Red Dog
Louis de Bernieres
19 June 2012
Red Dog is a beautiful novella, based on the true story of a dog that travelled around Australia in the 70s, befriending everyone he met. It describes how the love for such a character can bring people together, and make them work together in times of loss and despair. The overall message is truly uplifting.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson
17 April 2012
This book is the story of a life’s work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town.
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
28 February 2012
Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem’s story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.
An Imaginary Life
David Malouf
10 January 2012
In the first century AD, Ovid, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer.
Whisky Galore (Pitlochry Theatre)
Compton Mackenzie
12 November 2011
1943: the curse of rationing has visited the remote Hebridean islands of Little Todday and Great Todday and the thirsty islanders have all but run out of uisge beatha - the water of life. When the S.S. Cabinet Minister runs aground with fifty thousand cases of whisky aboard, the islanders rush to take advantage of the unexpected bounty. But then the officious Captain Waggett, the English commander of the Home Guard, learns of the illicit salvage operation – and is ordered to confiscate the liquor!
The Comfort of Things
Daniel Miller
29 September 2011
Daniel Miller and his co-researcher Fiona Parrott set off on a 17-month investigation into the lives, loves and domestic interiors of 30 households in a randomly chosen London street. That word “household” is important. For although Miller’s research has all the trappings of an ethnographic community study, he is quick to emphasise that there is no community to be found in the street he studied.
And The Land Lay Still
James Robertson
24 August 2011
The story of a nation. James Robertson’s breathtaking novel is a portrait of modern Scotland as seen through the eyes of natives and immigrants, journalists and politicians, drop-outs and spooks, all trying to make their way through a country in the throes of great and rapid change. It is a moving, sweeping story of family, friendship, struggle and hope.
At the Loch of the Green Corrie
Andrew Greig
29 June 2011
‘I should like you to fish for me at the Loch of the Green Corrie’ MacCaig commanded months before his death. ‘Go to Lochinver and ask for a man named Norman MacAskill - if he likes you he may tell you where it is. If you catch a fish, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused.’
The quest sounds simple and irresistible, but the loch is as demanding as it is beautiful.
Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín
5 May 2011
It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed as she takes tentative steps towards friendship.
Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver
8 March 2011
Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, wanders the mountain trails and watches a den of coyotes, while becoming involved with a young hunter; Lusa Maluf Landowski, who loves moths, finds herself mourning her farmer husband, surrounded by his relations and their children.
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
18 January 2011
Middlesex tells the mesmerising story of a near-mythic Greek American family and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time”. The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides.
The Winter of Our Discontent
John Steinbeck
23 November 2010
Steinbeck’s last great novel focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family’s past fortune, and his father’s loss of the family wealth, the hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterises successin every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of combat, operating under ‘the laws of controlled savagery.’
Gate to Women’s Country
Sheri S. Tepper
5 Oct 2010
This is the story of the struggles that a society headed by women face in a post-nuclear holocaust Earth. Inside the cities that have been established the women live; governing and working at their chosen trade. Separated by the city walls are the garrisons, where Spartan type male warriors are taken from their mothers at the age of five to train in the ways of war. The contrasts between the two societies are great.
Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier
11 Aug 2010
Max de Winter brings his new bride to Manderley, the home he shared with his beautiful first wife Rebecca, before her untimely death. Rebecca's presence still seems to permeate Manderley, haunting the new Mrs de Winter and sapping her confidence. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers who loved Rebecca and resents her place being 'usurped' feeds the young brides insecurities at every opportunity and makes her doubt her husbands love for her.
The Wrong Boy
Willy Russell
16 June 2010
Teenager Raymond Marks has not had a charmed life; with a struggling mother and doting Sartre-fan grandmother. Fifteen minutes of potential glory when he saved a boy from drowning are cruelly compromised when Raymond becomes “the precocious pervert, the evil influence, the filthy little beast”. Eventually packed off to Grimsby at the suggestion of his despised Uncle, Raymond pours out his life’s woes in a series of missives to his idol, one-time Smiths’ star Morrissey.
The Ode Less Travelled
Stephen Fry
28 April 2010
Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.
Poetry
Various
3 March 2010
Lottery: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Perry L. Crandall
Patricia Wood
13 January 2010
Perry L. Crandall knows what it's like to be an outsider. With an IQ of 76, he's an easy mark. Before his grandmother died, she armed Perry well with what he'd need to know: the importance of words and writing things down, and how to play the lottery. Most importantly, she taught him whom to trust, a crucial lesson for Perry when he wins the multimillion-dollar jackpot. As his family descends, moving in on his fortune, he has a lesson for them: never ever underestimate Perry L. Crandall.
