September/October Read

Hi All,

The book for this month is Venus Reborn by Martina Devlin as suggested by Shinners who I quote "Think I may have found a book to rival The Red Tent".

There's no shame in being adopted. It means you were wanted. And chosen.

Venus Macken is back in Ireland after more than a decade as a city girl in London, and she has mixed feelings about the move. Except her return to the wilds of Roancarrick to care for her elderly father offers the chance to search for answers. Answers to questions that have haunted her all her life. Venus is tired of feeling like an outsider. Who was her birth mother? Why was she abandoned? Surely the people who love her and reared her can help unlock the riddle of her identity. Meanwhile there are distractions, among them enigmatic artist Conor Landers who has bolted to Roancarrick to escape the consequences of a life and death decision. As the sketchy details of what happened on a stormy night 32 years before take shape, Venus begins to realise that who she is matters less than understanding who she wants to be.

Information and Image taken from:

http://www.martinadevlin.com/venus-reborn.html

July/August Read: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Hi All,

This months read is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It is his eagerly anticipated follow-up to the brilliant first novel The Kite-Runner.

A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. It is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 22 May 2007

Links:

- Read an interview with the author, available on

http://www.amazon.co.uk/

- Download the first chapter

http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/uk-books/images/ATSSChap1.pdf

- Website dedicated to the author

http://www.khaledhosseini.com/

May/June Read: Half of a Yellow Sun

Hi All,

I'm not sure if we're meeting in May or June but the read for this month is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanad Ngozi Adichie.

This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character.As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publication Date: Jan 2007

Links:
- http://www.halfofayellowsun.com/ - website dedicated to the book
-http://www.harperperennial.co.uk/books.aspx?id=32636 - read chapter one online
-http://preview.tinyurl.com/2jvtlm Amazon reviews
-http://www.readinggroups.co.uk/guides/Recommended.aspx?id=32636&articleid=7329 - reading group guide

K