The F&B Book Club Autumn Edition

The page turner…

Girl, Woman, Other
By Bernardine Evaristo

This is Britain as you've never read it. This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope…

 

'The most absorbing book I read all year.'
Roxane Gay 

'Vivid and infectious.'
The Financial Times

The true story…

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
By Adam Kay

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking.

 

'Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.'
Stephen Fry

The whodunnit…

The Thursday Murder Club
By Richard Osman

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

 

'So smart and funny. Deplorably good.'
Ian Rankin

'A little beacon of pleasure...SUCH FUN!'
Kate Atkinson

The epic modern classic…

A Fine Balance
By Rohinton Mistry

'A towering masterpiece by a writer of genius.' Independent India, 1975. An unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency. Amidst a backdrop of wild political turmoil, the lives of four unlikely strangers collide forever. An epic panorama of modern India in all its corruption, violence, and heroism, A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's prize-winning masterpiece: a Dickensian modern classic brimming with compassion, humour, and insight - and a hymn to the human spirit in an inhuman state.

 

'A masterpiece of illumination and grace. Like all great fiction, it transforms our understanding of life.'
Guardian

The novella…

Grown Ups
By Marie Aubert

Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and struggling with the feeling of panic as she realises her chances of motherhood are rapidly falling away from her. She's navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs - but tries to put a pause on these worries as she heads out to the family country cabin for her mother's 65th birthday. That is, until some supposedly wonderful news from her sister sets old tensions simmering, building to an almighty clash between Ida and her sister, her mother, and her entire family. Exhilarating, funny, and unexpectedly devastating.

 

‘The perfect palate cleanser. It has loads to talk about, is beautifully written and is short enough to read in an afternoon.’
The Independent