Elma Turner book chat July
Bookchat is a place where we get together to talk about books we have recently read. Come along and tell us about what you have been reading, or just come to hear what titles other people have enjoyed. We meet on the second Tuesday of the month from 10:30am in Rūma Mānuka.
A thriller set in Southern England. Follows the lives of a young female writer and her husband who’s a teacher in London initially. After the woman is accosted by a young man, she wants to leave the city so finds a job in the countryside of Yorkshire. Her job as a lecturer in Creative Writing in a small University town sees her taking over a group of students in Creative writing whose previous teacher hasn’t returned after the week off as planned. Suspense/psychological thriller.
Long listed for the Booker prize in 2023, I enjoyed the setting and story however due to no indents, long sentences, and lack of quotation marks, it wasn’t easy to read. Set in an Irish republic dictatorial landscape, the protagonist Eilish opens her door to officials who interrogate her husband, a trade unionist and he then disappears. A world of curfews and tyranny with a growing number of rebels. Also available on Libby, Borrow box and on CD
Leif Enger I cheerfully refuse
Set in the not-too-distant America which has grown more authoritarian with corporations taking on power. Set on the north coast of Minnesota close to Canada and Lake Superior. The lead character is Rainy who has lost his wife due to an accident. He takes a boat through the Great Lakes to escape and because, in his grief, he believes that he’ll reunite with his wife there. He experiences storms, floating corpses and a lawless society. The landscape is familiar to me so connected to the story.
Niall Williams Time of the child
This is a follow up novel to This is happiness. Doctor Troy was born and raised in the village of Faha in Ireland and his unmarried adult daughter Ronnie lives with him. It’s Advent season in 1962 when a baby is found at a fair and left in their care. They come to love the child and wish to adopt it but how to avoid the gossip of the parish in 1960s Ireland is impossible. Laugh out loud funny and glorious writing.
(and from another reader...)
Beautiful writing. A collection of people in a village where it rains all the time. It connects to Williams’ first novel This is happiness by mentioning a male character whom they doctor and daughter wish would return from America and pretend to be the father of the abandoned baby they are left with so they wouldn’t have to hide it. All resolved in the end.
Dr Emma Espiner There’s a cure for this
Emma talks about her childhood. Did a degree in history and classics at Otago university then worked at parliament where she met Guyon Espiner. They have a child, and Emma enrolled at medical school and is now a surgeon. She talks about racism encountered being a Māori student at Medical school. Well worth reading.
Helen Russell The year of living Danishly
I listened to this as an audiobook on Borrowbox ( but the library has the book version too).
Experienced journalist Helen Russelland her husband moved to rural Jutland in Denmark where he has work at the Lego factory. Helen sets out to discover why Denmark has some of the happiest people on the planet.. The book is divided into months of the year while she explores education, food, interior design, and taxes.. First published in 2016, she has an updated edition where she concludes her life and family have changed and that Denmark is a messy and flawed place but a model for a better way of living. Although anecdotal at times, there are academic elements where the writer talks about the research she has done to write the book.
Felt like written in two halves. A commune set up by a young group in Christchurch is a guerrilla gardening group that plants crops where no one will notice. Funny interactions with excellent dialogue. The second half moves to fictional Thorndike which is cut off after a landslide in the Korowai pass a fictional place but possibly in the Arthurs Pass area. The second half of the novel focuses on a tech billionaire Robert Lemoine who has bought a farm from conservationist Owen Darvish.
Set in Quala, A North Queensland sugar town in the 1970s. A 16-year-old woman has gone missing. A sense of menace. Several narrators. Racism, sexism. Rural noir like novels by Jane Harper
Evelyn Waugh Brideshead revisited: the sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder
First published in 1945, Many of us remember the screen version. The story is more expansive in book form. Charles visited the home of the Marchmont’s ( Brideshead) before the second world war and becomes infatuated with the family and their privilege then returns to the home and recognises his difference from them. Nostalgic and reflective.
Claudia Gray The Rushworth family plot ( Library doesn’t own) but we do have several other titles based on characters from Jane Austen
Kelly Gardiner Miss Caroline Bingley, private detective
Set two years after Pride and Prejudice. Caroline hears that Georgiana Darcy’s maid has disappeared, so she races to London to help find her but discovers murder. We get stories of Indian dockhands, mysterious East India company men, malevolent footmen . It captures well the prose of the day.
Paolo Cognetti The eight mountains
Translated from the Italian . A beautifully written novel about two boys who meet when Pietro goes to the Dolomites with his family from Milan for the holidays. Pietro meets Bruno who lives in a village there and they form a strong friendship. The mountains are the backdrop to this story about the power of friendship. Beautiful prose- poetic in the sense of atmosphere. I was convinced it was a memoir but not.
Yaroskav Trofimov No country for love
I listened on Libby audiobook. A sweeping saga about a young Ukrainian girl living in Kharkiv in 1930 wanting to contribute to the future of her country and her struggle to survive the devastation and trauma that Ukraine goes through. Many layers of history – famine, ideological conflict, and the horror of WWII. Excellent historical writing. The library has a non-fiction book by this author ‘Our enemies will vanish’ written last year . [ The author is a Ukrainian chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall St journal and provides eyewitness accounts of living through the current Russian invasion.]
