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.
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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: