General Chat

Review date 18 November

Two books as usual please. Vote will hopefully take place either Tuesday PM if all in or Wednesday 6 Oct.

The Passage - Justin Cronin

A virus nearly destroys the world, and a six-year-old girl holds the key to bringing it back. The Passage takes readers on a journey from the early days of the virus to the aftermath of the destruction, where packs of the hungry infected scour the razed, charred cities looking for food, and the survivors eke out a bleak, brutal existence shadowed by fear.

The Perfect Someone - Johanna Lindsey

Nine years ago, Richard Allen fled England and his controlling father. Determined to live his own life, he took to the sea and settled in the Caribbean, joining a band of treasure-hunting pirates and adopting the persona of a carefree, seductive Frenchman named Jean Paul to guard the secrets of his past. When he slips back into England to carry out an urgent task, Richard becomes infatuated with a married woman, Georgina Malory. But his reckless attempt to woo Georgina at a masked ball turns out to be the worst mistake of his life because it brings him face to face with another beautiful woman.

Thrilled that her solicitors have finally come up with a way to free her from her betrothal contract to the Earl of Manford’s son who abandoned her years ago, heiress Julia Miller is ready for the marriage mart and hopes to find that perfect someone at her friend Georgina’s ball. Charmed by a masked Frenchman who gives her her first kiss, she can’t help but pursue this mysterious man—until she makes a shocking discovery. Now, to avoid falling into a ruthless nobleman’s trap, Julia must enter a risky, intimate charade with a man she never believed she could love.

Ann, good afternoon. I was only thinking about your Greaders thread over the weekend. Now I will keep my eyes peeled for the suggestions.
Many Thanks
Julia in Derbyshire

Picture perfect Jodi Picoult

A woman wakes to find herself lying in a graveyard hurt and bleeding, her memory wiped clean. She doesn’t know what she is doing there or who she is.
She is rescued by a police officer, himself a newcomer to Los Angeles. After days of waiting, she is taken by complete surprise when she is finally identified by Alex Rivers, Hollywoods biggest movie star and her husband.

Cassie is dazzled and bewildered by the fairy tale in which she suddenly finds herself. But everything is not quite right, and there is something dark and disturbing behind this glamorous facade. It is only as her memory gradually returns that her picture perfect life comes crumbling down, and Cassie is faced with choices she never dreamed she would have to make.

Booklist “A riveting unfailingly intelligent and undeniably literary psychological drama.”

The Villa in Italy Elizabeth Edmondson

4 strangers are summoned to the Villa Dante, a beautiful but now abandoned house above the Ligurian coast. Each has been named in the will of the intriguing Beatrice Malaspina; not one of them knows who she is. Delia, an opera singer; George, an atom scientist from Cambridge; Marjorie, a detective novelist; and Lucius, a Boston banker, come to Italy, only to find that the mystery deepens.
Spring flowers into the joy of an Italian summer, and the Villa dante, with its frescoes and once-magnificent gardens, comes back to life. As water flows again through the cascades and fountains. The four visit the mediaeval tower close to the house, and find them selves face to face with their troubled pasts in a way they could never have foreseen.
The villa works its magic and slowly they are changed, as the sorrows of their wartime experiences grow into the possibility of hope. Now they can receive their unexpected inheritance and, as devastating secrets are finally revealed, the even greater gift of a new life.

Oxford Times “ A very interesting book, not only because it gives a flavour of life – it is a way of imbibing history.

I can see I shall have to send out pms again.

My suggestions are:

Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx

The third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News', 'Accordion Crimes' spans generations, continents and a century and confirms the hallucinatory power of Proulx's writing. 'Accordion Crimes' is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion-maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion-maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants: German-Americans founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.

The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble

Freda Haxby is as famous for her writing as she is for her eccentricities. But for Daniel Palmer, Rosemary, Grace and their families, she is a monster mother. This is the story of an end-of-the-century family whose comfortable lives are disrupted by a succession of sinister events.

Nudge

The Pilots Wife by Anita Shreve
This is a beautifully written novel about a happily married woman, Kathryn Lyons, whose husband, Jack, is an airlines pilot. They have a teen age daughter named Mattie. They live in Kathryn's childhood home in Ely, New Hampshire. For sixteen years, life has been good. Then her husband goes down with his plane, just ten miles off the coast of Ireland, and ever so slowly the very fabric of their life together unravels.
The media frenzy, surrounding the explosion of the plane that her husband was piloting, brings to light the inescapable fact that her husband had been, unbeknownst to her, leading a double life, a life that had not included her or their daughter, but had, most emphatically, excluded them. This is a story of Kathryn's navigation of the emotional roller coaster that was to become her life, as she is thrust into a maelstrom of grief and disbelief, struggling to reconcile her memory of the man she thought she knew, with the reality of who he now appeared to have been.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse
The Great War took much more than lives. It robbed a generation of friends, lovers and futures. In Freddie Watson's case, it took his beloved brother and, at times, his peace of mind. Unable to cope with his grief, Freddie has spent much of the time since in a sanatorium. In the winter of 1928, still seeking resolution, Freddie is travelling through the French Pyrenees - another region that has seen too much bloodshed over the years. During a snowstorm, his car spins off the mountain road. Shaken, he stumbles into the woods, emerging by a tiny village. There he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful local woman, also mourning a lost generation. Over the course of one night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories of remembrance and loss. By the time dawn breaks, he will have stumbled across a tragic mystery that goes back through the centuries. By turns thrilling, poignant and haunting, this is a story of two lives touched by war and transformed by courage.
x jill

' Evening all, my suggestions -

The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud by Julia Navarro

AD 30, A brotherhood of fanatical believers charged with protecting the burial shroud of Jesus Christ is hunted and persecuted but willing to die to protect its secret possession.

