Book club

Status: Active, open to new members
Group Leader:
Pam O'Neill
Group email: Book club group
When: Fortnightly on Friday mornings
2nd & 4th Friday
Venue: Somni's Cafe

Do you love books? Are you often looking for people to discuss literature with? Lots of people love to read, but it can be hard to find someone to discuss the book you’re reading — especially if you love an uncommon genre. If you’re having a hard time finding people to talk with about your reading material, you might want to consider joining our book club. They’re also great opportunities to meet new people and make new friends with common interests.

Reading is a solitary activity but when a book has moved or stimulated you it's natural to want to discuss it with someone else. A reading group gives you that opportunity. Also, a group encourages you to think a bit more about the books you read - why you like some, hate others. 

Our Book Choice for March is Even The Darkest Night by Spanish author Javier Cercas translated by Ann McLean

A Melchor Marín novel. Winner of Spain's biggest literary prize - the Premio Planeta
When Melchor goes to investigate the horrific double-murder of a rich printer and his wife in rural Cataluña nothing quite adds up. The young cop from the big city, hero of a foiled terrorist attack, has been sent to Terra Alta till things quieten down. Observant, streetwise and circumspect, Melchor is also an outsider.

The son of a Barcelona prostitute who never knew his father, Melchor rapidly fell into trouble and was jailed at 19, convicted of driving for a Colombian drug cartel. While he was behind bars, he read Hugo's Les Misérables, and then his mother was murdered. Admiring of both Jean Valjean and Javert - but mostly the relentless Javert - he decided to become a policeman.

Now he is out for revenge, but he can wait, and meanwhile he has discovered happiness with his wife, the local librarian, and their daughter, who is, of course, called Cossette.

Slowly at first, and then more rapidly once ordered to abandon the case, he tracks the clues that will reveal the larger truth behind what appears at first to be a cold-blooded, professional killing.

Even the Darkest Night is a thought-provoking, elegantly constructed thriller about justice, revenge, and, above all, the struggles of a righteous man trying to find his place in a corrupt world.

Our Book Choice for April is On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

Genre Non Fiction Memoir Biography and also a True Crime Mystery

In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. There were no screams when she was taken, suggesting the culprit was someone familiar to her, and when she turned up again in a nearby village several days later, she was found in perfect health and happiness. No one was ever accused of a crime. The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents never discussed it. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century.

This was not the only secret her parents kept from her. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also hid the fact that she’d been adopted, and that shortly after the kidnapping, her name was changed from Grace to Betty.

In on Chapel Sands Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies.