Book Group

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McGoohan 31 May 8:05am, 31 May 2024 54,127 posts	0 McGoohan
Diogenes 31 May 9:46am, 31 May 2024 86,276 posts	0 Diogenes Okay, the June book is... Bournville, by Jonathan Coe. Here's the blurb "In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Bournville is a rich and poignant novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England.It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself."
Diogenes 31 May 9:52am, 31 May 2024 86,277 posts	0 Diogenes In case you were wondering, or if my official choice doesn't take your fancy, these were the other two options I had in mind. They do all seem (coincidentally) to share a common theme. The Village News - Tom Fort "We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across England, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the land. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city ‘weekenders’, or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly – if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian and travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle and covers the length and breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, will be personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers and enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire." Serotonin - Michel Houellebecq "Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin. When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return to what they remember as a golden age."
McGoohan 31 May 9:55am, 31 May 2024 54,130 posts	0 McGoohan Fun fact: Michel Houellebecq's birth name was Michel Thomas - like the language learning fella... except THAT Michel Thomas was born Moniek Kroskof and later changed HIS name. Tune in later for more Michel Facts
LindsD 31 May 11:54am, 31 May 2024 68,194 posts	0 LindsD Thanks Dio. I like the sound of both the fictions. I got bought The Bee Sting yesterday. Anyone read it?
LindsD 31 May 12:00pm, 31 May 2024 68,196 posts	0 LindsD Reserved Bourneville. If I've read it right, it's in the library.
Ocelot Spleens 31 May 12:19pm, 31 May 2024 38,960 posts	0 Ocelot Spleens The Village News would have been a better choice, if you were asking me, but you're not, .
Diogenes 31 May 12:30pm, 31 May 2024 86,279 posts	0 Diogenes I was very tempted to go for that, OS, as it is the one I'd like to read next. However, I decided to stick with the fiction.
LindsD 31 May 12:53pm, 31 May 2024 68,198 posts	0 LindsD I'm not at home to non-fiction
LazyDaisy 31 May 1:14pm, 31 May 2024 40,175 posts	0 LazyDaisy I think I might be a rebel and read the Tom Fort one instead I quite like Jonathan Coe though. so maybe I'll read that too.