The Elegance of the Hedgehog

picRenee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society s expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this façade lies the real Renée: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renée lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever. The Gourmet, Muriel Barbery’s first novel is published on 1st September 2009.

Scores on the doors:

Jane 8
Pauline C 6
Elaine E 6
Rebecca H ?
Janet J 6
Janine J 6
Sally M 7
Cai M 8
Christine P 7
Trude S. ?
June T 6

Janine J
Score:

Dec 10th at The Minnow

A short Christmas read.
Alan Bennett is the author of Writing Home, The Madness of George III, Talking Heads, The Clothes They Stood Up In and much else besides. Miss Shepherd lived in a Robin Reliant opposite Bennett’s house in Camden Town. After a series of attacks on her van, he suggested she move, with her van, to his front drive. Initially reluctant, she agreed – and Bennett landed himself a tenancy that went on for fifteen years. The Lady in the Van is probably Alan Bennett’s best-known work of non-fiction, and follows his other little blockbuster The Clothes They Stood Up In.
Uncategorized
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Midnight in Peking

Who killed Pamela Werner?On a frozen night in January 1937, in the dying days of
colonial Peking, a body was found under the haunted watchtower. It was Pamela
Werner, the teenage daughter of the city’s former British consul Edward Werner.
Her heart had been removed.A horrified world followed the hunt for Pamela’s
killer, with a Chinese-British detective team pursuing suspects including a
blood-soaked rickshaw puller, the Triads, and a lascivious grammar school
headmaster. But the case was soon forgotten amid the carnage of the Japanese
invasion… by all but Edward Werner. With a network of private investigators
and informers, he followed the trail deep into Peking’s notorious Badlands and
back to the gilded hotels of the colonial Quarter.Some 75 years later, deep in
the Scotland Yard archives, British historian Paul French accidentally came
across the lost case file prepared by Edward Werner. Unveiling an undercover sex
cult, heroin addicts and disappearing brothels, the truth behind the crime can
now be told – and is more disturbing than anyone could imagine.Not just the
unputdownable story of a savage murder, Midnight in Peking is a sweepingly
evocative account of the end of an era.

Scores on the doors:

Jane 8
Pauline C 8
Elaine E 8
Rebecca H 8
Janet J 8
Janine J 6
Sally M 9
Cai M 8
Christine P 8
Trude S. 7
June T 8

Janet J
Score:

The Russia House by John le Carré

Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a
self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley
who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair,
was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest
asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise. Nearly a year
later, his drunken promise returns to haunt him. A reluctant Barley is quickly
trained by British Intelligence and sent to Moscow to liaise with a go-between,
the beautiful Katya. Both are lonely and disillusioned. Each is increasingly
certain that if the human race is to have any future, all must betray their
countries …In his first post-glasnost spy novel, le Carr� captures the effect
of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy
puppet-masters who command them.Contains a foreword and afterword by the author.

Scores on the doors:

Jane  not read
Pauline C   7
Elaine E  6
Rebecca H   not read
Janet J   6
Janine J   not read
Sally M   7
Cai M   5
Christine P   8
Trude S. 7
June T   8

Sally M
Score:

So Much for That by Lionel Schriver

What do you pack for the rest of your life? The explosive new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Shepherd Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one way ticket away from the daily grind. When he sells his handyman business for $1million, ‘The Afterlife’ seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted one reason after another why now isn’t the time to go. Determined to take the plunge, Shep announces that he is leaving for an island off the coast of Tanzania: with or without her. However, Glynis has an announcement of her own – she needs his health insurance.

Illustrating how a marriage is both stressed and strengthened by medical crisis, So Much for That puts the uncomfortable fiscal question: how much is one life worth? Enlivened by Shriver’s signature acerbity and political outrage, it’s surely the funniest and most entertaining novel about illness and death one’s ever likely to read.

Scores on the doors:

Jane  not at meeting
Pauline C   9
Elaine E  9
Rebecca H   7
Janet J   not read
Janine J   9
Sally M   7
Cai M   8
Christine P   5
Trude S. 9
June T   9

Pauline C
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