by Admin | 8 Nov 2023 | activities, Cricklereaders Read, FRONT PAGE NEWS
A n out-of-season South Korean resort, a mysterious foreign visitor and a young woman whose dual nationality and anguished diffidence mark her out as an anomaly among her community are the main components of French-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin’s compact first novel. The book is set in Sokcho, a city so close to South Korea’s impenetrable northern counterpart that it is possible to take a day trip over the border.
Dusapin’s unnamed narrator has returned to her home town from university in Seoul. Working as a live-in receptionist and cook at a dead-end guesthouse run by the grumpy Old Park, she has resisted opportunities for further study abroad as obstinately as she holds out against an anticipated engagement to her vacuous model boyfriend. Winter has encased Sokcho like a snow globe: in this precarious frozen landscape, figures move as languorously as the crabs and octopuses occupying the glass tanks of its vast fish markets. [The Guardian]
This month’s choice sounds amazing! Read along at home, or better still, join the group on Sunday 19 November, 1030 at the library.
by Admin | 11 Sep 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, FRONT PAGE NEWS
The group is reading Death and the Penguin by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov.
Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.
Join the group on Sunday 15 October at the library, 1030-1130. Sign up in advance so we know to expect you!
by Admin | 23 Jul 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, FRONT PAGE NEWS
September’s book is Stella Maris, the sequel to July’s The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy. The two books are the last works by McCarthy before his death aged 89 in June this year.
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
by Admin | 11 Jun 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
The group has chosen Tennessee-born author Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger for their July meeting.
A sunken jet, a missing body, and a salvage diver entering a conspiracy beyond all understanding. The Passenger is a dark, hallucinogenic novel from Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road.
‘What a glorious sunset song . . . It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic’ – Guardian
1980, Mississippi. It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges into the darkness of the ocean. His dive light illuminates a sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box – and the tenth passenger.
Now a collateral witness to this disappearance, Bobby is discouraged from speaking of what he has seen. He is a man haunted: by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
Traversing the American South, from the bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
‘The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need’ – New Statesman
by Admin | 1 May 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
A quest for secrets in the blue afternoon . . .
Los Angeles, 1936. Kay Fischer, a young and ambitious architect, is being followed by an old man. When confronted, he explains that his name is Salvador Carriscant – and that he is her father.
In a matter of weeks Kay will join Salvador on an extraordinary journey as they delve back into his past to not only learn the truth behind her own birth, but also to discover the whereabouts of a woman long thought dead – and to uncover the identity of a killer.
by Admin | 8 Apr 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, reading
The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm through to the collapse of the company in 2008. It has been translated into 24 languages, staged by such directors as Luca Ronconi and Sam Mendes, and was later published as a novel. An English translation of the play by Mirella Cheeseman was produced in the West End in 2018 by the National Theatre. The production was directed by Sam Mendes and included the cast of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles. It earned five Laurence Olivier Award nominations.
Join Cricklereaders on 30 April from 1030 to discuss this through-provoking work.
