06.06.2023 - Love Marriage by Monica Ali Today’s book was published in 2022, and it’s by the writer of that famous novel ‘Brick Lane’ (published 2003) – Monica Ali. After a ten-year hiatus, during which Ali suffered a ‘loss of...
06.06.2023 - We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo Today’s book, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. It was published in 2013 and was the first novel for NoViolet Bulawayo, a pen name, belonging...
22.03.2023 - Furious Hours by Casey Cep (2019) This month‘s book is about a famous American writer and her struggle to write a second book after a very successful first one. Here’s the blurb from the back cover: ‘Reverend Willie Maxwell, a rural...
14.02.2023 - Lessons, Ian McEwan (2022) This month we introduce Lessons by Ian McEwan, published in 2022. This is McEwan’s 17th novel, which he wrote during the pandemic lockdown. The blurb on the cover of the book reads: “When the world is still...
23.01.2023 - The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1998) In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of late 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to...
15.12.2022 - Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ (2021) Blurb on back cover: “In 1974 , two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided Cyprus, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home, Nicosia. The tavern is the only place that Kostas,...
07.11.2022 - ‘Solar Storms’ (1995), by Linda Hogan “In a novel with the feel of a richly woven pattern, Linda Hogan tells the story of five generations of Native American women in the harsh landscape of the Boundary Waters between Canada and...
31.10.2022 - Our Reading Circle has been running now for 10 years. We have also offered Freirad one-hour Reading Circle programmes for these last five years. We now have a new schedule for the Reading Circle programme. The discussion of the monthly book still...
31.10.2022 - Castaway (1983), Lucy Irvine In 1981 Lucy Irvine answered an advertisement from a man seeking a wife: he wanted a companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. ‘G’ (Gerald Kingsland) intended to write a book about the experience. Lucy...
31.10.2022 - Violeta (2022), Isabel Allende ‘One extraordinary woman, 100 years of history, one unforgettable story’ Violeta Del Valle comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of 5 boisterous sons. From the start, her life...
31.10.2022 - Julia Boyd (& Angelika Patel): A Village in the Third Reich (Elliott & Thomson, 2022) Welcome to the Reading Circle, with Sandra and Andrew Milne-Skinner. Over the last few months we have, as a group, read and discussed two books that have...
13.06.2022 - Paradise (1994), by Abdulrazak Gurnah Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between...
13.06.2022 - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), by Jeanette Winterson “Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.” ‘This is the story of Jeanette, born to...
13.06.2022 - Interview with Meriel Schindler In a recent Reading Circle programme we introduced the book The Lost Café Schindler by Meriel Schindler. Launched in 1922 by two Jewish brothers, the grand Café Schindler in Maria-Theresien-Straße, Innsbruck...
