Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Title Deeds by Liza Campbell
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
The Liar by Stephen Fry
Call of the Wild: My Escape to Alaska by Guy Grieve
The Boy and the Sea by Kirsty Gunn
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay
The Island by Victoria Hislop
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Dead Simple by Peter James
Book Lover by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack
Day by A.L. Kennedy
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
The Stornoway Way by Kevin MacNeil
The Savage Garden by Mark Mills
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
One Summer's Grace: a Family Voyage Around Britain by Libby Purves
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz
Holes by Louis Sachar
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Trek by Paul Stewart
Border Crossing by Rosie Thomas
Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron
How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper
Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

BOYD, William
Any Human Heart
The story of a life lived to the full through the ups and downs of the twentieth century. Logan Mountstuart’s diary tells of an ordinary man living an extraordinary life – a soldier, a spy and an art-dealer – and searching for happiness during wartime, the swinging sixties and through his own bittersweet success. It takes us on a unique journey deep into a very human heart.

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CAMPBELL, Liza
Title Deeds
Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle, as featured in Macbeth. Her father Hugh, the 25th Thane of Cawdor, inherited good looks, wealth, an ancient title, three stately homes and 100,000 acres of land. But increasingly overwhelmed by his enormous responsibilities, Hugh turned to drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. He turned the castle into an arena of reckless profligacy, abuse and terrifying domestic violence, leading to the abrupt termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years.
Title Deeds is a dark, yet funny, contemporary fairytale about growing up in an old family where ancient curses and grisly past events are matched by the turmoil of a confusing and frightening present. Liza Campbell shows how even enormous wealth and privilege can hide unspoken abuse and misery: and what it is like to watch your father destroy himself and everything he holds dear.
“Sometimes when visitors came they would say, ‘You are such lucky children; it’s a fairytale life you live.’ And I knew they were right, it was a fairytale upbringing. But fairytales are dark and I had no way of telling either a stranger or a friend what was going on; the abnormal become ordinary.”

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DAWKINS, Richard
The God Delusion
In The God Delusion the scientist Richard Dawkins sets out to attack God "in all his forms". He argues that while Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing people around the world, while the dispute between "intelligent design" and Darwinism "is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science".  He maintains that in many countries religious dogma from medieval times still serves to abuse basic human rights such as women's and gay rights. And all from a belief in a God whose existence lacks evidence of any kind. Dawkins demolishes the major arguments for religion and attempts to demonstrate the supreme improbability of a supreme being. His opinion is that religion fuels war, foments bigotry and abuses children. A fascinating, controversial read.

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DICK, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
War had left the earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn’t ‘retiring’ them, he dreamed of owning the ultimate status symbol – a live animal. Then Rick got his big assignment: to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But things were never that simple, and Rick’s life quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit.
(I don’t really read SF but did enjoy the film, Blade Runner, on which this was based. One of the groups was keen to include this, so here we are. Trina)

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DUNANT, Sarah
In the Company of the Courtesan
1527. While the Papal city of Rome burns - brutally sacked by an invading army including Protestant heretics - two of her most interesting and wily citizens slip away, their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed as the enemy breaks down their doors. Though almost as damaged as their bellowed city, Fiammetta Bianchini and Bucino Teodoldi - a fabulous courtesan and her dwarf companion - are already planning their future. They head for the shimmering beauty of Venice, a honey pot of wealth and trade where they start to rebuild their business. As a partnership they are invincible: Bucino, clever with a sharp eye and a wicked tongue and Fiammetta, beautiful and shrewd, trained from birth to charm, entertain and satisfy men who have the money to support her. Venice, however, is a city which holds its own temptations. From the admiring Turk in search of human novelties for his Sultan's court, to the searing passion of a young lover who wants more than his allotted nights. But the greatest challenge comes from a young blind woman, a purveyor of health and beauty, who insinuates her way into their lives and hearts with devastating consequences for them all.