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
28 October 2009
Bassanio, a feckless young Venetian, asks his wealthy friend, the merchant Antonio, for money to finance a trip to woo the beautiful Portia in Belmont. Reluctant to refuse his friend (to whom he professes intense love), Antonio borrows the money from the Jewish moneylender. If he reneges on the deal, Shylock jokingly demands a pound of his flesh. When all Antonio's ships are lost at sea, Shylock calls in his debt, and the love and laughter of the first scenes of the play threaten to give way to death and tragedy.
Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
9 Sept 2009
Esther Woolfson has been fascinated by corvids, the bird group that includes crows, magpies and ravens, since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook sixteen years ago. That rook - named Chicken - has lived with the family ever since. Other birds have also taken their place in the household - a magpie, starling, parrot and doves. But above all, it has been the corvids that she has formed the closest attachments with, amazed by their intelligence, personality and capacity for affection.
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
29 July 2009
Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer's block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. Fearing the onset of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook, the Golden Notebook, which is the key to her recovery and renaissance.
By the Shores of Silver Lake & The Long Winter
Laura Ingalls Wilder
10 June 2009
By the Shores of Silver Lake is the fourth book by Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Little House On The Prairie series and one of the least well known, it tells the story of the Ingalls family journey from Plum Creek to Dakota Territory. The Long Winter is the fifth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's slightly fictionalized account of the life of pioneers in the 1860-80 period. This is an account of one of the toughest winters on record, as it was lived by a family with nothing to rely on but themselves and their neighbours.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
22 April 2009
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence.
Love In A Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
4 March 2009
In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, the story of coldly beautiful Polly Hampton and her aristocratic parents is is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language.
Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
John Boyne
14 January 2009
Nine year old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no-one to play with until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence
Glass of Blessings
Barbara Pym
27 November 2008
Blessed with money, position, and marital stability, Wilmet Forsyth lives in the heart of London with her husband and mother-in-law and tries to spice up her staid life by imagining the possibility of romance coming to her from handsome clergymen or lonely bachelor friends.
A Quiet Belief in Angels
R.J. Ellory
29 October 2008
Joseph Vaughan’s life has been dogged by tragedy. Growing up in the 1950s, he was at the centre of series of killings of young girls in his small rural community. The girls were taken, assaulted and left horribly mutilated. Only after a full ten years did the nightmare end when the one of his neighbours is found hanging from a rope, but it seems that the real murderer still lives and is killing again.
Short Stories
10 September 2008
The Stone Boy - Gina Berriault
The Dead - James Joyce
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Holy - Orson Scott Card
Roman Fever - Edith Wharton
Event Horizon & Of fugues and Fireflies - langsandy & sadi_ranson_polizzotti
Short Stories
Various
23 July 2008 (Hamiltons)
Middlemarch
George Elliot
4 June 2008
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Sidetracked
Henning Mankell
23 April 2008
“The Swedish summer-time is too beautiful and too brief for something like this to happen.” A young girl commits self-immolation, a former government minister is killed with an axe and scalped; these are the two brutal facts that confront Inspector Kurt Wallander as he prepares for his holiday. As the Swedish midsummer approaches there is no escaping from the darkness of society.
The Whale Caller
Zakes Mda
18 March 2008
After years of wandering along the coasts of two Oceans, a sometime fisherman returns home to "The Whale Coast" where tourists flock with cameras, video recorders, dour expressions and money. The fisherman, who once caused a schism in his local church, is also enchanted by the whales. That attraction manifests itself as a spellbinding story - the creation of the Hermanus Penitent.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
23 January 2008
The sad story of the Biafran War is told through the intersecting lives of people in the country - Olanna and Kainene, feisty twin sisters from a privileged background, Richard, an Englishman who grows to love Africa (and Kainene) and Ugwu, the bright, vulnerable houseboy of Olanna. There are many other strong characters who make the sad story of civil conflict come alive.
Intuition
Allegra Goodman
11 December 2007
This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking discovery of a virus that fights cancer. Cliff, responsible for the discovery, is on the verge of dismissal when his tumour-ridden mice exhibit stunning rates of remission; meanwhile, Cliff's colleague and former girlfriend, spurred by personal and professional jealousy, begins to harbour suspicions about his lab work.
