Hamm Court Book Club – Page 43 – For the enjoyment of friends, books and wine …

Hello from the Gillespies by Monica McInerey

For the last thirty years, Angela Gillespie’s annual Christmas letter has been full of her family’s triumphs. But this year Angela surprises everyone, including herself – she tells the truth.
Angela’s husband is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Her grown-up daughters are more out of control than ever. And her youngest child spends all of his time talking to an imaginary friend.
With fantasy thoughts of a life before marriage and motherhood becoming more than just an innocent daydream, Angela’s real life is slowly slipping out of focus.
But, as the repercussions of her ruthlessly honest letter begin to pile up, a shocking event takes Angela from her family, and she realises she should have been more careful of what she wished for. . .

Elaine 8

Jane 8

Sally 7

June 6

Trude 4

Christine 7

Janine 9

Rebecca 9

Pauline 8

Janet 8

Cai 8

Mrs Hemmingway by Niaomi Wood

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

The Stoner by John Williams

‘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