by Admin | 10 Feb 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, reading
March’s book chosen by Cricklereaders is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Sheehan Karunatilaka. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, Shehan Karunatilaka’s second novel is a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems to be a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.
But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has ‘seven moons’ to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was announced as the winner of the Booker Prize 2022 on October 17 at a ceremony in London.
by Admin | 14 Jan 2023 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, reading
The book chosen for the first Cricklereaders of the year is local author Paterson Joseph’s The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho. You can hear Paterson talk about his book here.
Published by Little, Brown, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is a “gloriously written Regency polemic”.
Waterstones says: Meet Charles Ignatius Sancho: his extraordinary story, hidden for three hundred years, is about to be told.
I had little right to live, born on a slave ship where my parents both died. But I survived, and indeed, you might say I did more…
It’s 1746 and Georgian London is not a safe place for a young Black man, especially one who has escaped slavery. After the twinkling lights in the Fleet Street coffee shops are blown out and the great houses have closed their doors for the night, Sancho must dodge slave catchers and worse. The man he hoped would help – a kindly duke who taught him to write – is dying. Sancho is desperate and utterly alone. So how does Charles Ignatius Sancho meet the King, write and play highly acclaimed music, become the first Black person to vote in Britain and lead the fight to end slavery?
It’s time for him to tell his story, one that begins on a tempestuous Atlantic Ocean, and ends at the very centre of London life. And through it all, he must ask: born amongst death, how much can you achieve in one short life?
From one of Britain’s best-loved actors, Paterson Joseph, comes an utterly captivating and haunting historical novel, telling the true story of a Great Black Briton.If you’d like to join the group, email cricklereaders@cricklewoodlibrary.org.uk for more details.
Next meeting: Sunday 5 February, 1030-1130
by Library Admin | 31 Oct 2022 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read, FRONT PAGE NEWS, reading
The book chosen for the last Cricklereaders of the year is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.
Demon Copperhead is a once-in-a-generation novel that breaks and mends your heart in the way only the best fiction can.
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.
Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.
If you’d like to join the group, email cricklereaders@cricklewoodlibrary.org.uk for more details.
Next meeting: Sunday 11 December, 1030-1130
by Library Admin | 18 Sep 2022 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
‘The most exquisite kind of literature… I’ve put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. ‘
OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘Could not be more timely… It’s funny and absurd, but it’s also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home… A writer of great warmth as well as skill‘
GUARDIAN
‘In equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it’
CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs
‘A genrebusting novel of ideas… Gospodinov’s vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination with the book’s own merits, may just have created a classic’
THE TIMES
‘Gospodinov is one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book’
DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle
The September group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 30 October. Do join in.
by Library Admin | 10 Aug 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is “vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review).
When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.
The September group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 18 September. Do join in.
by Library Admin | 26 Jun 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
From the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, powerful, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
The August group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday7 August. Do join in.