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EPHRON, Nora
Heartburn
“If I had to do it over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma … I picked up the pie, thanked God for linoleum floor, and threw it.”
Rachel Samstat is smart, successful, married to a high-flying Washington journalist … and devastated. She has discovered that her husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, ‘a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed’. A delectable novel fizzing with wisecracks and recipes, Heartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss and – most satisfyingly – revenge.
Nora Ephron has received three Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry met Sally, Silkwood and Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. Heartburn is Ephron’s roman-a-clef. It is the amusing revenge of a woman scorned: “I always thought during the pain of the marriage that one day it would make a funny book,” she once said – and it did.
(You asked for more funny books – so hopefully this fits the bill – Trina).

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FRY, Stephen
The Liar
No idea what this is about. I like watching Stephen Fry on the TV, particularly in QI, but have never been tempted to read one of his books. Now’s my chance. More comedy – I hope! – Trina

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GRIEVE, Guy
Call of the Wild: My Escape to Alaska
Guy Grieve jacked in his desk to spend a year alone in the Alaskan wilderness. With only moose, bears and wolves for company, he survived freezing temperatures, built a log cabin, learned to hunt and handle a dog team and had several brushes with death.
‘The book captures Grieve’s maverick adventure, and has an energy and pace to it, a compelling, rushing quality, like a dog sled chasing through the snowscape … the book also has a real flavour of the frontier, told by a man who shoots a hole in his roof for a chimney with his shotgun, and puts a recipe for beaver ribs and pea soup in the end notes. It’s the story of a greenhorn making good – and the transition of a mid-level marketing executive to adventurer. Scotsman
(This book is paired with Into the wild by Jon Krakauer – pick one, you get them both! – Trina).

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GUNN, Kirsty
The Boy and the Sea
At the start of a summer’s day, Ward is waiting on the beach. His friend, Alex, wants him to come to a party at Alison’s where there’ll be girls and drinks and the possibilities of fun. But Ward is shy and self-conscious and struggling to move from under the weight of his powerful father. He’d rather wait on the beach for the surf to come up. As the sun moves towards its highest point, the tide changes and Ward is faced with a dramatic event that will change his life forever.
This beautiful and intense coming of age story captures perfectly the discomforts and challenges of being fifteen years old with the world stretching out in front of you. Sensual, heady, as though dazed by the heat of the pages, Gunn slowly unfolds a tale of danger and sexuality, of mothers and sons and the fathers who rule them, and of the sea.
(An ideal partner to read with Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide.  Two coming of age novels).

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HADDON, Mark
A Spot of Bother
At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his unpredictable daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has ‘strangler’s hands.’ Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the way he cares for her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by the way the wedding planning gets in the way of her affair with one of her husband’s former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.
Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

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HAY, Sheridan
The Secret of Lost Things
A stunning debut from a new Australian writer -- the story of a treasure hunt through a vast New York bookshop. At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she's read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff -- a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel. There's Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men. The store manager Walter Geist is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter's eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to 'place' a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville's personal correspondence but never published, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point. Based on actual documents the author found while doing research on Melville, 'The Secret of Lost Things' is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long-lost manuscript, and an evocative portrait of life in a bookshop.

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HISLOP, Victoria
The Island
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother’s past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone’s throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga – Greece’s former leper colony. Then she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip.
Winner of the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007

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HOSSEINI, Khaled
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam’s unhappy household. Laila and Mariam are to find consolation in each other, their friendship to grow as deep as the bond between sisters, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter.
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women’s endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is an unforgettable portrait of a wounded country and a deeply moving story of family and friendship. It is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond and an indestructible love.
(So many people have suggested this for the list, and just about everyone that’s returned it to the library reckon it’s better than the Kite Runner, so I felt I had to include this, even although I try not to feature the same author more than once. Hope you agree - Trina).

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JAMES, Peter
Dead Simple
It was meant to be a harmless stag night prank. A few hours later four of his best friends are dead and Michael Harrison has disappeared. With only three days to the wedding, Detective Superintendent Grace – a man haunted by the shadow of his own missing wife – is contacted by Michael’s beautiful, distraught fiancée, Ashley Harper. Grace discovers that the one man who ought to know Michael Harrison’s whereabouts is saying nothing. But then he has a lot to gain – more than anyone realizes. For one man’s disaster is another man’s fortune …dead simple.
(Most people have indicated that they’ve enjoyed the crime novels that have been included, so here’s another one. Although Peter James is very popular, if crime isn’t your usual genre, this may be a new author for you - Trina).