Two thousand years later, a body with its tongue cut out is discovered at Turin Cathedral, the home of the shroud. Marco Valoni, chief of police is called in. He begins a desperate race to save the burial cloth from those who will stop at nothing to posses its legendary power .......

Second suggestion -

The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory
Heiress to the red rose of Lancaster, Margaret never surrenders her belief that her House is the true ruler of England and that she has a great destiny before her.
But she is sent off to a loveless marriage in remote Wales to a man twice her age. A mother at fourteen, Margaret is determined to turn her lonely life into a trimph. She sets her heart in putting her son Henry on the throne of England whatever the cost.

Disregarding rival heirs and the overwhelming power of the York dynasty, she sends Henry into exile and pledges him in marriage to the daughter of her enemy, Elizabeth Woodville

She feigns loyalty to \king Richard 111, marries one of his supporters and then masterminds one of the greatest rebellions of all time - all the while knowing that her son, Henry is growing to manhood, recruting an army, his eyes on the greatest prize ............

Hi Ann and Everyone Else, I would like to suggest

The Reading Room by Ruth Hamilton.

Leanne Chalmers has made a career for herself presenting her own style of home decorating and design on the nation's screens. That was her past life, at least, For now Leanne has been forced to start again as Lily, leaving her name, job and marriage behin
Sunshine and Shadows by KAtie Flynn.
DAisy Kildare lives with her family in a cottage perched on the Connemara coast. The Kildares are poor but happy, but their croft is wrestled from them, Daisy's Aunt Jane, who is housekeeper to Dr and Mrs Ven ables, offers to take DAisy back to Liverpool so that the child can be , a companion to her employers' orphaned neice, Cynthia .











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The Gypsy Tearoom by Nicky Pellegrino (A NZ author that gets her books published in the UK)

This is the story of Raffaella Moretti, a beautiful girl in Triento, who is about to marry the only boy she has ever loved. It seems that nothing but happiness lies in store for Raffaella. The last thing she expects is to find herself a widow, one short year later, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the layers of dirt in a strange house.

As she starts to struggle to recapture her own lost happiness she starts looking for ways to help those around her do the same. As the lives of the villagers interweave, Raffaella is pulled into the centre of a conflict that threatens not only to divide Triento but also to destroy all she holds dear.

A reviewer’s quote: ‘Full-bodied as a rich Italian red, it’s a page-turner combining, the missed chances of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with the foodie pleasures of Chocolat.’

************************************************
Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh

Covering several decades from the 1960s to the late 1990s, it is about a man who marries three women and in turn ruins each of their lives.

Accordingly, the book is about three rather than just one "Mrs. Kimble."
The three women who successively marry Ken Kimble all believe they've found the perfect partner, and all are proven wrong.

In fact it gets four and five star reviews and is one of those books that you feel compelled to keep reading.

n

GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Steig Larsson.
Millennium publisher Mikael Blomkvist has made his reputation exposing corrupt establishment figures. So when a young journalist approaches him with an investigation into sex trafficking, Blomkvist cannot resist waging war on the powerful men behind this lucrative industry. When the journalist and his girlfriend are found murdered in their apartment, Lisbeth Salander's fingerprints are found on the weapon left at the scene. Now hunted by the entire Swedish police force and officially branded a danger to society, she is forced to go undercover. But how can she prove her innocence?

REVERSAL by Michael Connelly
Detective Harry Bosch is sure of anything, it's that Jason Jessup plans to kill again …
In this exhilarating follow-up to Nine Dragons, Bosch, an LAPD detective, is called to reinvestigate Jessup’s child murder conviction. After 24 years in prison, Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence, but both Bosch and veteran defense attorney Mickey Haller believe he’s guilty.

That is a bit worrying, everyone has replied except Pammy who has not opened her PM either. I will leave the vote until either she comes on or tomorrow PM at the latest.

Sorry Ann, I've only just logged on

Suggestions for Oct/Nov

Dead Heat by Dick and Felix Francis

‘I wondered if I was dying. I wasn’t afraid to die, but such was the pain in my gut, I wished it would happen soon.’
The night before the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket sees the great and the good of the horse-racing community gathered for a black-tie gala dinner at the Hay Net - the racing town’s favourite Michelin-starred restaurant - founded by Max Moreton, something of a local celebrity.
Spending the night retching in the throes of agony is the last thing Max expected of the evening. But much worse is to come…his food is suspected of putting twenty-four dinner guests in hospital. Within hours, Max’s restaurant is forcibly closed, his reputation teeters on the brink of ruin, and a court case looms. But the day is far from over, for soon Max Moreton finds himself desperately fighting for more than just his livelihood…

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

'And in Edinburgh of all places. I mean, you never think of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh, do you...?' 'That sort of thing' is the brutal abduction and murder of two young girls. And now a third is missing, presumably gone to the same sad end. Detective Sergeant John Rebus, smoking and drinking too much, his own young daughter spirited away south by his disenchanted wife, is one of many policemen hunting the killer. And then the messages begin to arrive: knotted string and matchstick crosses - taunting Rebus with pieces of a puzzle only he can solve.

Thanks Pam I will put the vote thread up now as I think all suggestions are in.

Some good titles here this time, we are spoilt for choice.