2 September 2025, The Salt Path, Raynor Winn We chose this as our September book just a few weeks after the Observer had reported at some length on the inconsistencies between Winn’s account in The Salt Path of walking the south coast path with her husband, Moth and their (the Observer’s) investigation into the circumstances … Read more

5 August 2025, Persuasion, Jane Austen, 1818 Jane Austen is everywhere this year, the 250th anniversary of her birth, and not wishing to miss out we chose her last completed novel, Persuasion, for our high summer read. It is regarded by many as her best novel, although it is not her most well-known or popular; … Read more

6 May 2025, The Hours, Michael Cunningham, 2006 The Hours was Virginia Woolf’s working title for what became Mrs Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s novel is clearly inspired by this, one of Woolf’s best-known novels. There are many references to Woolf’s life and writing in The Hours and indeed she features as one of the three … Read more

1 April 2025, A Place Called Winter, Patrick Gale, 2015 Harry Cane’s photograph in the last pages of this book show a handsome, fine featured Edwardian man. He is Patrick Gale’s great grandfather who in the early years of the last century was one of the hundreds of young Englishmen who took up an extraordinary … Read more

The Offing, Benjamin Myers, Bloomsbury, 2019 The Offing explores the unexpected friendship between a young adolescent boy and an eccentric older woman living alone above Robin Hood’s Bay. In the summer following the end of the second world war, 16 year-old Robert leaves his Durham mining village to walk south, yearning for independence and the … Read more

Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020 In her author’s note at the end of the novel, Maggie O’Farrell explains that Shakespeare’s wife Agnes (Anne) Hathaway lived with their three children Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith in Henley Street, Stratford. This much is known. It is also known that Hamnet and Hamlet are the same … Read more

7 January 2025 Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, Simon & Schuster, 2008 This is the first novel by Elizabeth Strout featuring Olive Kitteridge and the novel for which Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; it has been described as a novel in short stories. Strout introduces us to Olive Kitteridge, a larger than life figure, … Read more

5 November The Bell Jar,Sylvia Plath, William Heinemann, 1963 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, is a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman’s (Esther’s) decline into a depressive mental illness and towards suicidal impulses. Esther describes herself as sitting under a bell jar ‘stewing in my own sour air’, suggesting her suffocation by the … Read more

5 November: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, William Heinemann, 1963 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, is a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman’s (Esther’s) decline into a depressive mental illness and towards suicidal impulses. Esther describes herself as sitting under a bell jar ‘stewing in my own sour air’, suggesting her suffocation by … Read more

1 October, The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald, 1988 The Beginning of Spring is a difficult novel to categorise. Set in a minutely observed fully realised Moscow of 1913, it recounts the life of an English printer, Frank Reid in the few weeks after Nellie, his wife, leaves him without explanation to return to England … Read more