Richard and Judy Book Club - Autumn Reads

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. 

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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?