Thank you to Robert Davison for writing this book review and for inviting the author to our meeting. For August our book of choice was ‘City of Devils’ by  Diana Bretherick who is a local author, living in Market Harborough. From a very early age Diana was fascinated with crime and murder and her many … Read more

Thank you to Jenny Hirst for the following review of ‘Stanley and Elsie’ by Nicola Upson. This is a book which tells the story of the family life of the painter, Stanley Spencer, his wife, Hilda, their daughters, Shirin and Unity, Patricia Preece, Stanley’s muse and then lover and her lifelong partner Dorothy Hepworth, both … Read more

Thank you to Andrew Darbourne for the following review. A smaller than usual number of Bookworms met in June to discuss ‘Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. The author was born in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and Creole mother in Dominica in the Windward Islands and died in Exeter, UK, in 1979. … Read more

Our book of choice for May was ‘Trespass’ by Rose Tremain, the award-winning author of, among others, the Whitbread Novel of the Year ‘Music and Silence’ and ‘Restoration’ which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  The story mainly takes place in a silent valley near the village of La Collune in southern France, where the … Read more

‘Go Set a Watchman’ by Harper Lee was our book of choice for April. Most group members had read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Lee’s 1961 Pulitzer Prize winning classic and, despite the fact that ‘Go Set a Watchman’ wasn’t published until 2015, it was the first of the two books to be written. Originally promoted as … Read more

‘The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands’ by Sarah Brooks takes the reader back to 1899 on board the Great Trans-Siberian Express on its journey from Beijing to Moscow, traversing the menacing yet intriguing Wastelands. We are given the layout of the great luxury train in diagrammatic form, an effective tool helping to immerse the … Read more

In February the Bookworms group moved to a new venue at ‘Homestart South Leicestershire’ where we immediately felt at home. Most people associate the author Hilary Mantel with her historical Wolf Hall trilogy, but this month one of her lesser known, earlier novels, ‘An Experiment in Love’, was our chosen read. The story centres around … Read more

To start the year off, the group read ‘All the Broken Places’ by John Boyne, a prolific Irish author whose novels are published in 60 languages, making him the most globally translated Irish writer of all time. He is probably best known for his 2006 novel ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and it’s from … Read more

To round off the year, our chosen author was Graham Greene whose works span a large part of the 20th century. He is described as a Catholic novelist and this particular religion features as a theme in much of his writing. Greene was also interested in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage, … Read more

 E. M. Forster’s first novel,  ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, was our November book choice. It was published in 1905 following the author’s travels in Europe when he was only 26 years old and the title comes from a line in Alexander Pope’s poem, An Essay on Criticism – “For fools rush in where angels … Read more