The Book Group has been running since we started Corbett WI back in 2018. They even managed to continue meeting through the Covid lockdowns, via Zoom.
Here are a few of their recommended reads…
Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
'My brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths in the thick air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.
Bound by birth, we were driven apart by bitter betrayal. No surgeon can heal the wound that would that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed'
The Dutch House - Ann Patchett.
Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance.
Life is comfortable and coherent, until one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea's advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives.
Blood & Sugar - Laura Shepherd-Robinson
June, 1781. An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock - horribly tortured and branded with a slaver's mark.
Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham - a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career - is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable damage to the British slaving industry. He'd said people were trying to kill him, and now he is missing . . .
A Terrible Kindness - Jo Browning Wroe
It is October 1966 and William Lavery is having the night of his life at his first
black-tie do.
But, as the evening unfolds, news hits of a landslide at a coal mine. It has buried a school: Aberfan.
Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.
Miss Benson’s Beetle - Rachel Joyce
It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist.
Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules, and at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
When a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud.
As the investigation turns her quiet life inside out, Jean is suddenly given an unexpected chance at friendship, love and - possibly - happiness.
But there will, inevitably, be a price to pay.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies - John Boyne
Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?
The Giver of Stars - Jojo Moyes
Alice Wright doesn't love her new American husband. Nor her domineering father-in-law or the judgmental townsfolk of Baileyville, Kentucky.
Stifled and misunderstood, she yearns for escape and finds it in defiant Margery O'Hare and the sisterhood bringing books to the isolated and vulnerable.
But when her father-in-law and the town turn against them, Alice fears the freedom, friendship and the new love she's found will be lost.
Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.
But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results!
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot - Marianne Cronin
Life is short. No-one knows that better than seventeen-year-old Lenni. But as she is about to learn, it's not only what you make of life that matters, but who you share it with.
Lenni joins an art class where she bumps into fellow patient Margot, a rebel-hearted eight-three-year-old from the next ward. Their bond is instant as they realize that together they have lived an astonishing one hundred years.
To celebrate their shared century, they decide to paint their life stories, and as their friendship deepens, it becomes vividly clear that life is not done with Lenni and Margot yet.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home - Carol Rifka Brunt
1987, New York City. There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that's her uncle, the renowned painter, Finn Weiss; he is her godfather, confident, and best friend. So when he dies far too young of a mysterious illness, June's world is turned upside down.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta's family did not learn of her 'immortality' until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences .
American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins
Lydia Perez owns a bookshop in Acapulco, Mexico, and is married to a fearless journalist. Luca, their eight-year-old son, completes the picture.
But it only takes a bullet to rip them apart…
Milkman - Anna Burns
A teenager – whose only means of escape is literature – is slowly ground down by the unwanted attentions and creeping psychopathy of a paramilitary many years her senior.
This is the secret state, a place where gossip and hearsay are weaponised methods of control, contained in a novel written with both a sad humour and a certain kind of fury.
Sacred Country - Rose Tremain
At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: 'I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy.' So begins a heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world.
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders' colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope
The Island of Sea Women - Lisa See
Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger.