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