A Case of Exploding Mangoes

A cheeky political satire that purports to look at the events leading up the death of General Zia, the man who ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, and a great target for satire in any case

On 17 August 1988, a plane carrying General Zia ul-Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan since 1977 and America's staunchest ally in the first Afghan war, went down in flames, killing everybody on board. Zia was accompanied by some of his senior generals, the US ambassador to Pakistan and the head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan, all of whom died. There was no real investigation and no culprit was ever identified.

“A Case of Exploding Mangoes” is set in the months before and the days after the crash. Far from coming to a conclusion about the cause of Zia’s death, Hanif gleefully thickens the stew of conspiracy theories, introducing at least six other possible suspects, including a blind woman under sentence of death, a Marxist-Maoist street cleaner, a snake, a crow, an army of tapeworms and a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force named Ali Shigri, who is also the novel’s main narrator.

Mohammed Zia paints an irreverent and remarkably thorough picture of the complex Pakistani political landscape in the 80s

July/August meeting

The July/August meeting of Book Circle and Pudding Club is tonight!

Random Acts of Heroic Love

Random Acts of Heroic Love is a novel with two intertwining threads. The first is a story:

1992: Leo Deakin wakes up in a hospital somewhere in South America, his girlfriend Eleni is dead and Leo doesn't know where he is or how Eleni died. He blames himself for the tragedy and is sucked into a spiral of despair. But Leo is about to discover something which will change his life forever.

The second is loosely based on the true story of the authors grandfather who fought for the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI and was captured by the Russians in 1915:

1917: Moritz Daniecki is a fugitive from a Siberian POW camp. Seven thousand kilometres over the Russian Steppes separate him from his village and his sweetheart, whose memory has kept him alive through carnage and captivity. The Great War may be over, but Moritz now faces a perilous journey across a continent riven by civil war. When Moritz finally limps back into his village to claim the hand of the woman he left behind, will she still be waiting?

Two stories are told of two men who have had love ripped away from them and how the memory of that love sustains them through their lives.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society.

Scout and Jem Finch are growing up in the tired old Alabama town of Maycomb. Their father, Atticus, is the local lawyer and as a single parent tries to raise his children with honor and respect to their individualism. With the Depression on times are hard, and there is no money to be found anywhere in town.

The surface of the story is an Alcottish filigree of games, mischief, squabbles with an older brother, troubles at school, and the like. None of it is painful, for Scout and Jem are happy children, brought up with angelic cleverness by their father and his old Negro housekeeper. Nothing fazes them much or long. Even the new first-grade teacher, a devotee of the "Dewey decimal system" who is outraged to discover that Scout can already read and write, proves endurable in the long run.

What moves To Kill a Mockingbird to classic status is its morality and ability to draw sympathy out of readers as much today as when it was written in 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird deals with heavy issues--racism, oppression, injustice. Amazingly, it is able to handle these deep and sensitive areas without feeling depressing or preachy. Lee accomplishes this by making the narrator a child and allowing us to learn along with her.

June Meeting

The June meeting of the Book Circle and Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 3rd June

The Secret Scripture

In a mental hospital in modern-day Ireland, Roseanne McNulty sits; a taciturn old woman about whom little is known. She may be approaching her 100th birthday, but there is no family to celebrate or even confirm her age. Preparing herself for death, she resolves to write a “brittle and honest-minded history of myself”, stowing the loose, pen-scored pages under a floorboard in her room.

In the telling, Roseanne's patchwork of memories becomes “history” - according to her own definition, a “fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth”. But it also becomes “scripture”: a sacred text. There is something spiritual in Roseanne's brave reverence for life, in her willingness to find angels in the midst of cruelty, prejudice and ignorance.

Sebastian Barry writes about loss, broken promises, failed hopes. The setting is the western Ireland of traditional literary depiction - subtle Yeatsian references abound in the novel - but Barry's destabilising of inherited images gives the book a punkish energy as well as fiery beauty.

May Meeting

The May meeting of the book circle and pudding club will be on Wednesday 5th May