Book of the month

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – March 2025

Published on Wed, 2025-03-19 13:33
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A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries: young lovers from a Puritan Colony, an English soldier turned apple farmer, a lovelorn painter, a conman, a crime reporter, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle. Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. It is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?  // Discuss in the Fiction reading group  //   

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – February 2025

Published on Sat, 2025-02-08 18:14
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Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads. They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry… The funniest tragedy you’ll ever read. //  Discuss in the Fiction reading group  //    

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – October 2024

Published on Mon, 2024-10-07 12:51
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While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does every­thing he’s supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and he – mostly – stays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he’s told, and his future is lit with promise. But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same – the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs, the same fathers and brothers missing… One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone. Close to Home begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles.  //  Discuss in the Fiction reading group  //

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – September 2024

Published on Fri, 2024-09-06 12:05
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One family’s deepest pain. Another’s darkest secret. Who will they be when the truth comes out? On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been… The Berry Pickers is an exquisitely moving story of unrelenting hope, unwavering love, and the power of family – even in the face of grief and betrayal.

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – August 2024

Published on Wed, 2024-08-07 17:42
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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where Jewish immigrants and African Americans lived side by side through the 1920s and ’30s. In this novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them, James McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community – heaven and earth – that sustain us.  //  Discuss in the Fiction reading group  //  

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – July 2024

Published on Tue, 2024-07-02 13:34
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”What are you looking for?” So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. But she is no ordinary librarian. Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it. We meet five visitors to the library, each at a different crossroads, from a hopeful young manga artist to a mother facing demotion at work – they all go to the library to find that special book only she can find for them.  //  Discuss in the Fiction reading group  //  

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – June 2024

Published on Wed, 2024-06-05 12:21
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Their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He's turning into a great white shark, and has less than a year left to live as a human…  An extraordinary novel of love, loss, hope and happiness, Shark Heart explores the shapes that love takes, in all its many forms, and asks us to ask ourselves: what makes us human? Praised by none other than Anthony Doerr as ”a fantastical, original and beautifully written novel”.   // Discuss in the Modern Fiction reading group  //  

Mystery Book of the Month – June 2024

Published on Wed, 2024-06-05 12:17
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Oxford is a wonderful place to be in the summer, except for perhaps when a suspicious death has occurred… Jesus College, Oxford, 1881. Amongst the scholars, secrets and soporifics of Victorian Oxford, the truth can be a bitter pill to swallow. An undergraduate is found dead at his lodgings and the medical examination reveals some shocking findings.…  //  Discuss in the Crime reading group  //  

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – May 2024

Published on Mon, 2024-05-13 12:38
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At the Golden Sunset retirement home, the residents tend to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, assumed identities and spying. A life that moves from WWII Indonesia to Busan during the Korean war; from cold-war Pyongyang to a Protestant church in China. The adventures are so colourful and various, at times so unbelievable. Surely they can’t all belong to the same woman. Can they?  // Discuss in the Modern Fiction reading group  // 

Modern Fiction Book of the Month – April 2024

Published on Tue, 2024-04-09 09:14
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In 1914, war feels far away to Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. They’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with the dreamy, poetic Ellwood – not having a clue that his best friend is in love with him, always has been. ”It was only because Gaunt knew he might die, that he could be so reckless as to kiss him.” An epic tale of the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip. // Discuss in the Modern Fiction reading group //  

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