Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group: Next book

Showing posts with label Next book. Show all posts

Friday, 14 February 2020

Our Next Book

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What the day owes the night, Yasmina Khadra

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 18 March 2020 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing What the day owes the night by Yasmina Khadra.

Younes' life is changed forever when his poverty-stricken parents surrender him to the care of his more affluent uncle. Re-named Jonas, he grows up in a colourful colonial Algerian town, and forges a unique friendship with a group of boys, an enduring bond that nothing - not even the Algerian Revolt - will shake. He meets Emilie - a beautiful, beguiling girl who captures the hearts of all who see her - and an epic love story is set in motion.

Time and again Jonas is forced to to choose between two worlds: Algerian or European; past or present; love or loyalty, and finally decide if he will surrender to fate or take control of his own destiny at last.

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*If you choose to buy from Amazon, click here so that Wolfson College may benefit from the sale through the Amazon EU Associates Programme.

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

Our Next Book

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The Shepherd's Hut, Tim Winton

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 22 January 2020 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton.

A boy on the run meets a disgraced priest as the big themes of faith and salvation are explored amid the visionary splendour of the burning saltflats.

A most enviable writer, both lauded and bestselling, Winton has a particular gift for making the vernacular lyrical.

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Friday, 18 October 2019

Our Next Book

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Noughts & Crosses, Malorie Blackman

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 27 November 2019 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman.

Sephy is a Cross: she lives a life of privilege and power. But she's lonely, and burns with injustice at the world she sees around her.

Callum is a nought: he's considered to be less than nothing - a blanker, there to serve Crosses - but he dreams of a better life.

They've been friends since they were children, and they both know that's as far as it can ever go. Noughts and Crosses are fated to be bitter enemies - love is out of the question.

Then - in spite of a world that is fiercely against them - these star-crossed lovers choose each other. But this is love story that will lead both of them into terrible danger . . . and which will have shocking repercussions for generations to come.

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Our Next Book

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The Wall, John Lanchester

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing The Wall by John Lanchester.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall—an enormous concrete barrier around its entire border. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and attack constantly. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. And then the Others attack. . . .

Acclaimed British novelist John Lanchester, “a writer of rare intelligence” (Los Angeles Times), delivers a taut dystopian novel that blends the most compelling issues of our time—rising waters, rising fear, rising political division—into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival

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Wednesday, 31 July 2019

Our Next Book

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Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 28 August 2019 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing the runaway success and winner of the 2017 Costa Book Award, Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, by Gail Honeyman.

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. She has learned how to survive but not how to live.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than... fine?

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Tuesday, 16 July 2019

Our Next Book

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Circe

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 17 July 2019 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer B. We will be discussing Madeline Miller’s Circe.

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Sunday, 25 November 2018

Our Next Book

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende.

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Our Next Book

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Ines of My Soul

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende.

The vibrant novel from Isabel Allende takes her back to her homeland of Chile, and tells the story of the first Spanish woman to arrive on its shores with the Conquistadors in the 1500s.

A real historical figure, Ines Suarez came to Chile with the Conquistadors in 1540, helping to claim the territory for Spain and to found the first Spanish settlement in Santiago. In this remarkable novel, Isabel Allende one of the world's most spellbinding storytellers re-imagines Ines's life and that of the two men who become her lover and husband respectively.

Ines of My Soul’ evokes the conflict and drama of the Conquistadors' arrival in Chile, as well as helping restore the reputation of Ines, a powerful woman long neglected by history and a patriarchal society. It also finds Allende returning to territory beloved of her and her readers imaginative historical fiction, evocatively told and to the familiar landscape of her native country.

The novel gives Ines the recognition and glory that are rightfully hers; but more than that it is an epic tale of love and conquest, lyrically written and enchantingly told by a writer at the peak of her powers.

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Our Next Book

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All the Light We Cannot See

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 19 September 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. ‘Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.’

For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth.

In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Monday, 28 May 2018

Our Next Book

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The Heart's Invisible Furies

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 27 June 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing John Boyne's latest novel, The Heart's Invisible Furies.

The novel opens in the small west Cork village of Goleen, in 1945, during mass in the parish church. Instead of giving a sermon, Father James Monroe rises to denounce 16-year-old Catherine Goggin, recently discovered to be pregnant. The priest calls her up to the altar to shame her before family and congregation, before kicking her out of the church and banishing her from the parish. Boyne introduces this scene by informing us that it will be known later that this priest has himself fathered two children in the area, and his brutality is inflamed rather than tempered by hypocrisy.

Catherine’s journey to Dublin is the beginning of a picaresque, lolloping odyssey for the individual characters and for the nation that confines them. As the novel begins, Ireland is a young republic and effectively a theocracy. The church writes and enforces the laws controlling sexuality and social behaviour. The opening episode is narrated by the child in Catherine’s womb. He grows up as Cyril Avery, adopted child of a famous Irish female novelist, and tells the story of his life up to 2015. By then the permanent, unquestionable structure of Catholic Ireland will have all but vanished, as the power of the church dissolves in scandal and shame.

