Recent Titles
A London men’s group
The Motorcycle Diaries was a great success and the group loved its portrait of the
revolutionary as a young man - “Che on a gap year”. Sophie’s Choice got a drubbing
for sensationalist exploitation and an exhausting style. But the runaway success was
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Everything about it struck a chord, from the central
characters - “two damaged people discovering each other”- to the “singing” Swedish
landscape.
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The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto Che Guevara
The Company of Liars - Karen Maitland
Slumdog Millionaire- Vikas Swarup
The Railway Man - Eric Lomax
Sophie’s Choice - William Styron
A Quiet Flame - Philip Kerr
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
Scottsboro - Ellen Feldman
The Séance - John Harwood
Intuition - Allegra Goodman
The Missing - Tim Gautreaux
A men’s group in the southeast
Mr Pip was a universal favourite and discussion ranged from memories of being
read to as children to curiosity about the Great Expectations parallels. The Reader
provoked heated debate about the morality of the Hanna/Michael relationship and
then a lot of reflection on illiteracy in prison and the aggression it can produce.
“Having to rely on other people to tell you what something written down really says is
very hard for prisoners. Trust doesn’t come easily here.” Despite its length (about
600 pages), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle intrigued almost everyone with its
combination of the surreal and the mundane - “a bit like Alan Bennett til you
remember it’s Japan”.
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Mr Pip - Lloyd Jones
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - Kate Summerscale
The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
Boy A - Jonathan Trigell
The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
The Last King of Scotland - Giles Foden
Scottsboro - Ellen Feldman
Fathers and Sons - Richard Madeley
Gods Behaving Badly - Marie Phillips
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Carry Me Down - M J Hyland
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Another London men’s group
Dreams from my Father led to talk about the possibilities of ‘post-racial’ culture and
identity and lots of personal stories and experience of race in Britain. There was high
praise for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and the way the child’s point of view
creates new perspectives for the adult reader. And the group found Blindness really
intriguing, from the idea of a sudden epidemic of sightlessness to the way the author
makes us live the blindness of the characters.
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Dreams from my Father - Barack Obama
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Blood at the Bookies - Simon Brett
Slumdog Millionaire - Vikas Swarup
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz
Scottsboro - Ellen Feldman
Next - Michael Crichton
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Dirty South - Alex Wheatle
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Gang Leader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh
The Railway Man - Eric Lomax
A women’s group in the southeast
Non-fiction has gone particularly well recently. Call the Midwife took group members
back through family memories, as she cycles round London delivering babies. We all
rather fell for charming con-man Agent Zigzag, and for some “the best book ever”
was Hari’s The Translator.
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Agent Zigzag - Ben McIntrye
The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur - Daoud Hari
Dreams from my Father - Barack Obama
Call the Midwife - Jennifer Worth
In the Dark - Deborah Moggach
Perfume - Patrick Susskind
The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney
The Secret River - Kate Grenville
Trauma - Patrick McGrath
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Restless - William Boyd
The Deportees (stories) - Roddy Doyle
Slumdog Millionaire - Vikas Swarup
The House at Riverton - Kate Morton
Another men’s group in the southeast
This is a group that runs itself with the support of a Principal Officer. Members value
the group highly and talk of its “democracy, choice, having a say”. “It challenges me
to read books I wouldn’t otherwise”. “It’s a chance to hook up with other readers”.
Books they report having enjoyed recently include Restless, The Secret River and
Engleby, “about a misfit who sees the world differently”.
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Restless - William Boyd
The Secret River - Kate Grenville
Engleby – Sebastian Faulks
Call the Midwife – Jennifer Worth
No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
Ulverton – David Thorpe
A Case of Exploding Mangoes – Mohammed Hanif
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K Jerome
The Night Watch – Sarah Waters
Ghostwritten – David Mitchell