Recent Books

Mazarine Athenaeum Book Club 2022

By Charlotte Grimshaw

February 21, 2022

When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past.  What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine?  Following the narrative thread left by her daughter, she travels through cities touched by terrorism and surveillance, where ways of relating are subtly changed, and a startling new fiction seems to be constructing itself.

The Mirror Book Athenaeum Book Club 2021

By Charlotte Grimshaw

April 14, 2021

‘This was the terror and the comedy of interrogating the past…’

Brave, explosive and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir from a critically acclaimed writer.

‘It’s material, make a story out of it,’ was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her famous literary family.  But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine the reality of that material.  The more she delved into her memories, the more the real characters in her life seemed to object.  So what was the truth of ‘a whole life lived in fiction’?

This is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead.  It looks beyond the public face to the ‘messy reality of family life – and much more’.

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.