Little Black Book of Stories
A.S. Byatt
16 October 2007
In these five short stories Byatt displays her talent for making the magical out of the mundane. Byatt takes a simple cloth and embroiders it until she has a tale woven richly with mythology and allegory, and strung with references classical and modern. Her well-structured stories are deceptively simple and when you look again, the focus of the stories seem to have shifted slightly and the different facets become apparent.
Keeping Faith
Jodi Picoult
4 September 2007
33-year-old Mariah discovers that her husband, Colin, is having an affair. Years ago, his cheating drove her to attempt suicide and Colin had her briefly committed to an institution. Now Mariah's facing divorce and depression when her eight-year-old daughter, Faith, acquires an imaginary friend. Soon this friend is telling the girl how to bring her grandmother back from the dead and as Faith manifests stigmata, doctors are astounded, and religious controversy ensues.
TransAmerica
Dir: Duncan Tucker
24 July 2007
TransAmerica, a small but rich movie about Bree — formerly Stanley — a pre-operative male-to-female transexual awaiting gender-reassignment surgery who learns she has a wayward teenage son named Toby. When her therapist strongarms Bree into facing her past, she bails Toby out of jail and they end up on a road trip across the country. Such a premise could feel forced, but the script and performances make it persuasive and natural.
Digging to America
Anne Tyler
4 June 2007
In Digging to America, Anne Tyler tells a simple story of two families: the Donaldsons and the Yazdans who meet at an airport both awaiting a baby both families have adopted from Korea. Strangers until that evening, they are destined to begin a friendship that will span their adoptive daughters’ childhoods.
Istanbul: Memories of a City
Orhan Pamuk
19 April 2007
Turkish novelist Pamuk presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life’s complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire.
The French Dancer’s Bastard
Emma Tennant
7 March 2007
Adèle Varens is only eight when she comes to Thornfield Hall to live with the forbidding Mr Rochester, who may or may not be her father. She longs to return to the glitter of Paris and to the mother who has been lost to her. Her loneliness would be complete were it not for the young governess who arrives to care for her, although Adèle at first regards her with suspicion and dislike.
Poetry Readings
Various
17 January 2007
Shalimar the Clown
Salman Rushdie
14 November 2006
The central tragedy of the story is the transformation of Kashmir from a Garden of Eden into a ravaged moonscape populated by cold-blooded, fanatic, malevolent marauders. The story of Shalimar and Boonyi echoes the tragedy on a personal level, as each proceeds toward their respective dooms after Boonyi eats from the forbidden fruit of modernity and Shalimar the Clown becomes an Islamist terrorist by way of passage to the execution of his personal terrorist agenda.
Rum Punch
Elmore Leonard
10 October 2006
A combination of coincidence and choice connects the fates of Jackie Burke, a 44-year-old, thrice-married stewardess, bail bondsman Max Cherry, overweight and in his 50s, and brash young gun dealer Ordell Robbie, in Miami. When Jackie is caught bringing cash into the U.S. from the Bahamas for Ordell, she agrees to cooperate with federal and state agents to catch him in a sting operation.
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
7 September 2006 (Pizza Express)
The Kite Runner is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Set in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and a ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir’s equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth.
Small Island
Andrea Levy
25 July 2006
It is 1948, and England is recovering from war. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn’t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. Small Island explores a point in England’s past when the country began to change and addresses weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch.
The Rotter’s Club
Jonathan Coe
30 May 2006
Against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension, a group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval that captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of ‘Old Labour’ - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager.
Life Along The Silk Road
Susan Whitfield
4 April 2006
In the first 1,000 years AD, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants and military men travelled on the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Linking Europe, India and the Far East, the route passed through many countries and many settlements, from the splendid city of Samarkand to tiny desert hamlets. This book recounts the lives of some of these people and the towns in which they lived.
Liza’s England
Pat Barker
28 February 2006
Set in 1984-85, the book deals with the final year in the life of its protagonist, Liza Wright, who is the same age as the century, almost to the second. Liza survives a divorce, bringing up children by herself, and a war, only to see the community disintegrate in the name of “progress”.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
23 January 2006
To avoid the threat of bombings in London, the four Pevensie children are sent to stay with a wealthy, eccentric professor in the country. But strange things start to happen when Lucy finds a wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek -- when she climbs in, she finds a snowy woodland and a friendly faun. Her siblings don't believe her... until peevish Edmund also ventures through, and encounters the beautiful but evil White Witch.
