Mrs Hemmingway by Niaomi Wood

mrs hemmingway    In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley’s best friend. She is also Ernest’s lover.

Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest’s literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife…

Luminous and intoxicating, Mrs. Hemingway portrays real lives with rare intimacy and plumbs the depths of the human heart.

Pauline 7

June 7

Cai 7

Janine 6

Sally 6

Jane 7

Trude 6

Christine 6

Janet 7

Elaine 7

Jane B
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The Stoner by John Williams

the stoner ‘Stoner is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away’ New York Times

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. Later, he becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

 

Janine 3
Elaine 5
Pauline 8
Janet 8
Christine 7
Sally 8
June 8
Jane 8
Cai 8
Trude 7
 

June T
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Christmas Party Pics

 

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Dec 10th at The Minnow

uncommon reader

Christmas Party –

Bring a book from a charity shop to go into the Xmas lucky dip hamper.

Dress code – wear something red and possibly glitzy

Meet at Christine’s at 7:00, taxi drivers welcome to share birthday champagne.

Christmas read is Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

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A Parisian Affair and Other Stories by Guy De Maupassant

a parisian affairAn extra read for the November book club, some short stories. Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of ‘A Parisian Affair’, between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as ‘At Sea’ and ‘Boule de Suif’, vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant’s stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

Jane 7 Christine 5 June 6 Janine 7 Sally 7

Janine JTrude S
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