Recent Books

Shuggie Bain Athenaeum Book Club 2021

By Douglas Stuart

April 1, 2021

1981.  Glasgow.  The city is dying.  Poverty is on the rise.  People watch the lives they had hoped for disappear from view.

Agnes Bain had always expected more.  She dreamed of greater things: a house with its own front door, a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect – but false – teeth).  When her philandering husband ups and leaves, she and her three children find themselves trapped in a mining town decimated by Thatcher-era politics.  As Agnes increasingly turns to alcohol for comfort, her children try their best to save her.  Yet one by one they abandon her in order to save themselves.

It is her son Shuggie who holds the longest.  But Shuggie has problems of his own: despite all his efforts to pass as a normal boy, everyone has started to realize that Shuggie is ‘no right’.  Agnes wants to be there for her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her – even her beloved Shuggie.

Laying bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride.  Shuggie Bain is a blistering debut by an exceptional novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold Athenaeum Book Club 2021

By Toshikazu Kawaguchi

December 8, 2020

If you could go back, who would you want to meet?

In a small back allay in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years.  But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’s time-travelling offer, in order to confront the lover who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has begun to fade, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…

The Pursuit of Love – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Nancy Mitford

July 3, 2020

Nancy Mitford was born in 1904.  Her childhood in a large remote country house with five sisters and one brother is described in the early chapters of The Pursuit of Love, which, said Miss Mitford, are largely autobiographical.  She was, she said, uneducated except for being taught to ride and to speak French.

Olive Kitteridge – Athenaeum Book Club 2020

By Elizabeth Strout

July 3, 2020

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable.  A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, struggling to make sense of the changes in her life as she grows older.  She is a woman who sees into the hearts of others, discerning their triumphs and tragedies.

We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost – and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feels tyrannized by her overbearing sensitivities.

A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul in need, Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain and shed a tear or two.

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.