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KAUFMAN, Jennifer and MACK, Karen
Book Lover
Some women shop. Some eat. Dora cures the blues by bingeing on books.
Separated, unemployed and on first-name terms with the pizza guy, Dora has been known to hide herself away in the comfortable chaos of her LA apartment, leaving only to refuel at the bookstore. Growing up with an absent father and alcoholic mother, Dora has long loved to shut out the real world by losing herself in a literary one.
It’s at the bookstore that she meets Fred – a Tennyson-quoting Adonis who captures her heart. But when tragedy strikes, Dora discovers he’s not all he seems to be.
Like the novels Dora turns to in her times of need, this wry, witty and moving debut is for anyone who has ever sought solace in the arms of their favourite author. If books be the food of love, read on
(OK, it’s American, lightweight and not a literary tour-de-force, but hugely enjoyed by one of the staff. It also has an interesting Q&A with the author and a great literary quiz at the back, requiring more work than just Googling. And it does mention a heck of a lot of books! Just the thing for a wet weekend. Trina)

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KENNEDY, A.L.
Day
The story of a former RAF prisoner-of-war returning to Germany to confront his demons. 
Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now, the war took it away. Now, in 1949, Alfred is winding back time to see where he lost himself. He has taken the role of an extra in a POW film. Shipped out to Germany and an ersatz camp, he picks his way through the cliches that will become all that's left of his war and begins to do what he's never dared to remember. He is looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back.
This book recently won the 2007 COSTA Book of the Year award

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KRAKAUER, Jon
Into the Wild
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25.000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burnt all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a hunter …
Jon Krakauer, best-selling author of Into Thin Air (a previous book group book – Trina), uses McCandless’ restless progress around the wide spaces of North America to explore the call of the wild and the mentality of those who succumb to it. What emerges from this mesmerizing, heartbreaking story is a version of the wilderness that is hard and seductive; a place where one can quite possibly find one’s self, but also opening the dark possibility that we might find our won nature strange and disturbing.
(This book is paired with Call of the Wild, by Guy Grieve – pick one, you get them both! – Trina).

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LAWSON, Mary
The Other Side of the Bridge
Arthur and Jake: brothers, yet worlds apart. Arthur is older, shy, dutiful and set to inherit his father’s farm. Jake is younger and reckless, a dangerous man to know. When Laura arrives in their 1930’s rural community, an already uneasy relationship is driven to breaking point …
Longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker prize
(Every single one of the characters in this book is superbly drawn. This is one of my top favourites from this year’s list – did make me cry, which is all good, I love crying at books and films! - Trina).

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LYNCH, Jim
The Highest Tide
It is not unusual for thirteen-year old Miles O’Malley to sneak out and explore the tidal flats of Puget Sound by moonlight. When he discovers a rare sea creature one night, he becomes a local phenomenon hounded by people curious whether he is an observant boy or an unlikely prophet. But Miles is just a kid on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce and struggling to keep his world intact. In this captivating novel, we witness dramatic changes for both Miles and the coastline that he adores over one unforgettable summer.
(An ideal partner to read with Kirsty Gunn’s The Boy and The Sea. Two coming of age novels)

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MacNEIL, Kevin
The Stornoway Way
“Fuck everyone from Holden Caulfield to Bridget Jones, fuck all the American and English phoney fictions that claim to speak for us; they don’t know the likes of us exist and they never did. We are who we are because we grew up the Stornoway way. We do not live in the back of beyond, we live in the very heart of beyond …”
Meet R Stornoway, drink-addled misfit, inhabitant of the Hebridean Isle of Lewis, and meandering man fighting to break free of an island he just can’t seem to let go of …
(No mistaking the tone of this book then, so not for those who’re offended by the language. Mind you, a lot of you had to suspend that distaste when reading Christopher Brookmyre, but felt it was well worth it. Haven’t read this yet, but according to the ‘Scotsman’ it’s “the best Scottish book since Trainspotting”. So if you didn’t like that, perhaps best to give this one a miss! – Trina)

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MILLS, Mark
The Savage Garden
Tuscany, 1958. Behind a villa in the heart of Tuscany lies a Renaissance garden of enchanting beauty. It’s grottoes, pagan statues and classical inscriptions seem to have a secret life of their own – and a secret message, too, for those with eyes to read it.
Young scholar Adam Strickland is just such a person. Arriving in 1958, he finds the Docci family, their house and the unique garden as seductive as each other. But post-War Italy is still a strange, even dangerous, place and the Doccis have some dark skeletons hidden away in their past.
Before this mysterious and beautiful summer ends, Adam will uncover two stories of love, revenge and murder, separated by 400 years … but is another tragedy about to be added to the villa’s cursed history?

