General Chat

2 books as usual please vote will be pm 30 March as long as all suggestions are in.

Jump by Jilly Cooper
Anyone for a giggle this time?
As well as introducing some hilarious, super posh newbies, we are treated to a few well placed cameo's from favourites such as Rubert Campbell Black, Hermione Granger and Lysander Hawkley. We also have our 'brick' in Etta - complete with two ghastly spoilt children and her relationship with the delightful Mrs.Wilkinson will have you hooked. Dora Belvedon and Amber Lloyd-Foxe are all grown up and you'll come across many a favourite from 'Score', if you have read it, 'Pandora' and 'Wicked' amongst its pages. JC's writing is choc-full of witty one liners as usual and various sub-plots running alongside the main theme - Mrs.Wilkinson's rescue and subsequent rise to fame - keep you more than entertained. There's few authors who can seamlessly introduce so many characters without confusing the reader and JC carries it off perfectly once again.

Friendship’s bond by Meg Hutchinson
Thomas Thorpe hides his carnal desires under the mask of pious lay preacher. When Ann Spencer rejects his advances, he evicts her from her home, claiming she is living in sin with a younger man not her blood relative.
But Alec is a ward, not a lover. And Ann has made a promise to her dead father that she will protect the Russian boy with her life.
Taken in by kind-hearted Leah Marshall, Ann and Alec repay her by working in the dairy. The two young people become substitutes for the children Leah has lost. But Thomas Thorpe will not leave them in peace.
Playing on the paranoia engendered by the Great War, he sows seeds of doubt among the good people of Wednesbury about the foreigner in their midst. Once Ann becomes an outcast, he will be able to claim her unwilling body for his evil purposes

and this one, send it up.

I've been away so only just seen this. I am going to give Greaders a miss this month as work is just crazy at the moment and I am so exhausted at night at the moment I don't have time to read. Thanks Michelle

OK Michelle. No problem

Cross Fire - by James Patterson
Detective Alex Cross investigates the execution of two of Washington's most hated public figures.

I Am Number Four - by Pittacus Lore.
John Smith is not your average teenager. He moves from town to town and changes his identity. When he decides to stay in one place, he knows it won't be long before his secret is known. He was one of nine, and three are dead. He knows he is next.

Her Fearful Symmetry By Audrey Neffenegger

Julia and Valentina are normal American teenagers - normal at least for identical 'mirror' twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cosy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn't know existed had died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin....but they have no idea they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword writer who lives above them to their aunt's mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins' mother - and who can't even seem to quite leave her flat.....

I have already started it and I am also becoming obsessive-compulsive about reading it... this author also wrote The Time Traveller's Wife.

The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud by Ben Sherwood,

From 'Kareninthedesert' : I got the paperback about 4 years ago, I'm not sure when it was first published. It's such an unusual story, not at all what I expected, and once into it, I just couldn't put it down...have the tissues handy! It gets very sad in places.

'This is a story of life and death, beautifully written with a gentle simplicity which lends it great emotional power...' ...Daily Mail book review.

From me Persie: I saw this on the other thread about books and it appealed to me so I have read library reviews as well and I think it would be a good one, so good Karen is going to avoid seeing the movie of it (LOL as most movies of books aren't anything like what you have read)

Ann, you beat me to Jilly Cooper! I have just been re-reading her others and thought I might suggest one!

I would like to suggest "The Lollipop Shoes" by Joanne Harris.

This book follows on loosely from "Chocolat". Zozie de l'Alba arrives in Vianne and Anouk's life (now calling themselves Yanne and Annie), and they become good friends, depending on each other for moral and emotional support. But Zozie is not what she seems. With a second daughter, Rosette, born after the events of the first book, Vianne has a new life to protect, but is unaware of the threat beneath her own roof. Supposed to be a very good read.

"The Marrowbone Marble Company" by Glenn Taylor

A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit. From the author of the critically-acclaimed The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart comes this sweeping novel of love and war, power and oppression, faith and deception, over the course of three defining American decades. At the end of the Pacific War, where he has witnessed terrible things, Loyal Ledford is a lost man, disconnected from the present yet divorced from his dissolute, violent past. His life is set on a new course when he meets his cousins, Dimple and Wimpy, the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to him and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that the Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Inevitably, such a home invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family. Told in clear and powerful prose in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, The Marrowbone Marble Company recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community, taking a harrowing look at the issues of race and class throughout the tumultuous 1950s and '60s. With this, his second novel, Glenn Taylor joins the ranks of the Great American Novelist.

Will be back later today to suggest a couple of books. Will be trying to join in again properly as hope to go to the Llibrary on Thursday.

Tess

That is excellent Tess

Scoundrel by Bernard Cornwell

Paul Shanahan, the owner of a yacht delivery business in Belgium, now lives a peaceful existence after a terrorist-active life. An old colleague's request for the secret transport of a large amount of gold is a welcome return to the fold, and a chance to get home to Boston. But it turns out to be the trickiest and deadliest business of all - haunted always by the betrayal of his lover.

The Other Countess by Eve Edwards

England, 1582 ELLIE – Lady Eleanor Rodriguez of San Jaime – is in possession of a gold-seeking father, a worthless title and a feisty spirit that captivates the elite of the Queen’s court, and none other than the handsome new Earl of Dorset . . . WILLIAM LACEY has inherited his father’s title and his financial ruin. Now the Earl must seek a wealthy heiress and restore his family’s fortune. But Will’s head has been turned by the gorgeous Ellie, yet their union can never be. Will is destined to marry a worthy Lady so the only question is – which one . . . ?

" Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell.

January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater English village.
But he hasn't reckoned with bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, a threatened gypsey invasion and those mysterious entities known as girls.
Charting thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, this is a captivating novel, wry, painful and vibrant with the stuff of life


- - - - - - - -

Q by Luther Blissett

1517; Martin Luther nails his 95 theses, demanding reform of the Catholic Church, to the door of the cathedral church in Wittenburg, setting off the period of upheaval, war, civil war and violence we now know as the Reformation.

In this age devastated by the wars of rwligion, a young theology student adopts the cause of the heretics and the disinherited. Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German plains to the flourishing Duthc cities and down to Venice, the gateway to the East, our hero, a "Survivor", a radical Prodtestant Anabaptist who goes under many names, and his enemy Q, a Papal informer and heritic-hunter, play a game in which no moves are forbidden and the true size of the stakes remain hidden to the end
What begins as a struggle to reveal each other's identities eventually becomes part of a much greater mission: to destroy and achieve domination over each other.


Tess