Cardiff’s longest running book club
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11th June 2024 – Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Mark Dunn’s book, Ella Minnow Pea, pushes literary conventions. Nevin Nollop left the islanders of Nollop with the treasured legacy of his pangram the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. But as the letters begin to crumble on the monumental inscription, the island’s council forbids the use of the lost letters and silence…
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14th May 2024 – Hagitude by Sharon Blackie
‘There can be a perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.’ What is Hagitude? It means being at ease with the unique power women embody in the second half of their life. It means having a…
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9th April 2024 – The Mad Women’s Ball by Victoria Mas
The Salpêtrière asylum, 1885. All of Paris is in thrall to Doctor Charcot and his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad or hysterical, outcasts from society. But the truth is much more complicated – for these women are often simply inconvenient, unwanted wives or strong-willed daughters. Once a year a grand…
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12th March 2024 – Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbours on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents don’t approve of…
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13th Feb 2024 – Under The Net by Iris Murdoch
‘This is real life, Jake,’ she said. ‘You’d better wake up.’ Jake is clever, lazy and scraping by in London as a hack translator. Jake loves Anna. Anna is an elusive and lovely singer. Anna loves Hugo. Hugo is a fireworks manufacturer turned movie producer and majestic philosopher. Hugo loves Sadie. Sadie is a glossy…
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9th Jan 2024 – Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2021 and SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder…
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12th Dec 2023 – Christmas Is Murder by Val McDermid
A collection of atmospheric short stories from the international bestseller Val McDermid. She is a master of the dark and sinister story, and these powers are in full force in Christmas is Murder, a festive collection of chilling tales. From an irresponsible baron whose body is discovered beneath a silver birch tree, to a classic detective…
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14th Nov 2023 – My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
**Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022** A Book of the Year in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Guardian, the White Review, the Evening Standard, the Big Issue, the TLS, the Week and the New Statesman. Helen Grant has always been a mystery to her daughter. Twice-divorced, with few friends, her…
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10th October 2023 – Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2021WINNER OF DEBUT NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2022 SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE ‘A beautiful and powerful novel about the true and sometimes painful depths of love’ Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of QUEENIE Two young people meet…
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12th September 2023 – Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit OR/AND Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Read one or both! ORANGES… ‘At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn’t care. It was not judgement day, but another morning’ This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by working-class evangelists in the North of England to be one of God’s elect. Passionate, headstrong…
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8th August 2023 – The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
‘I loved every word’ – Malorie Blackman ‘Atta’s bold verse novel calls to its readers to find their own blazing, performative inner truth’ – Guardian WINNER OF THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD A boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen – then at university he finds his wings as a drag…
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11th July 2023 – This is Memorial Device by David Keenan
‘Beautifully believable and appallingly sad … One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years … A hallucinatory and haunting vision.’ (The Guardian) This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s…
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