The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection Reading Group Collection October 2019 NEW – New to reading group list, not a new release. *All page numbers are approximate Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, this novel contains three main characters who get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. It is about Africa, about the end of colonialism, about class and race, and the ways in which love can complicate these things. 448 pages* Purple Hibiscus Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili's father, involved in mysterious ways with the unfolding political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to their aunt's. Here she discovers love and a life - dangerous and heathen - beyond the confines of her father's authority. 358 pages Fighting on the Home Front: the Legacy of Women in World War One Kate Adie Bestselling author and award-winning former BBC Chief News Correspondent Kate Adie reveals the ways in which women's lives changed during World War One and what the impact has been for women in its centenary year. 328 pages The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection Poppy Shakespeare Clare Allan When Poppy Shakespeare walks into the Dorothy Fish Day Hospital in her six- inch skirt & 12-inch heels, she is certain she isn't mentally ill & is desperate to return to her life outside. Together with another patient, Poppy plots to gain freedom. But in a world where everything's upside-down, is she crazy enough to upset the system? 341 pages Somewhere Towards the End Diana Athill This book tells the story of what it means to be old: how the pleasure of sex ebbs, how the joy of gardening grows, how much there is to remember, to forget, to regret, to forgive - and how one faces the inevitable fact of death. 182 pages Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility. 433 pages The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood The Republic of Gilead allows Offred only one function - to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on whom her future hangs. 324 pages The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection The Heart Goes Last Margaret Atwood Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine's job at a dive bar, they're increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience - a 'social experiment' offering stable jobs and a home of their own - they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell. 416 pages Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen A work of romantic fiction, better known as a comedy of manners, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England, London and Kent between 1792 and 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. The novel follows the young ladies to their new home, a meagre cottage on a distant relative's property, where they experience love, romance and heartbreak. 353 pages Longbourn Jo Baker It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah's hands are chapped and bleeding. Domestic life below stairs, ruled tenderly and forcefully by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman smelling of the sea, and bearing secrets. For in Georgian England, there is a world the young ladies in the drawing room will never know, a world of poverty, love, and brutal war. 447 pages Penguin’s Poems for Life Laura Barber (Ed.) Ranging from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, via Shakespeare, Keats, and Lemn Sissay, this book offers something for each of those moments in life - whether falling in love, finding your first grey hair or saying your final goodbyes - when only a poem will do. 416 pages The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. They all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age and he is finding that memory is imperfect. 150 pages On Canaan’s Side Sebastian Barry Narrated by Lilly Bere, 'On Canaan's Side' opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Sligo, at the end of the First World War. 340 pages The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake Aimee Bender When 9-year-old Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's home-made lemon chocolate cake, to her horror, she discovers she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. And her mother - her cheerful, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly food becomes perilous. 325 pages Turn Again Home Carol Birch A story of ambition and opportunity, providence and survival that explores a family's bond of unspoken love and loyalty. Beginning in Manchester in 1930, it follows Nell, who grows up to work in a factory, and her younger brother, Bobby, who finds himself fighting in the jungles of Malaya. 405 pages Jamrach’s Menagerie Carol Birch Jaffy Brown is running through the London backstreets when he comes face to face with an escaped circus animal. His life is transformed by the encounter. Plucked from the jaws of death by Mr Jamrach, the two strike up a friendship. Before he knows it, Jaffy finds himself on board a ship bound for the South Seas. 348 pages The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection A Street Cat Named Bob James Bowen The moving, uplifting true story of an unlikely friendship between a man on the streets and the ginger cat who adopts him and helps him heal his life. 279 pages Any Human Heart William Boyd This is the story of Logan Mountstuart, told through his journals. His travels take the reader from Uruguay to Oxford, Paris, the Bahamas, New York and Africa. This is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart. 503 pages Restless William Boyd What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? Ruth Gilmartin discovers the strange and haunting truth about her mother, Sally, during the long hot summer of 1976. 325 pages The Sixth Lamentation William Brodrick A man arrives at Larkwood Monastery claiming sanctuary. Eduard Schwermann is accused of Nazi war crimes: the chances are he is stained with blood, but politics demand that Larkwood shelter him. Father Anselm is given the task of finding out more about Shwermann's crimes. 433 pages The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Bronte This is the story of a woman's struggle for independence. Helen Huntingdon has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage. Exiled to the desolate moorland mansion, she adopts an assumed name and earns her living as the painter, Mrs Graham. 432 pages The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Libraries & Residents Service Reading Group Collection Milkman - NEW Anna Burns In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. 348 pages The Miniaturist Jessie Burton On an autumn day in 1686, Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin. Nella is at first mystified by the closed world of the Brandt household, but as she uncovers its secrets she realizes the escalating dangers that await them all. 424 pages The Children’s Book A.S. Byatt A panoramic novel of family secrets, set against a backdrop of a bohemian, artistic late Victorian and Edwardian world, and with real commercial as well as literary potential, about the damage wrought by writers of children's books on their children - about predators and innocents, war and peace, art and society. 617 pages Perdita Paula Byrne A portrait of one of the most flamboyant women of the late 18th century.