Mercy

What would you do for someone you love? Would you lie? Would you leave? Would you kill? These are just some of the questions confronting the characters in Mercy, which follows the path of two cousins driven to extremes by the power of love.

Cameron McDonald has spent his life guided by duty. As the police chief of a small Massachusetts town that has been home to generations of his Scottish clan, he is bound to the town's residents by blood and honor. Yet when his cousin Jamie arrives at the police station with the body of his wife and the bald confession that he has killed her, Cam immediately places him under arrest. The situation isn't as clear to Cam's wife, Allie. While she is devoted to her husband, she finds herself siding against Cam, seduced by the picture Jamie paints of a man so in love with a woman that he'd grant all her wishes - even the one that meant taking her life.

Into this charged atmosphere drifts Mia, a new assistant at Allie's florist shop, for whom Cam feels an instant and inexplicable attraction. While he aids the prosecution in preparing the case against Jamie, who killed his terminally ill wife out of mercy, Cam finds himself betraying his own wife.

Woven tight with passion and a fast-paced plot, Mercy explores some of today's most highly charged emotional and ethical issues as it draws toward its stunning conclusion. When you love someone, where do you cross the line of moral obligation? And how can you commonly define love and devotion to begin with?

April meeting

The April meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 2nd April

Notes from a Large Country

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, Notes from a Large Country recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth.

You are unlikely to read anyone else who derives quite so much pleasure from meaningless statistics. If those statistics are about the USA (Bryson's homeland) or his adopted England--or even better, comparing one to the other--then he is in heaven. And it is not only the uselessness of the information that interests him, but also the fact that Americans spend millions of dollars and hours each year collecting such data together.

Reading Bill Bryson is not a spectator sport...you are invited-- in fact, compelled--to marvel at how the nation that "has the largest economy, the most comfortably off people, the best research facilities, many of the finest universities and think-tanks, and more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of the world put together" could be the same nation where "13 per cent of women...cannot say whether they wear their tights under their knickers or over them. That's something like 12 million women walking around in a state of chronic foundation garment uncertainty."

March meeting

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

Case Histories

Case Histories continues a winning streak for Kate Atkinson which began when her impressive novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

The protagonist here is a former police inspector who now makes a living as a private investigator. Jackson Brodie is making ends meet in a sweaty Cambridge summer and trying to deal with his own failed marriage. But if his life is adrift, perhaps Brodie can justify his existence via his belief that he can do some good for the people he encounters in his job. But he is to find that he will be irrevocably changed by those he is trying to help.

The scene is set in Cambridge, with three case histories from the past: A young child who mysteriously disappeared from a tent in her back garden; An unidentified man in a yellow jumper who marched into an office and slashed a young girl through the throat; and a young woman found by the police sitting in her kitchen next to the body of her husband, an axe buried in his head.

More than a decade later, private detective Jackson Brodie gets involved investigating some aspect of all three cases. As he delves further into each one, he uncovers family secrets perhaps better left behind unopened doors. As he starts his investigations Jackson has the sinister feeling that someone is following him. As he begins to unearth secrets that have remained hidden for many years, he is assailed by his former wife's plan to take his young daughter away to live in New Zealand, and his stalker becomes increasingly malevolent and dangerous. In digging into the past Jackson seems to have unwittingly threatened his own future.

Case Histories is essentially a balancing act, with evil and ignorance stacked opposite truth and healing.

February Meeting

The February meeting of the Book Circle & Pudding Club will be on Wednesday 6th February.

Memory Keepers Daughter

Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted family drama that explores every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you?

The book opens with a pivotal moment, one that changes the lives of all its characters forever. Forced to deliver his own twins in a snow storm, Dr. David Henry sees at once that while his son is healthy, his daughter has Down syndrome. He makes a split second decision to send his daughter to an institution; meaning to spare his wife what he imagines will be years of grief, he tells her that their daughter died. His nurse can’t leave the infant, however. Instead, she flees with her to Pittsburgh, where she raises the girl as her own.

With the ethical dilemma and family drama at its heart, “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” is appealing to readers who want a rich and deeply moving page turner and something to discuss in their reading groups. It captures the way life takes unexpected turns and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.