Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

Donna Tartt burst upon the literary scene in 1992 with her debut novel The Secret History. Rather than pander to her audience with an immediate follow-up, her second book – The Little Friend – didn’t make it to the bookshops until 2002. It was worth the wait.

The Little Friend is a very different creature to its murderous academic

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An English comic novel. That sentence, no matter how short, completely sums up this book. The English excel at a certain sort of comedy that is both witty and cutting – poking themselves in the eye while tickling our funny bone. Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat can easily be seen as the precursor of such beloved sit-coms as Faulty

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McCarthy’s novel focuses on the lives of eight young women after they graduate from New York’s Vassar College in 1933. By following the different choices they make right up to 1940 McCarthy mirrors changes in America, both political and social. In charting the girls’ individual development, she invokes debate about sex, contraception

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Set mostly in New York City in the days after the disputed 2000 US presidential election, The Diviners is ostensibly the story of an independent production company’s attempts to get a TV mini-series about man’s lifelong search for water off the ground; in reality, Rick Moody’s latest is a sweeping commentary on contemporary America

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It’s 2001 and in the wealthy suburbs of southern France post-millennium tension is sweeping the land. Vast business parks are home to largest corporate organisations and executives adhere strictly to the ethic of ‘work hard, play hard’. Immense buildings and phallic skyscrapers dot the landscape while the population resembles powerful

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Helen Cross’ debut is a darkly brooding tale of what happens when two teenage girls join forces one sultry summer in 1980s Yorkshire. Mona, the fifteen-year-old narrator, is a regular drinker and would-be criminal, addicted to fruit machines, obsessed with her weight and determined not to fit in with her sloppy, decidedly non-nuclear family

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She’s Come Undone is the story of a developing woman and her journey through life as she struggles to find her place. Told with every heart-breaking step of a woman who can never truly accept who she is and with all the scars that life has left her, Delores Price is a character that will stick with the reader.

What is most impressive about this

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