Bookclub Reads

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

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10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

A beautiful and campaigning novel short-listed for the Booker Prize 2019

Tequila Leila, a Turkish prostitute in her 40s, lies murdered in a rubbish bin. Her brain, for the first ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her death is still working – remembering, sensing, calling up memories and sensations from her life. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak tells not just the story of one woman’s life through these disjointed recollections but conjures a beautiful but unsettling portrait of Istanbul and its shifting population.

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A Stranger at My Table by Ivo de Figueiredo

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A Stranger at My Table

A thorough exploration of a complex family history

It feels timely for Norwegian historian and biographer Ivo de Figueiredo’s postcolonial family chronicle to be published in English on the eve of Brexit. A Stranger at My Table by Ivo de Figueiredo is the author’s autobiographical account of a family history that spans two centuries and four continents, and the result is an ambitious amalgam; an exploration of a family ‘caught in the half-life of empires’, as well as a personal memoir detailing de Figueiredo’s turbulent relationship with his father Xavier.

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Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

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Three Women

Not a ‘feminist classic’ in my book

Devouring Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, this summer’s most talked about book, has left a bad taste in my mouth. For eight years Taddeo followed the relationships of three American women – Maggie, Lina and Sloane – with the goal of uncovering ‘vital truths about women and desire’. Taddeo’s initial plan was to study a larger group of women but finding volunteers (the level of intimate details in this book would make the bravest of women shy away) proved tricky. That’s a shame as these three stories, captivating as they are (Taddeo is a superb storyteller), surely represent only a small sub-section of female sexual experience. So that begs the question: what is the point of this book?

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An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

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An American Marriage

Soul-stirring Women's Prize for Fiction Winner

Celestial and Roy are two young black newlyweds, he an executive with a promising career ahead; she an up-and-coming folk artist. When something terrible happens they are torn apart for five years – their lives unravel and they question everything they thought they knew. I read An American Marriage by Tayari Jones as an e-book without having read the blurb (surprising for me but there you are) and I think this is the best and only way to read it. If you know what is going to happen – and almost every review will tell you – then the spoiler makes the whole book a bit pointless.

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Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

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Leaving the Atocha Station

An impostor in Madrid

Ben Lerner’s pot smoking, pill popping protagonist Adam is an endearing, hilarious and vulnerable anti-hero whom I immediately warmed to. On a poetry fellowship to Spain from Kansas, Adam comes weighed down with self-doubt. His knowledge of Spanish is negligible, his skills as a poet questionable. Adam self-medicates to the point that much of his life has become an out-of-body experience. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner had me in stitches, but just like Adam’s experience of life, this book has layers and layers of meaning, some hilarious, some profound, many of them both.

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Let It Go by Dame Stephanie Shirley

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Let It Go

One amazing woman

I was in awe of Let It Go by Dame Stephanie Shirley, the memoirs of one of Britain’s most successful (and possibly most unknown?) female software company entrepreneurs. I certainly hadn’t heard of this amazing woman before and I’m willing to bet that many of you haven’t either. This inspiring book is the story of her journey from 5-year-old Kindertransport child in 1939 to one of Britain’s wealthiest women and most generous philanthropists.

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West by Carys Davies

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West

Chasing shadows in the Wild West

I have a soft spot for anything Wild West (yes, I did watch a fair bit of The Little House on the Prairie as a kid), so when West by Carys Davies came along I wasn’t hard to convince. It’s the short story of widower Cy Bellman who sets out from Pennsylvania in 1815 to find rumoured gigantic beasts after reading about the discovery of ancient bones in a newspaper. Left behind, in the care of strict Aunt Julia, is his 10-year-old daughter Bess. Like many a mid-life crisis, this one doesn’t end well.

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The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

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The Porpoise

A nail-biting literary joyride

Two pages into The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night Time) I was utterly hooked and only emerged bleary-eyed a day later after what felt like a roller-coaster ride. The book interweaves a contemporary story with one from antiquity, and whereas that might turn some of you off, it really shouldn’t. The Porpoise is first class, breakneck paced storytelling. A sort of literary Mission Impossible.

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The Wall by John Lanchester

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The Wall

Thought provoking eco-dystopian novel

The Wall by John Lanchester is an eco-dystopian novel set in the near future, this is a dark and mesmerising vision of what happens when borders become walls, when the world is divided into ‘us’ and ‘others’, and when the young despise the old for what they allowed to happen on their watch.

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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

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Machines Like Me

Don't bother

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is set in London in the 1980s, only these are not the 1980s we know, but rather a sort of Sliding Doors variant of the that time. Thatcher is in power but has lost, rather than won, the Falklands War. Computer genius Alan Turing, the breaker of the Enigma code, has not committed suicide, as he did in real life, but is alive and well. He has invented the world wide web, solved some unsolvable scientific conundrums and taken the world way past 2019 in terms of technological advances. McEwan, always with his finger on the pulse of the world we live in, has noble ambitions with this novel. Sadly, it just doesn’t work.

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