Past Book Club Reads and Reports
Book Club Reads 2025
Please scroll across to see the rest of the table
| Month | Title and Report | Author | Precis | Goodreads Rating (out of 5) | Book Club Rating (out of 10) | Reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | The Colony | Audrey Magee | The Colony is an account of two male outsiders – one an English painter and the other a French academic. Both travel to a small remote island off the coast of western Ireland for the summer of 1979. | 4.12 | 8.2 | Report |
| This Other Eden | Paul Harding | This Other Eden is also about a group of people on an island but this time off the coast of Eastern USA. | 3.79 | 7.6 | ||
| February | Death in Venice | Thomas Mann | Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous and widely read literary work. This semiautobiographical short story about a writer’s trip to the city of Venice, which uses symbolism and employs Mann’s meticulously written prose, also presents themes relating to modernity. | |||
| The Magician | Colm Tolbin | The Magician by Colm Tolbin tells the story of the German writer Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. |
Book Club Reads 2024
Please scroll across to see the rest of the table
| Month | Title and Report | Author | Precis | Goodreads Rating (out of 5) | Book Club Rating (out of 10) | Reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt | An exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. | 4.41 | 7.7 | Report |
| Cannery Row | John Steinbeck | Set in Monterey California, this collection of loosely linked vignettes features characters who live outside the norm. | 4.05 | 8.7 | ||
| February | Eight Months on Ghazzah Street | Hilary Mantel | This book is a nuanced look at life in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of a previously successful professional woman. | 3.65 | 8.5 | Report |
| An Experiment in Love | Hilary Mantel | An examination of the pressures on 1960s women to excel. | 3.67 | 8.5 | ||
| March | Great Circle | Maggie Shipstead | Two parallel narratives about two fictional women. One is about the disappeared 20th-century aviator Marian Graves, while the other is about a 21st-century actress, Hadley Baxter, who is cast in the role of Marian for a film about her final flight. | 4.11 | 6 | Report |
| Find a Way | Diana Nyad | It follows Nyad's attempts to swim from Cuba to Florida, which she first tried in 1978 at age 28, twice more in 2011, and then finally achieved in 2013 at age 64. | 4.18 | 7.5 | ||
| April | The Colour Purple | Alice Walker | Follows an African-American teenager named Celie being raised in rural Georgia in the early 1900s. | 4.26 | 7.7 | Report |
| The Bluest Eyes | Toni Morrison | Explores the damaging effects of societal standards on a young black girl's sense of self-worth. | 4.11 | 7.5 | ||
| May | Still Life | Sarah Winman | About a young soldier called Ulysses who meets 64-year-old Evelyn in Italy in the final months of WWII. | 4.17 | 8.9 | Report |
| A Month in the Country | JL Carr | Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran employed to uncover a mural in a village church that was thought to exist under coats of whitewash. | 4.12 | 8.6 | ||
| June | Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver | An episodic novel, told in the first-person by our hero, a scrappy and resilient youngster for whom the past is as mysterious as the future. | 4.5 | 7.6 | Report |
| The Turning Point | Robert Douglas-Fairhurst | An amazing and fascinating review of our wasteful and dead Newtonian, Cartesian, paternalistic, reductive society. | 3.8 | 8 | ||
| July | The Book Shop | Penelope Fitzgerald | A tale of one woman’s desire to open a bookshop despite strong opposition. | 3.2 | 6.6 | Report |
| 84 Charing Cross Road | Helene Hanff | The record of a warm friendship forged through a long correspondence between a writer and a bookseller. | 4.2 | 8.3 | ||
| August | A Killing in November | Simon Mason | The tale of the first case for an unlikely new detective joining the Oxford Crime Squad. | 4.16 | 7.5 | Report |
| The Searcher | Tana French | A retired American detective moves to Ireland to lead a more peaceful life. Despite his intentions, he becomes embroiled in a missing person case. | 3.8 | 7.6 | ||
| September | Restless Doly Maunder | Kate Grenville | The story of the author’s grandmother, working to carve out a life for herself in early twentieth century Australia. | 3.97 | 6.9 | Report |
| The Botanist's Daughter | Kayte Nunn | A tale of two female botanists, separated by more than a century, who become caught up in a hunt for a rare plant and the consequences of the discovery. | 3.91 | 7.5 | ||
| October | The Songlines | Bruce Chatwin | A tale of two companions traveling and talking together in Central Australia. | 3.97 | 5 | Report |
| The Places in Between | Rory Stewart | An illuminating tale of the author’s travels in 2002 Afghanistan. | 3.96 | 5.4 | ||
| November | The History of Bees | Maja Lunde | A tale of three generations of beekeepers. | 3.81 | 7 | Report |
| November | The Wren, The Wren | Anne Enright | A novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder and love. | 3.55 | 7.25 | |
| December | We All Want Impossible Things | Catherine Newman | A deeply moving, jubilant celebration of life and friendship at its imperfect, radiant, and irreverent best. | 4.01 | 8.4 | Report |
| December | Just Got Real | Jane Fallon | The hilarious and razor-sharp new novel from the million-copy bestselling queen of revenge comedy. | 3.82 | 7.1 |
