Recent Books

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (August 2023) – Athenaeum Book Club 2024

By David Grann

August 29, 2023

From the international bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, survival and savagery, culminating in a court-martial that revels a shocking truth.

On 28 January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil.  Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell.  They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, which had left England two years earlier on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain and had been wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.  The men, after being marooned for months, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas.  They were greeted as heroes.

Six months later, another even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile.  This boat contained just three castaways and they told a very different story.  The thirty sailors who had landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers.  As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court-martial to determine who was telling the truth.  The stakes were life-and-death – for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behaviour at the extremes told by one of our greatest non-fiction writers.  As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.  Most powerfully, he unearths the deeper meanings of the events, showing it was not only the Wager’s captain and crew who were on trail – it was the very idea of empire.

Everyone Here Is Lying (August 2023)

By Shari Lapena

August 29, 2023

Welcome to Stanhope – a place for families.

William Wooler is a family man, on the surface.  But he’s been having an affair – an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road.  So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter Avery unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper.

Hours later, Avery’s family declares her missing.

Suddenly Stanhope doesn’t feel so safe.  And William isn’t the only one on his street who’s hiding a lie.  As witnesses come forward with information that may or not be true, Avery’s neighbours become increasingly unhinged.

Who took Avery Wooler?  Nothing will prepare you for the truth.

The Waters (August 2023)

By Carl Nixon

August 29, 2023

One family

Forty years.

The Waters kinds – practical athletic Mark; the physically beautiful dreamer Davey; and the baby of the family Samatha – have to face more than their fair share of challenges.  1979 was the year their father sold the farm and invested all the family’s money in a doomed property development next to the ocean in Christchurch.  Is that when everything started going wrong?

Will their bond survive the passage of time or will the three siblings succumb to their parents’ legacy of failure?  Can the past be overcome…and forgiven?

SAS Rogue Heroes (August 2023)

By Ben Macintyre

August 29, 2023

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict mayhem behind enemy lines.

Despite intense opposition, Winson Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find.  So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organization in the world: the SAS.

It was 75 years later that the SAS finally decided to tell its astonishing story.  It opened its secret archives for the first time, granting the acclaimed historian Ben Macintrye full access to a treasure trove of unseen reports, memos, diaries, letters, maps and photographs, as well as free rein to interview surviving Originals and those who knew them.

Tom Lake (August 2023)

By Ann Patchett

August 29, 2023

This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor.

This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all.

It’s about falling so wildly in love with him – the way one will at twenty-four – that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight.

There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard.  While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance years before.

Both hopeful and elegiac, Tom Lake explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

Lioness (August 2023)

By Emily Perkins

August 29, 2023

You know now we say we devoured  a story, and also that we were consumed by it?  Eating and being eaten.  It was like that with Claire, for me.

From humble beginnings, Therese has grown used to a life of luxury after marrying into an empire-building family.  But when rumours of corruption gather around her husband’s latest property development, Therese begins to look at her privileged world with new eyes.

In the flat below, something else is brewing.  Therese’s neighbour Claire believes she’s discovered the secret to living with freedom and authenticity, freeing herself from the mundanity of domesticity.  Therese is enchanted by the lure of the permissive zone Claire creates – a place of ecstatic release.

All too quickly, Therese is forced to confront herself and her choices – just how did she become this person.  And what should she do about it?

Winter’s Gifts (July 2023)

By Ben Aaronovitch

July 27, 2023

They do things differently across the pond…

When retired FBI Agent Patrick Henderson calls in an ‘X-Ray Sierra India’ incident, the operator doesn’t understand.  He tells them to pass it up the chain till someone does.

That person is FBI Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds.  Leaving Quantico for snowbound Northern Wisconsin, she finds that a tornado has flattened half the town – and there’s no sign of Henderson.

Things soon go from weird to worse, as neighbours report unsettling sightings, key evidence goes missing, and the snow keeps rising – cutting off the town, with no way in or out…

Something terrible is awakening.  As the clues lead to the coldest of cold cases – a cursed expedition into the frozen wilderness – Reynolds follows a trail from the start of the American nightmare, to the horror that still lives on today.

Pet (July 2023)

By Catherine Chidgey

July 27, 2023

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet.  However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger.  With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn.  Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, and probing themes of racism and misogyny, Pet is an elegant and chilling psychological thriller by the bestselling author of The Wish Child, Remote Sympathy and The Axeman’s Carnival.

Murder in Paradise (July 2023)

By Ann Cleeves

July 27, 2023

Murder in Paradise is the third mystery novel featuring George and Molly Palmer-Jones by Ann Cleeves, author and creator of the three astounding TV series Vera, Shetland and The Long Call.

Newlyweds Jim and Sarah are welcomed home from their honeymoon to the Scottish island of Kinness with a huge celebration – cheerful festivities which take a sinister and devastating turn when the grooms younger sister, Mary, slips and tumbles to her death from the island’s precipitous cliffs.

The whole island is present when Mary disappears.  But did she fall?  Or was she pushed?  George Palmer-Jones, retired birdwatcher and amateur detective, suspects the latter – but proving it will be difficult, given no one wants to upset the balance of the island’s ancient relationships.

Helped by Sarah, the bride, George begins to uncover the secrets hidden on the island, and pieces together a tragic story both wish they had never heard.

David Copperfield (July 2023)

By Charles Dickens

July 27, 2023

One of the most famous and celebrated Victorian coming-of-age novels.  David Copperfield charts the adventures and vicissitudes of its eponymous hero’s life, from the misery of his childhood after his mother’s marriage to the tyrannical Mr Murdstone, through to his first steps as a writer and his search for love and happiness.  Along the way he encounters a vast array of gloriously vivid characters – many of whom number among the most memorable in literature – such as the eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood, the eloquent debtor Wilkins Micawber and the obsequious villain Uriah Heep.

Replete with comedy and tragedy in equal measure, and cited by Dickens as “his favourite child”, this partially autobiographical work provides tantalizing glimpses into Dickens’s own childhood and remains one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language