all the light we cannot see : a novel / anthony doerr book club... · moera book chat best reads...

Moera Book Chat Best reads 2015

December 2015

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All the light we cannot see : a novel / Anthony Doerr In 1944, the U.S. Air Force bombed the Nazi-occupied French coastal town of St. Malo. This story begins just before the bombing, then goes back to 1934 to describe two childhoods: those of Werner and Marie-Laure. Marie-Laure, a French teenager has been blind since the age of six. When the Nazis invade, Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris for St Malo with a dangerous secret. Werner is an orphaned German soldier whose engineering skill will take him to St Malo also.

Elizabeth is missing / Emma Healey In this darkly riveting debut novel - a sophisticated psychological mystery that is also a heartbreakingly honest meditation on memory, identity, and aging. An elderly woman descending into dementia embarks on a desperate quest to find the best friend she believes has disappeared, and her search for the truth will go back decades and have shattering consequences.

Lila / Marilynne Robinson Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church, and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence.

The children act / Ian McEwan Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses.

That girl from nowhere / Dorothy Koomson Clemency Smithson was adopted as a baby and the only connection she has to her birth mother is a cardboard box hand-decorated with butterflies. When Clemency moves to Brighton, she has no idea that she'll meet someone who knows all about her butterfly box and what happened to her birth parents. As the tangled truths about her adoption and childhood start to unravel, a series of shocking events cause Clem to reassess whether the price of having contact with her birth family could be too high to pay.


December 2015


First impressions : Charlie Lovett Book lover and Jane Austen enthusiast Sophie Collingwood has just started working at an antiquarian bookshop in London when two different customers request a copy of the same obscure work: the second edition of Little Book of Allegories by Richard Mansfield. Their enquiries draw Sophie into a mystery that will cast doubt on the real authorship of Pride and Prejudice - and ultimately threaten her life.

The drowned boy / Karin Fossum A 16-month-old boy with Down's Syndrome is found naked and drowned in a pond right by his home. Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer is called to the scene as there is something troubling about the mother's story. As even her own family turns against her, Sejer is determined to get to the truth. Translated from the Norwegian.

The secret life of Luke Livingstone / Charity Norman Luke Livingstone is a lucky man. He's a father and grandfather, a respected solicitor, a pillar of the community. He has a loving wife, children who adore him and an idyllic home in the countryside. But Luke is struggling with an unbearable secret, one that is close to destroying him. He must either end his life, or become the woman he knows himself to be - whatever the cost. His family is tested to its limits, as each of them is forced to consider what makes a person essentially themselves.

Girl at war : a novel / Sara Novic Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills. The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life. A daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later she returns to Croatia, a young woman struggling to belong to either country, forced to confront the trauma of her past and rediscover the place that was once her home.

Trust no one : a thriller / Paul Cleave Jerry Grey is known to most of the world by his crime writing pseudonym, Henry Cutter. Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at the age of 49, Jerry's crime writing days are coming to an end. As his dementia begins to break down the wall between his life and the lives of his characters, Jerry confesses his worst secret: The stories are real. He knows this because he committed the crimes. Those close to him, including the nurses at the care home where he now lives, insist that it is all in his head. But if that were true, then why are so many bad things happening? Why are people dying?


December 2015


Fates and furies / Lauren Groff Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.

A spool of blue thread / Anne Tyler It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family, their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog, are on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father.

My grandmother sends her regards and apologises / Fredrik Backman A charming, warmhearted novel about a young girl whose grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters, sending her on a journey that brings to life the world of her grandmother's fairy tales.

At hawthorn time / Melissa Harrison It is dawn on a May morning. On a long straight road between two sleeping fields a car slows as it arrives at the scene of an accident. As the lives of four people overlap, we realize that mysterious layers of history are not only buried within them, but also locked into the landscape.

In the unlikely event / Judy Blume In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was 15 and in love for the first time, three planes fell from the sky within three months, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events in the early 1950s, Judy Blume weaves a haunting story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, whose lives are for ever changed in the aftermath.


December 2015


The nature of the beast / Louise Penny Hardly a day goes by when nine year old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. From alien invasions, to walking trees, to winged beasts in the woods, to dinosaurs spotted in the village of Three Pines, his tales are so extraordinary no one can possibly believe him. But when the boy disappears, the villagers are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true. And so begins a frantic search for the boy and the truth. What they uncover deep in the forest sets off a sequence of events that leads to murder, leads to an old crime, leads to an old betrayal.

Noonday / Pat Barker Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville first met in 1914 at the Slade School of Art, before their generation lost hope, faith and much else besides on the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. Now it is 1940, they are middle-aged, and another war has begun. London is a haunted city. Some have even turned to seances in an attempt to contact lost loved ones. As the bombs fall and Elinor and the others struggle to survive, old temptations and obsessions return, and all of them are forced to make choices about what they really want.

The secret chord / Geraldine Brooks Traces the arc of King David's journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.

The love song of Miss Queenie Hennessy / Rachel Joyce When Queenie Hennessy is told she has days to live she sends a letter on pink paper in which she bids goodbye to Harold Fry. It is a letter that inspires an unlikely walk, a cast of well-wishers and the examination of many lives unlived. But there is a second letter, a longer, quieter more complicated letter which she will never send. It is this letter, the one we did not know about in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which reveals the shocking and beautiful truth of Queenie's life.

Our souls at night / Kent Haruf In Holt, Colorado, widower Louis Waters is initially thrown when the widowed Addie Moore suggests that they spend time together, in bed, to stave off loneliness. They are soon exchanging the confidences and memories of lives now empty of family, and their hopes for the imminent future.


December 2015


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Customer recommendations:

Tennison / Lynda la Plante

Make me / Lee Child

I am pilgrim / Terry Hayes

Non fiction:

Guantanamo Diary / Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The shepherd’s life / James Rebanks

Fire Strike 7/9 / Sgt Paul Grahame

This party’s got to stop / Rupert Thomson

all the light we cannot see : a novel / anthony doerr book club... · moera book chat best reads...

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