As the nights draw in and the central heating gets
switched on, what could be nicer than curling up on the sofa with a good book? Why not take a look at the Richard and Judy Book Club Autumn 2016
reading list, there’s sure to be something here that takes your fancy. All 8
titles are available to borrow or reserve from your local Torfaen Library.
Fiona Barton – The Widow
Jean Taylor's life was
blissfully ordinary. Nice house, nice husband. Glen was all she'd ever wanted,
her Prince Charming. Until he became that man accused, that monster on the
front page. Jean was married to a man everyone thought capable of unimaginable evil.
But now Glen is dead and she's alone for the first time, free to tell her story
on her own terms. Jean Taylor is going to tell us what she knows.
Katarina Bivald – The Readers of Broken
Wheel Recommend
This is a book about books.
All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane
Austen, from Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It's about the joy
and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly
even hiding behind them. It's about whether or not books are better than real
life. It's also a book about a Swedish girl called Sara, her elderly American
penfriend Amy and what happens when you land a very different kind of bookshop
in the middle of a town so broken it's almost beyond repair. Or is it?
Sharon Guskin – The Forgetting Time
A novel that spans life,
death and everything in between, 'The Forgetting Time' tells an unforgettable
story - about Noah, about love, and, above all, about the things we hold onto
when we have nothing else.
Anna Hope – The Ballroom
1911: Inside an
asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, where men and women are kept apart
by high walls and barred windows, there is a ballroom, vast and beautiful. For
one bright evening every week, they come together and dance. When John and Ella
meet, it is a dance that will change two lives forever.
Set over the
heatwave summer at the end of the Edwardian Era, The Ballroom is a tale of
unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity and of who gets to
decide which is which.
Gregg Hurwitz – Orphan X
'Do you need my help?' It
was always the first question he asked. They called him when they had nowhere
else to turn. As a boy he was chosen, then taken from the orphanage he called
home. Raised and trained as part of a top secret programme he was sent to the
worst places in the world to do the things his government denied any knowledge
of. Then he broke with the programme, using everything he'd learned to
disappear. He wanted to help the desperate and deserving. But now someone's on
his tail. Someone who has issues with his past. Someone who knows he was once
known simply as Orphan X.
Christobel Kent – The Loving Husband
Can you ever truly know the
one you love? Fran Hall and her husband Nathan live in a farmhouse on the edge
of the Fens with their two children. One February night, when Fran is woken by
her baby, she finds the bed empty beside her and Nathan gone. Searching the
house for him she makes a devastating discovery. As Fran finds herself under
intense police scrutiny, she and her two small children become more isolated as
she starts to doubt whether or not she really knew Nathan. Was he really the
loving husband that Fran had trusted him to be?
Paula McLain – Circling the Sun
Set in colonial Kenya during the 1920s, Circling the
Sun brings to life a fearless and
captivating woman—Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a
passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen
Blixen, who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic memoir Out of Africa.
Susie Steiner – Missing Presumed
A young woman vanishes. A
smear of blood in the kitchen of the house she shares with her boyfriend
suggests a struggle. As soon as DS Manon Bradshaw sees the photograph of
missing Edith Hind - a beautiful Cambridge post-grad from a well-connected
family - she knows the case will be big. And she's right: pressure soon mounts
from the media and from on high. Can Manon see clearly enough to solve the
mystery of Edith's disappearance? Can she withstand intimidation from Sir Ian
Hind, Edith's father, who has friends in high places? When a body is found,
will it mean the end or just the beginning?