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MORTON, Kate
The House at Riverton
Summer 1924. On the eve of a glittering society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again.
Winter 1999. Grace Bradley, ninety-eight, one-time housemaid at Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet’s suicide. Ghosts awaken and old memories – long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace’s mind – begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge, something history has forgotten but Grace never could.
Set as the war-shattered Edwardian summer surrenders to the decadent twenties, The House at Riverton is a thrilling mystery and a compelling love story.

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Nesbo, Jo
The Redbreast
Down on his luck, Detective Harry Hole is having a rough time. Reassigned, having caused a high-profile embarrassment, he finds himself lumbered with surveillance duties. But working alone is just the way Harry likes it and it’s not long before he discovers that a rare, high-calibre rifle, a type favoured by assassins, has been smuggled into the country.
When a former WW2 Nazi sympathiser is found with his throat slit, Harry suspects a connection. As his investigation unfolds and the bodies mount up, it becomes clear that the killer is hell-bent on serving his own justice. But who is he? And what is the link to events that took place over 50 years ago? One thing is for certain: he must be stopped.
(I didn’t only choose this because the author is Norwegian, and so am I! – Trina).

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NEMIROVSKY, Irene
Suite Francaise
In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz in 1942 prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the existing two sections of her planned novel sequence, Suite Francaise, would be rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece.
Set during the year that France fell to the Nazis, Suite Francaise falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation. This is a novel that teems with wonderful characters struggling with the new regime. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and live exist, but often in surprising places.
(One of these books where the typeface is just a bit too small. Hope this lives up to the hype, I know of one book group where not one reader enjoyed this. Here’s hoping we disagree! – Trina).

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O’FARRELL, Maggie
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Edinburgh in the 1930’s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.
Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.
Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris’s questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?

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PAMUK, Orhan
My Name is Red
In Istanbul, in the late 1590’s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day – in the European manner. But when one of the miniaturists is murdered, their master has to seek outside help. Did the dead painter fall victim to professional rivalry, romantic jealousy or religious terror?
A thrilling murder mystery, My Name is red is also a stunning meditation on love, artistic devotion and the tensions between East and West.

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PURVES, Libby
One Summer’s Grace: a Family Voyage Around Britain
In the summer of 1998, Libby Purves and her husband Paul Heiney set sail in their cutter Grace O’Malley with their children Nicholas, aged five, and Rose, three. They sailed the 1,700 miles round mainland Britain, from the offshore labyrinths of the sandy Southeast to the towering stacks of Cape Wrath and back home through the North Sea. Her account of the voyage is a modern classic of the sea.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the journey, for this new edition the author offers a frank postscript on the long-term effects of the adventure on family life and relationships.

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RAWICZ, Slavomir
The Long Walk
Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and, after brutal interrogation and a farce of a trial, he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour in the Gulags.
After a three-month journey to Siberia in the depths of winter he escaped with six companions, realizing that to stay in the camp meant almost certain death. In June 1941 they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and, finally, freedom nine months later in March 1942 after travelling on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert.
This is one of the world’s greatest true stories of adventure, survival and escape.