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We really hope that you will join us at this meeting. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Thursday, 17 May 2018

Our Next Book

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A Gentleman in Moscow

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 16 May 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow.

In 1922 Count Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. He is sentenced to house arrest in The Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.

Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

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*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Tuesday, 27 February 2018

Our Next Book

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The Girls of Slender Means

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 21 March 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Muriel Spark's 1963 novella, The Girls of Slender Means.

The novel is set in London in 1945 at the end of the war in a shabby/genteel boarding house for young ladies called the May of Teck Club. We meet the titular girls of slender means and follow their lives and love affairs over a few weeks until a shocking event transforms the wry comedy of their existence into something suddenly tragic and baleful.

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*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Our Next Book

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The Night Circus

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 21 February 2018 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway - a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors.

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*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Thursday, 9 November 2017

Our next book

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The Sympathiser

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 13 December 2016 at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathiser, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016.

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. 'The Sympathizer' is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.

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We really hope that you will join us at this last meeting of 2017 and to share in wine and mince pies. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Wednesday, 1 November 2017

Our next book

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The Essex Serpent

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 1 November at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Sarah Perry's award-winning novel, The Essex Serpent.

Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way. They are Cora Seaborne and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart. Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.

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*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Monday, 10 July 2017

Our next book

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The God of Small Things

The Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 13 September at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize winning (and debut) novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language.

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We really hope that you will join us in September, especially as it will be Christine's last meeting with us. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Friday, 23 June 2017

Our next book

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The Tobacconist

The Wolfon Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 5 July at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing Robert Seethaler's The Tobacconist (2012).

It is 1937. In a matter of months Germany will annex Austria and the storm that has been threatening to engulf the little tobacconist will descend, leaving the lives of Franz, Otto and Professor Freud irredeemably changed. In the tradition of novels such as Fred Uhlman's classic Reunion, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room, The Tobacconist tells a deeply moving story of ordinary lives profoundly affected by the Third Reich.

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We really hope that you will join us in July - the participation of our members is what keeps the Reading Group alive. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Sunday, 19 March 2017

Our next books

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Burial Rites and The Sea

The Wolfon Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 3 May at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. We will be discussing two books at the meeting and you are welcome to read one or both.

Burial Rites, Hannh Kent (2013)

Northern Iceland, 1829.

A woman condemned to death for murdering her lover.

A family forced to take her in.

A priest tasked with absolving her.

But all is not as it seems, and time is running out:

winter is coming, and with it the execution date.

Only she can know the truth. This is Agnes's story

The Sea, John Banville (2004)

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

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We really hope that you will join us in May - the participation of our members is what keeps the Reading Group alive. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Saturday, 21 January 2017

March 2017: Our next book

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Golden Hill, Francis Spufford

The Wolfon Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 8 March at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. All are welcome to come along to our discussion of Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford - the winner of the Costa First Novel Award in 2016.

From Amazon.co.uk:

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746.

One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money.

Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
An astonishing first novel, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a book about the eighteenth century, and itself a novel cranked back to the form's eighteenth century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, and usually did, and a hero was not a hero unless he ran the frequent risk of being hanged.

Set a generation before the American Revolution, it paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later self: but subtly shadowed by the great city to come, and already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love - and find a world of trouble.

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Please join us for our next meeting in March - the participation of our members is what keeps the Reading Group alive. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/

Tuesday, 10 January 2017

January 2017: Our next book

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Sweet Caress, William Boyd

The next meeting of the Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will take place on Thursday, 12 January 2017 in Plommer A at 7:30pm - please note the change of day. We will be meeting to discuss William Boyd's Sunday Times bestseller, Sweet Caress.

From Amazon.co.uk:

Amory's first memory is of her father doing a handstand. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional bond she needs, and, when he gives her a camera and some rudimentary lessons in photography, unleashes a passion that will irrevocably shape her future.

A spell at boarding school ends abruptly and Amory begins an apprenticeship with Greville in London, living in his flat in Kensington, earning two pounds a week photographing socialites for fashionable magazines. But Amory is hungry for more and her search for life, love and artistic expression will take her to the demi monde of Berlin of the late 1920s, to New York of the 1930s, to the Blackshirt riots in London and to France in the Second World War where she becomes one of the first women war photographers. Her desire for experience will lead Amory to further wars, to lovers, husbands and children as she continues to pursue her dreams and battle her demons.

In this enthralling story of a life fully lived, William Boyd has created a sweeping panorama of some of the most defining moments of modern history, told through the camera lens of one unforgettable woman, Amory Clay. It is his greatest achievement to date.

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Everyone is very welcome to join us for our first meeting of 2017 and we hope to see you for the usual lively discussion and refreshments. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.

*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/