and about herself shocked the westerner she is, yet spoke to the eastern woman she was never allowed to be. A deeply moving account of two journeys – one across the deadly front lines of wartime Afghanistan, the other a personal journey of discovery.
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Shriver, Lionel   We need to talk about Kevin
Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. He is visited in prison by his mother, Eva, who narrates in a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, her account of Kevin’s upbringing. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. Much as parents are expected to love their children unconditionally, sometimes the kids don’t turn out well, but how much is her fault?  And can she ever come to terms with being the mother of a teenager who went on the rampage with such disastrous consequences?
A courageous and well-written book, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
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Slater, Nigel   Toast
Toast is Nigel Slater’s award-winning story of a childhood remembered through food. Whether relating his mother’s ritual burning of the toast, his father’s dreaded Boxing Day stew or such culinary highlights of the day as Arctic Roll and Grilled Grapefruit (then considered something of a status symbol in Wolverhampton), this remarkable memoir vividly recreates daily life in sixties suburban England.
Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses form a fascinating backdrop to this incredibly moving and deliciously evocative portrait of childhood, adolescence and sexual awakening.
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Steinbeck, John    East of Eden
“There is only one book to a man,” Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – whose generations helplessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
This is one of my all-time favourite novels and the only one I’ve ever read twice!
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Stewart, Chris   Driving over Lemons – an optimist in Andalucia
At age 17 Chris retired as the drummer of Genesis and launched a career as a sheep shearer and travel writer. He has no regrets about this. Had he become a big-time rock star he might never have moved with his wife Ana to a remote mountain farm in Andalucia. Nor forged the friendship of a lifetime with his resourceful peasant neighbour Domingo … nor watched his baby daughter Chloe grow and thrive there … nor written this book. Fate does sometimes seem to know what it’s up to. Driving over lemons is that rare thing: a funny insightful book that charms you from the first page to the last … and one that makes running a peasant farm in Spain seem like a distinctly good move. Chris transports us to Las Alpujarras, an oddball region south of Granada, and into a series of misadventures with an engaging mix of peasant farmers and shepherds, New Age travellers and ex-pats. The hero of the piece, however, is the farm that he and Ana bought, El Valero – a patch of mountain studded with olive, almond and lemon groves, sited on the wrong side of a river, with no access road, water supply or electricity. Could life offer much better than that?
Winner of the British book awards “Newcomer of the Year.”
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Taylor, Irene and Alan (editors)    The assassin’s cloak – an anthology of the world’s greatest diarists
This anthology is presented like a diary, from 1st January to 31st December, with several entries for each day. In one volume you can sample the delights of 170 diarists, from the extremely familiar, such as Samuel Pepys to total strangers (to me, anyway!). Luckily there is a list of short biographies at the end. A wonderful book just to dip into, but not one to read from cover to cover!
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Trevor, William   The story of Lucy Gault
Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens - an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come.
This novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize
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Webb, Mary   Precious bane
Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a harelip - her 'precious bane'. Cursed for it, too, by the superstitious people amongst whom she lives. Prue loves two things: the remote countryside of her birth and, hopelessly, Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. The tale of how Woodseaves gradually discerns Prue's true beauty is set against the tragic drama of Prue’s brother, Gideon, a driven man who is out of harmony with the natural world.
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Wharton, Edith   The House of Mirth
The House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits – her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market for too long. Wharton charts the course of Lily’s life, providing, along the way, a wider picture of a society in transition, a rapidly changing New York where the old certainties of manners, morals and family have disappeared and the individual has become an expendable commodity.
The House of Mirth was published in October 1905 – exactly 100 years ago – to widespread critical acclaim. It became an instant best seller and is regarded today as one of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished and compelling social satires.
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Williams, Niall   Four letters of love
This synopsis is lifted straight from the Amazon website
Niall Williams' debut - and best selling - novel about the tragedies and miracles of everyday life. 'When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn't say much. He told my father to be a painter and left it at that...' So begins Niall Williams' magical tale about love and destiny. Nicholas Coughlan and Isabel Gore were made for each other - but fate doesn't always take the easiest or the most obvious route to true love. For a start, Nicholas and Isabel have never met and nor are they likely to, without some kind of divine intervention. But as God, ghosts, a series of coincidences and seemingly chance events and encounters conspire to bring the couple together, other - often more human - forces attempt to keep them apart. 'What will be, will be,' of course, but that doesn't guarantee a happy-ever-after ending, nor answer the question 'Will they, won't they?' Written in a lyrical, lilting tone, Four Letters of Love is a glorious, uplifting story about faith, about seizing the moment, believing in your instincts and acting on impulse - and about following your heart, no matter where it may lead.
I can’t for the life of me remember why this ended up on the list, I can only assume someone highly recommended it. I do hope it isn’t a disappointment. I hadn’t heard of the author, or read about this anywhere else.
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