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SACHAR, Louis
Holes
Stanley Yelnats’ family has a history of bad luck, so he isn’t too surprised when a miscarriage of justice sends him to a boys’ juvenile detention centre. At Camp Green Lake the boys must dig a hole a day, five feet deep, five feet across, in the dried up lake bed. The warden claims the labour is character building, but it is a lie. Stanley must dig up the truth.
(Several years ago 2 teenage/junior books were included in the collection – the first Harry Potter, and Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. They weren’t that well received, but I think it’s time to try again! This is an established classic. Let me know, via the notebooks, what you all think. Trina)

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SETTERFIELD, Diane
The Thirteenth Tale
Angelfield House stands abandoned and forgotten. It was once the imposing home of the March family – fascinating, manipulative Isabelle, Charlie, her brutal and dangerous brother, and the wild, untamed twins, Emmeline and Adeline. But Angelfield House conceals a chilling secret whose impact still resonates …
Now Margaret Lea is investigating Angelfield’s past – and the mystery of the March family starts to unravel. What has the house been hiding? What is its connection with the enigmatic author Vida Winter? And what is it in Margaret’s own troubled past that causes her to fall so powerfully under Angelfield’s spell?
(Check out the reading group notes at the back of the book – Trina).

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STEWART, Paul
Trek
A true adventure story of disaster and survival in the Sahara.
1955, Kenya. A group of four British eccentrics set out to drive from Nairobi to London, via the Sahara desert, in an 8 horsepower Morris Traveller. Under the leadership of Alan Cooper, a down-on-his-luck farmer, the group was made up of a worldly field biologist who recorded the whole trip on her 8mm cine camera, a genteel schoolmistress of uncertain age and in search of romance, and a 17-year-old boy whose mother had insisted that the trip would make a man of him. What united them was an overwhelming desire for adventure.
As they set off through Equatorial Africa the omens seemed against them. The May Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya was at its height and the days of colonial rule were ending. Their journey was to take them through an Africa that very soon would cease to exist. But it was the desert that turned their joyride into a nightmare. What began as an adventure ended as a desperate fight for life in the blazing sands of the Sahara. Trek brings this story to dramatic life and is a page-turning account of a fight for survival against all the odds.

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THOMAS, Rosie
Border Crossing
The first international motor rally from Peking to Paris took place in the summer of 1907. Only five cars were involved, and the crews wrote their agreed code of conduct on the back of a menu the night before the start. Their only navigational aids were the sun and telegraph poles. Ninety years later the race was re-enacted when 110 vintage cars gathered in Peking. Their goal was the finishing line in Paris, 45 days and 16,000 kilometres away. In this book one of the competitors, the novelist Rosie Thomas, describes the excitement of the daily time challenge, the strange camaraderie, the test of sleeping outdoors or in flea-pit hotels in foreign lands - and her own internal journey, including a near-death experience high in the Himalayas.

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THUBRON, Colin
Shadow of the Silk Road
On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. Covering over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron recounts extraordinary adventures – a near miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell during the SARS epidemic, undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic in Iran – in inimitable prose. Shadow of the Silk Road is about Asia today; a magnificent account of an ancient world in m modern ferment.

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TROPPER, Jonathan
How to Talk to a Widower
When Doug married Hailey – beautiful, smart and ten years older – he left his carefree Manhattan life to live in the suburbs with her and her teenage son, Russ. Three years later, at 29, Doug has been a widower for twelve months and just wants to drown himself in self-pity and Jack Daniels. But his family has other ideas …
Russ is furious with Doug for not adopting him, and has fallen in with a bad crowd. Claire, Doug’s irrepressible, pregnant twin sister, has left her husband and, uninvited, moved in with Doug. And their sister Debbie is determined to have the perfect wedding, at any cost.
Soon, Doug finds himself trying to forge a relationship with Russ and reconnect with his own eccentric family, while reluctantly edging back into the complicated world of dating.
(I’ve had requests for some more light-hearted and funny books. This had been reviewed as “brilliant, funny, and incredibly poignant” and “a wise-cracking, darkly comic tale”. Possibly not a sidesplitting read, but I’m hoping there’s at least some humour in it! – Trina).

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WEIR, Alison
Innocent Traitor
Lady Jane Grey was born into times of extreme danger. Child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother, for whom she was merely a pawn in a dynastic power game with the highest stakes, she lived a life in thrall to political machinations and lethal religious fervour.
Jane’s astonishing and essentially tragic story was played out during one of the most momentous periods of English history. As a great-niece of Henry VIII, and the cousin of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, she grew up to realise that she could never throw off the chains of her destiny. Her honesty, intelligence and strength of character carry the reader through all the vicious twists of Tudor power politics, to her nine-day reign and it’s unbearably poignant conclusion.

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YATES, Richard
Revolutionary Road
Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.

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