A Widow For One Year
John Irving
30 November 2005
Tracing the complicated life of novelist Ruth Cole, this book is divided into three parts. The book views Ruth’s life and relationships at age four in 1958 then focuses on Ruth’s book tour in Europe while coming to grips with a poor love life and considering marriage to an older man. Part 3 traces Ruth’s short widowhood and her marriage to the Dutch policeman who solves the murder to which she was a witness.
Persuasion
Jane Austen
20 October 2005 (Pizza Express)
Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. Seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances.
Headlong
Michael Frayn
31 August 2005
Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, sees a chance of a lifetime: to perform a great public service, and to make his professional reputation. To obtain the treasure he thinks he has identified involves him setting up a classic sting and risking everything that is valuable to him.
We Need to Talk About KEVIN
Lionel Shriver
19 July 2005
Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian’s son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin’s upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters.
Heart of Midlothian
Sir Walter Scott
8 June 2005
1736 and the people of Edinburgh are infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard. His death reprieved by a distant monarch they resolve to take their own revenge. At the centre of the story is Edinburgh’s forbidding Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.
The Third Policeman
Flann O’Brien
27 April 2005
This novel is about a hilarious and terrifying murder case. You feel at many times dislocated and trapped in a surreal comedy, but the underlying ideas of the story are quite serious. In a sense, the murder is over and solved in the first sentence. The rest of the novel is a contemplation of the psychological and metaphysical consequences of it.
Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell
Gitta Sereny
10 March 2005
This book pieces together the damaged life of Mary Bell, who aged 11 was tried and convicted of manslaughter after the death of two young boys. Only as an adult has she been able to realise the moral enormity of her crimes. The story of her life forces the reader to consider society’s responsibility for children's crime.
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
8 February 2005
Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmain family and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recgonize his spiritual and social distance from them.
Thursbitch
Alan Garner
7 December 2004
In 1755, Jack Turner is found frozen to death near his home in Thurbitch Valley, a woman's single footprint found beside him. 250 years later, Ian and Sal think they see and hear Jack Turner and the two of them find themself thrust into an ancient story of the moors.
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
2 November 2004
In 1845, Thoreau began a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself on the shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau’s classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and the freedom it gave him.
A History of God
Karen Armstrong
30 September 2004
The idea of a single divine being - God, Yahweh, Allah - has existed for over 4000 years. In this account of the evolution of belief Armstrong examines Western society’s unerring fidelity to this idea of one God and the many conflicting convictions it engenders.
The Soldier’s Return
Melvyn Bragg
10 August 2004
When Sam Richardson returns from World War II to Wigton in Cumbria, he finds little has changed, as far as his own limited prospects go. In his absence, though, his young family has changed immensely, and Sam struggles to adjust to life in peacetime.
Pharos
Alice Thompson
22 June 2004
A young woman is washed up on the shores of a remote lighthouse island off the coast of Scotland. She does not know who she is or how she got there. The keepers of the lighthouse take her in and feed and clothe her. But this mysterious woman is not all that she seems, and neither is the island.
K-Pax
Gene Brewer
25 May 2004
A man is detained at Grand Central Station, New York, claiming that his name is Prot and that he has come from the planet K-Pax. He is turned over to psychiatrist Dr. Mark Powell who starts to doubt his own judgement and begins to wonder whether Prot is indeed from a distant planet.
Northern Lights
Philip Pullman
1 April 2004
In this first part of the Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra’s friend Roger disappears. She and her daemon, Pantalaimon, determine to find him. Their quest leads them to the bleak splendour of the North where a team of scientists is conducting unspeakably horrible experiments.
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens
25 February 2004
Nell’s grandfather falls into poverty, under the control of Mr Quilp, through his gambling debts. The novel harks back to a time of innocence unlike the industrial landscape of the Midlands through which Nell has passed.
The Seville Communion
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
6 January 2004
When the Pope receives an anonymous plea to save a church slated for demolition, the Vatican sends Father Lorenzo Quart to investigate a diverse collection of people fighting to save the building. Once in Seville, Father Quart finds himself collar-deep in intrigue.
