This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine.
The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Penguin) ‘It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain. Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix – or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself. Or maybe – as she has long believed – there is something wrong with her. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha – on the edge of 40 – friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) ‘Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. It is a role that will lead her to an unexpected discovery, throwing fresh and spellbinding light on the story of the unknowable Marian Graves.’ But it is an obsession with flight that consumes her most. Now, as she is about to fulfil her greatest ambition, to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole, Marian crash lands in a perilous wilderness of ice. Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is drawn inexorably to play the enigmatic pilot on screen. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Penguin) ‘From her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, from the rugged shores of New Zealand to a lonely iceshelf in Antarctica, Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger. Determined to live an independent life, she resists the pull of her childhood sweetheart, and burns her way through a suite of glamorous lovers.
Do you have a favourite on the 2022 shortlist? Let us know in our comments forum, we love to hear from you. Have you read The Book of Form and Emptiness? Maybe you’ve read something else by Ruth Ozeki. Does Ozeki’s book hold up against the competition? And if you’re only going to read one, which one should it be? How about for book club? Which sparked the most debate? All this and more.
#Young souls book club full
Listen in for our full and frank take on the winner, The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, and the other five shortlisted books. “How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘Always the bell rings and the baker calls.’ It did indeed prove almost impossible to get four women into the same room to discuss all six books on the 2022 Women’s Prize shortlist, but after much postponement and delay we return to our roots minus our two planned guests, but with all our usual enthusiasm for discussing and debating the shortlist.
0 kommentar(er)
