Title:
Perfume
Author:
Patrick Süskind
Genre:
Fiction
Publisher:
Vintage Books
Release Date:
2001
Pages:
255
Meeting: 12th March 2007
Synopsis
Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human’s. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet, there is one
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Title:
The Fountain Overflows
Author:
Rebecca West
Genre:
Fiction
Publisher:
New York Review of Books
Release Date:
1956
Pages:
408
The author re-imagines her own childhood in this witty, often troubling autobiographical novel that follows the lives of members of the Aubrey family from the perspective of Rose, one of four siblings. Original.
Meeting: 13th October 2007
After a lot of research including scouring the recommendations in the Sunday papers and reviewing the ‘top’ lists in the Guardian
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Title:
The Icarus Girl
Author:
Helen Oyeyemi
Genre:
Fiction
Publisher:
Anchor
Release Date:
2006
Pages:
337
Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, a racially-mixed child, is growing up feeling that she is caught between two different worlds, until she is sent to visit relatives in Nigeria, where she comes face to face with a mysterious new friend.
Meeting: 6th May 2006
Without much time to look for this month’s bookclub book, I was relying on the Irish Times Saturday
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Title:
The Last King of Scotland
Author:
Giles Foden
Genre:
Historical Fiction
Publisher:
Vintage Books
Release Date:
1999
Pages:
335
Meeting: 5th July 2007
As a child I devoured every book within reach, many of which, I probably shouldn’t have been reading! One of those books, which I read when I was about 10, was about the terrible reign of Ugandan President Idi Amin, complete with photos of his victims. It was a book that haunted me for a long time and, since then, I’ve had an interest
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Title:
Memoir
Author:
John McGahern
Genre:
Biography, Irish
Release Date:
2006
Pages:
272
Meeting: 14th December 2006
Sometimes bookclub books are chosen carefully; sometimes they occur by default. Memoir is one of the serendipitous accidents. A last minute trip to the bookshop before the last bookclub resulted me being unable to get seven copies of my book of choice. At the last minute, I saw a stack of Memoir and, as it’s been on my Must Read list since
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