Hello book clubbers! I am massively enjoying the reading this cosy season and managed to get through six books last month, which is loads for me! Anyway . . . I hope you like the choices for November. As usual I will probably buy all five!
As usual, you can vote for your favourite in our Facebook group and we will then discuss the book in the Facebook group at the end of month! Don’t worry if you are busy that day – you can join in on the discussion on the posts anytime! Vote closes at the end of Thursday 31st October.
Lots of love, Amanda xx
THE HUSBANDS - HOLLY GRAMAZIO
You wait ages for The One . . . then 203 come along at once
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right.
Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her.
There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes.
The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch).
The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich.
The one who turns everything into double entendres (‘I’ll weed your garden’).
And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch.
But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out?
THE SEVEN YEAR SLIP - ASHLEY POSTON
An overworked book publicist with a perfectly planned future hits a snag when she falls in love with her temporary roommate…only to discover he lives seven years in the past, in this witty and wise new novel from the bestselling author of The Dead Romantics.
Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.
Six months ago, Clementine West had the worst day of her life. So, she came up with a plan to keep her heart safe: stay busy, work hard, take no risks. And it’s been working.
That is until one day she finds a strange man standing in her kitchen. A man with kind eyes, a crooked smile, and a recipe for the perfect lemon meringue pie. The kind of man that, before everything, she could have fallen for . . .
He’s perfect but for one thing: he lives in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact.
This should be impossible, but Clementine used to love impossible things. And maybe, just maybe, she will again. After all, love is never a matter of time – but a matter of timing.
FAKE ACCOUNTS - LAUREN OYLER
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous Internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in Internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.
Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York – or be anywhere in particular – she flees to Berlin, and embarks on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat social events, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms.
Narrated in a voice as seductive as it is subtly subversive, Fake Accounts is a wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity and authenticity in the age of the internet.
SOCIOPATH - PATRIC GAGNE
Sociopath: A Memoir is a true story of a life lived on the edge of the law and an account of one woman’s battle to gain a deeper understanding of people who, like her, are sociopaths. Jaw-dropping and moving in equal measure, you will be thinking about this story for a long time to come.
'Your friends would probably describe me as nice. But guess what? I can't stand your friends. I'm a liar. I'm a thief. I'm highly manipulative. I don't care what other people think. I'm capable of almost anything.'
Patric Gagne knew she was different from a young age. Although feeling intense love for her family and best friend, David, these connections weren’t enough to make her ‘good’, or reduce her feelings of apathy and frustration. Growing up, her behaviour escalated from petty theft through to breaking and entering, stalking and worse…
It was as an adult, she realized she was a sociopath. This discovery forced her to question the official descriptions of sociopathy. After all, she had a plan for her life, had nurtured close relationships and was doing her best (most of the time) to avoid harming others.
While her darker impulses warred against her attempts to live a settled, loving life with her partner, Patric began to wonder - was there a way for sociopaths to integrate happily into society? And could she find it before her own behaviour went a step too far?
I'M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY - REBECCA WAIT
For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is also their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.
There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything . . .
As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.
