Recent Books

Girl, Woman, Other – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Bernardine Evaristo

June 9, 2020

This is Britain as you’ve never read it.

This is Britain as it has never been told.

From the top of the country to the bottom, across more than a century of change and growth and struggle and life, Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve very different characters on an entwined journey of discovery.

It is future, it is past.  It is fiction, it is history.

It is a novel about who we are now.

The End of the Ocean – Athenaeum Book Club 2021

By Maja Lunde

December 3, 2019

In 2017, seventy-year-old Signe sets out on a hazardous voyage to cross an entire ocean alone in a sailboat.  She is haunted by the loss of the love of her life and is driven by a singular and all-consuming mission.

In 2041, David flees with his young daughter, Lou, from a war-torn Southern Europe plagued by drought.  They have been separated from the rest of their family and are on a desperate search to reunite with them once again.  Everything changes when they stumble upon an old boat in a deserted garden.

As David and Lou fight for their lives, their journey of survival and hope weaves together with Signe’s, forming a heartbreaking, inspiring story about the human spirit in this second novel from the author of The History of Bees.

The Salt Path – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Raynor Winn

October 22, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club pick 2020

Just days after Raynor Winn learned that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, was terminally ill, they lost their home and livelihood.  With nothing left and little time, they impulsively decided to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwell.  Living wild and free, at the mercy of sea and sky, they discovered a new, liberating existence – but what would they find at the journey’s end?

The Testaments – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Margaret Atwood

September 20, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2010

‘Our time together is about to begin, my reader.  Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care.  Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens with words.’

You hold in your hands a dangerous weapon loaded with the secrets of three women from Gilead.  They are risking their lives for you.  For all of us.

Before you enter their world, you might want to arm yourself with these thoughts:

Knowledge is power

and

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

The Man Who Was Saturday – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Patrick Bishop

September 20, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

Soldier, Escaper, Spymaster, Politician – Airey Neave was assassinated in the House of Commons car park in 1979.  Forty years after his death, Patrick Bishop’s penetrating and action-packed biography examines the life, heroic war and death of one of Britain’s most remarkable twentieth-century figures.

Taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, Neave was the first British officer to escape from Colditz, and using the code name ‘Saturday’ became a key figure in the IS9 escape and evasion organization that spirited hundreds of Allied airman and soldiers out of Occupied Europe.  A lawyer by training, he came face to face with many architects of Nazi terror at the Nuremberg war trials, serving indictments on Goering, Hess and Ribbentrop, among others.

In peace he turned to politics and in 1953 was elected Conservative MP for Abingdon.  He went on to become the man who made Margaret Thatcher, mounting a brilliantly manipulative campaign that in 1975 won her the leadership of the Tory Party.

His death was as dramatic as his life.  On 30 March 1979, a bomb planted beneath his car exploded while he was driving up the ramp of the House of Commons car park, killing him instantly.  The murder was claimed by the breakaway Irish Republican group, the INLA.  His killers have never been identified.

Patrick Bishop’s fast-paced and deeply researched biography, published to mark the 40th anniversary of Neave’s death, sheds new light on the mystery of who killed him and why their identities have been hidden for so long.  It is also sympathetic portrait of a vanished breed: a public figure shaped by the experience of war and driven by duty, patriotism and honour.

Relative Strangers – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Pip Murdoch

September 20, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

Pip Murdoch has written a searingly honest memoir about growing up in the nineteen sixties and what it was like to give up a child for adoption,  in the face of limited choices and moral disapproval of unmarried mothers.

The search for her son, years after his birth, is a poignant, often heart-breaking account that reads like a page turning detective story.

Anyone who has been affected by the adoption circle, and there are many of us in New Zealand, will find this a compulsive read, and be touched by its compassionate approach to every aspect of the process and the people involved, whether it be the adoptee, birth parents, or adoptive parents, and the legacy of the practice.  Above all, it is an extraordinary and vivid testament to an era.

MI5 and Me A Coronet Among the Spooks – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Charlotte Bingham

July 29, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

Much to her surprise, eighteen-year-old Lottie has just found out that her aloof, rather unexciting father is a spy.  And now he’s decreed that she must make herself useful and get a Proper Job – so she’s packed off to MI5 herself, trussed up in a dreary suit.  Luckily her delightful colleague Arabella is on hand to enliven the torments of typing and decode the enigmas of office life.  But as Lottie’s home fills with actors doubling as spies, and Arabella’s mother is besieged with mysterious telephone calls, the girls start to feel well and truly spooked…

Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Jennifer Chiaverini

April 17, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini’s compelling historical novel unveils the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln through the perspective of the First Lady’s most trusted confidante and friend her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley.

In a life that spanned nearly a century and witnessed some of the most momentous events in American history, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born a slave.  A gifted seamstress, she earned her freedom by the skill of her needle, and won the friendship of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln by her devotion.  A sweeping historical novel, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker illuminates the extraordinary relationship the two women shared, beginning in the hallowed halls of the White House during the trails of the Civil War and enduring almost, but not quite, to the end of Mrs. Lincoln’s days.

The Life of De’Ath – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Majella Cullinane

April 17, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

In this accomplished debut novel, the mysterious narrator recounts Theodore De’Ath’s life before and during the Great War.  After a family tragedy, Theodore moves to Otago to live with his grandparents.  Influenced by his scholarly grandfather he becomes fascinated by the Underworld, reading the Inferno, Paradise Lost and Faust.  When war breaks out in Europe, unlike his peers, Theodore is not swept up with the fervor to enlist, but when conscription comes in 1916 he is obliged to join the New Zealand Division in France.

Theodore, a shy man, is more an observer of life than participant.  Although expert on Hell in literature, it is not until confronted with the reality of war that he understands its true meaning.  Soon he has to survive as a deserter, risking court martial and a death sentence.

The Life of De’Ath draws on historical events: New Zealand military involvement at the Western front, anti-German sentiment here during World War I, and the New Zealand soldiers who were shot for desertion between 1916 and 1918.  At its heart, though, is the story of a young man going against the tide of social and family pressure, and struggling to express his feelings for Elizabeth Paterson before it’s too late.

Identity Crisis – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Ben Elton

April 17, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2020

Why are we all so hostile?  So quick to take offence?  Truly we are living in the age of outrage.

A series of apparently random murders draws amiable, old-school detective Mick Matlock into a world of sex, politics and reality TV – and a bewildering kaleidoscope of opposing identity groups.  Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn’t ‘get’ a single thing about anything any more.

Meanwhile, each day another public figure confesses to having ‘misspoken’ and prostrates themselves before the judgement of Twitter.  Begging for forgiveness, assuring the public ‘That is not who I am.’

But if nobody is who they are any more – then who the F##K are we?

Ben Elton returns with a blistering satire of the world as it fractures around us.  Get ready for a roller-coaster thriller, where nothing – and no one – is off limits.