The Little Friend
Donna Tartt
18 November 2003
The story of a young girl with an overactive imagination who tries to solve the murder of her brother who died 12 years earlier. It's set in the deep south of the USA and is alive with gothic/biblical imagery and an amazing assortment of vivid characters.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
30 September 2003
The saga of two Yorkshire families in the remote Pennine Hills. The book has been interpreted as an historical romance, a ghostly thriller, a psychological love-story, a religious allegory and a nature poem. This is the author's only novel.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
12 August 2003
Setting out to reconstruct a murder that took place 27 years earlier, this chronicle moves backwards and forwards in time, through the contradictions of memory and moments lost in time. Its irony gives the book the nuances of a political fable.
The Magic Toyshop
Angela Carter
17 June 2003
Melanie walks naked in the midnight garden whereupon omens of disaster swiftly follow, transporting Melanie from rural comfort to London, to the Magic Toyshop. Using magic and myth, this is a story of sexual awakening.
The Company of Wolves
Angela Carter
30 April 2003
This film was a collaboration between director Neil Jordan and feminist author Angela Carter, based upon the classic children's story ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, but is filled with dark, menacing, and sexual imagery, all of which are used in the screenplay to create this stunning piece of gothic horror.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula LeGuin
18 March 2003
While on a mission to the planet Gethen, earthling Genly Ai is sent by leaders of the nation of Orgoreyn to a concentration camp from which the exiled prime minister of the nation of Karhide tries to rescue him.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
28 January 2003 (Lyceum Theatre)
She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the “crème de la crème” of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.
The Child That Books Built
Francis Spufford
10 December 2002
Spufford was a voracious reader as a child, finding an escape from his family’s problems behind the printed lines on a page. While writing this memoir of childhood reading, he reread all the books he had loved and attempted to find out just why he had read so catatonically, and how it had shaped him.
Heavenly Creatures
Peter Jackson (Dir.)
29 October 2002
In 1954 two teenage girls brutally murdered one of the their mothers in what must be the most sensational murder in New Zealand history. “Heavenly Creatures” tells the strange story of these two girls and their unique relationship.
Iris
John Bayley
24 September 2002
John Bayley and Iris Murdoch have been married for more than 45 years. She has shown the degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s Disease for the last four years. He chronicles a shared experience that can no longer be shared except with those outside of it, as he copes, rather than grieves.
The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch
24 September 2002
Charles, a retired theatre director, retires to a small village where he encounters Hartley, the woman he loved years ago when they were both children, and who is now happily married to a man Charles despises.
Little Infamies
Panos Karnezis
6 August 2002
This collection comes from Greek author Panos Karnezis, his subject matter is ordinary tales about ordinary people, and like Chekhov he manages to make the seemingly ordinary into something fascinating. Karnezis writes about the people in a poor, isolated Greek village with a series of connected tales.
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
19 June 2002 (Pizza Express)
The moonstone is a yellow diamond of unearthly beauty brought from India and given to Rachel Verrinder as an eighteenth birthday present, but the fabled diamond carries with it a terrible curse.
Driving Over Lemons
Chris Stewart
26 March 2002
Chris Stewart, skilled sheep-shearer and sometime Genesis drummer, took one look at the the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and decided that's where he wanted to be. This is the story of his adventures coming to terms with the terrain, the lifestyle and, of course, the locals.
Quarantine
Jim Crace
5 February 2002
Four travellers enter the Judean desert to fast and pray for their lost souls. They encounter the evil merchant, Musa, who holds them in his tyrannical power. Yet there is also another, a faint figure in the distance, fasting for 40 days, a Galilean who they say has the power to work miracles.
A Wild Herb Soup
Emilie Carles
11 December 2001
Emilie Carles was born in 1900 in south eastern France. An ardent pacifist all her life, in later years she became a fierce environmentalist and protected her home, the idyllic Claree valley, from the hands of developers. This enchanting autobiography tells of a world that has largely disappeared.
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier
30 October 2001
The Dutch painter Vermeer has remained one of the great enigmas of 17th-century Dutch art. The mysterious portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has fascinated art historians for centuries, and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier’s novel.
The Kitchen God’s Wife
Amy Tan
11 September 2001
Pre-Revolutionary China to present day America. It covers the themes of cultural differences, the problems of exile, the generation gap and above all the special relationship between mothers and daughters.
From the Holy Mountain
William Dalrymple
7 August 2001
In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. More than a thousand years later William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps.
Age of Iron
J.M. Coetzee
26 June 2001
Set in South Africa, this is the story of a retired university teacher who learns, in the same day, that she is dying of cancer and that she has a vagrant in her yard. The story describes the contrast between the dreams of the old woman and the political and social situation around her.
