by Library Admin | 20 Nov 2024 | activities, Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Current, FRONT PAGE NEWS
The last book of the year is Julia by Sandra Newman. 1984 from Julia’s viewpoint. London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It’s 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen – cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She’s very good at staying alive.
But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department – a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith, she comes to realise that she’s losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.
Read along at home with us (places in the group are on hold for now but may open up again in the new year.
by Library Admin | 8 Oct 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Current, Cricklereaders Read
November’s Cricklereaders choice is The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
Join the group on the sofa at the library on Sunday 3 November, 1030 am, or read along at home.
by Library Admin | 11 Aug 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet – cousin, housekeeper and perhaps more – to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.
From literary London to the Jamaica’s sugar-cane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.
Cricklereaders are always happy to have new members – join by applying here: Cricklereaders Book Group
by Admin | 22 Jul 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
In August the group is reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold, the million copy selling Japanese cult read.
Deftly written and nimbly translated, Kawaguchi’s life-affirming tale of café-based time travel and symbolic hot beverages has all the hallmarks of a beloved cult classic.
What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley 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 man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to 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 . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story – translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot – explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Meet at 1030 in the library to discuss!
by Library Admin | 7 Apr 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
In May, Cricklereaders are reading A Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss.
Award-winning American novelist Nicole Krauss first captivated readers with her groundbreaking debut novel Man Walks into a Room, a novel in which Krauss explores what it is to lose one’s identity and what it is to discover what makes us human.
Samson Greene has been missing for eight days when he is discovered wandering through the Nevada desert, ‘ragged as a crow’ and with no idea who he is. He is rushed to hospital where doctors save his life, but all his memories after the age of twelve have been permanently lost. Now, as he looks around the beautiful apartment he apparently shares with his wife and which is filed with all the souvenirs of a life well lived, Samson feels nothing more than a vague admiration.
In her first novel Nicole Krauss tells the story of a man suddenly liberated from the life he has made, disconnected from the people who have defined him. Withdrawing from a wife he has no memory of loving, Samson plunges weightless into the future. But when he agrees to participate in a revolutionary experiment, what he experiences a revelation of what it means to be human.
‘Krauss celebrates the anything-but-simple art of human connection’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘You’ll savour the last page – and be hungry for future work from this talented author’ The Washington Post Book World
Nicole Krauss is an American bestselling author who has received international critical acclaim for her first three novels: Great House (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011), The History of Love (Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 and winner of the 2006 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger) and Man Walks into a Room all of which are available in Penguin paperback.
The group will meet on Sunday 19 May at 1030 in the library.
by Library Admin | 7 Jan 2024 | activities, Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga, ‘victory city’.
Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s as she attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception.
New members always welcome.
