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

The People of the Book

When Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator, first touches the centuries-old Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, she feels a “strange and powerful” sensation, something “between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.” The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations — miniature scenes “as interpreted in the Midrash,” created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” — are stunning. It’s the spring of 1996 in Sarajevo, and Hanna has been called in to examine the book before it’s put on display.

Woven into the puzzle-solving is the account of Hanna’s romance with the Muslim librarian who has saved the book, as well as glimpses of her disastrous and at times melodramatic relationship with her mother. (“How is your latest tatty little book, anyway? Fixed all the dog-eared pages?”) Readers will eventually learn why Dr. Heath, an eminent neurosurgeon, is so dismissive, but this part of the plot has an artificial feel.

Geraldine Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous novel, “March,” has drawn her inspiration from the real Sarajevo Haggadah. As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah’s illuminations.

April Meeting

The April meeting of the book circle and pudding club will be on Wednesday 1st April.

The Time Travelers Wife

This bestselling and innovative debut novel from Audrey Niffenegger explores the perfect marriage, one that is tested by challenges the couple can neither control nor predict.

The novel tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a librarian, and his wife, Clare Abshire, an artist from a wealthy family who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life. Clare's past is still in Henry's future. Henry begins to experience the events in Clare's childhood at the same time that he experiences life with the adult Clare in the present. In the novel, the future cannot be changed, and many tragic events are foreshadowed in the past.

Niffenegger uses time travel as a way of expressing the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship - that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing. And she certainly weaves her plot well. This is one of those books that makes you want to eat it up from start to finish, eager to see how the twisted curves of time will be straightened out.

White Chocolate Torte

• 75g butter
• 225g ginger biscuits
• 700g white chocolate
• 600ml double cream
• cocoa powder
• icing sugar

Melt the butter and sir in the biscuit crumbs. Allow to set for 15 minutes.

Break up the chocolate, add half the cream and melt slowly over a low heat. Pour into a bowl and allow to cool for 15 minutes.

Whip remaining cream and fold into cooled mixture. Chill overnight.

Dust with icing sugar and cocoa powder before serving.

March meeting

The March meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 4th March

Friends Like These

Danny Wallace knows how to put together a story, and also how to live it. “Friends Like These” comes from the common crisis of people approaching thirty, asking what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what has happened to their youth. He himself is about to turn thirty and his life has become a cliche. Recently married and living in a smart new area of town, he's swapped pints for lattes and had even contemplated buying coasters. Something wasn't right - he was feeling way too grown-up.

Until - Danny finds an old address book containing just twelve names. His best mates as a kid. Where are they now? Who are they now? And how are they coping with this scary concept of being grown-up? And so begins a journey from A-Z, tracking down and meeting his old gang. He travels from Berlin to Tokyo, from Sydney to LA. He even goes to Loughborough. He meets Fijian chiefs. German rappers. Some ninjas. And a carvery manager who's managed to solve time travel. But how will they respond to a man they haven't seen in twenty years, turning up and asking if they're coming out to play?

This journey not only takes Wallace through a number of journeys, but also a number of revelations and realisations, that actually helps him on the road to “becoming a man”. Part-comedy, part-travelogue, part-memoir, Friends Like These is the story of what can happen when you track down your past, and of where the friendships you thought you'd outgrown can take you today.

February Meeting

The February meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 4th February

Half of a Yellow Sun

Half a Yellow Sun is based on the Nigeria-Biafra War that happened in Nigeria from 1967-70. Adichie's writing is an intact narrative and description of the horrors that surrounded those years in Nigeria.

Half of a Yellow Sun follows the lives of five very different characters as they are swept up in rapidly−escalating violent political turmoil. Ugwu is a poor villager‚ employed as a houseboy for the university lecturer Odenigbo. Olanna is a young beautiful middle−class woman‚ who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. Richard is a shy English writer who falls in love with the remote and enigmatic Kainene.

These characters are propelled into violent events that will pull them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways‚ testing their ideals and stretching their loyalties to breaking point.

This book will not hide grief or pain, it will not soothe over the bad, and only emphasize the good. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

January Meeting

The January meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 7th January

The Shack

The Shack tells the story of a man whose young daughter is murdered and who, four years later, receives a note, apparently from God, inviting him back to the shack where his daughter’s blood had been discovered. He encounters God in the form of a larger-than-life Afro-Caribbean woman.

Mackenzie (Mack) Allen Philip’s, an ordinary American, though one with a painful past of his own, decides one weekend to take his kids on a camping trip in the mountains of Oregon. Nothing unusual – just a fun filled weekend of campfires, hiking, canoeing and enjoying the great outdoors. Until tragedy strikes in the most unexpected way. Mack’s two older kids are out canoeing when they lose control and the canoe flips over.

The reader naturally expects that one or both of them drowns, but Mack succeeds in saving them. Yet while his attention is focused on saving them, a serial killer abducts his younger daughter Missy. As the search progresses, the dress she had been wearing is found torn and bloodied in a Shack, high up in the mountains, implying that she has been murdered.

The shack is a metaphor for “the house inside a human being”, he said, “the place of a soul that gets damaged and twisted by what happens to you”. It is the inner dark place in which people store their hurt, their lies, their addictions and their secrets from the outside world.

William P Young’s The Shack has become a publishing phenomenon in America, and the book is now into its 14th print-run.

December Meeting

The December meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 3rd December

The Road Home

On his interminable bus journey across Europe, bound for London, Lev practises his English: 'Excuse me for troubling you.' 'Do you have anything you could give me?' 'I am legal.' Lev's home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukaemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev, a former lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe's long-term unemployed, is travelling to London to find work.

Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel.

The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. The isolation of the immigrant is something that Tremain never loses sight of.

November Meeting

The November meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 5th November