The book is set in the early 21^st century and shows how people’s lives link and how these connections can have an impact.  It’s almost a series of short stories that explore the impact of war, how politics and comedy battle for supremacy.  It exposes the greed of the rich, with bankers desperate to have a cinema room in the basement whilst in the next street, people need to access foodbanks.  Friendships are tested, the police are called in to investigate a series of murders and a has been singer heads off to the jungle to join other celebrities. Coe is so good at looking at life and bringing it into the spotlight and he uses his acerbic wit to entertain and to provoke a reaction.

Grenville’s novel was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 and it’s clear why.  Set in Australia at the end of the 19^th century, we meet Dolly Maunder, a woman who is trying to throw open the doors that are slowly opening for women.  Born into poverty, Dolly is clever, determined and always wanting to be on the move.  She is inspired to do and be more than her trussed up ancestors found in the family album. She marries, has children, her husband has affairs and as a family they move from one business to another as Dolly strives to make her dreams come true. There’s a rags to riches tale until Dolly finally finds peace and settles down.  Grenville has created a fiction around the life of her grandmother, a pioneer in bringing down societal expectations of women.

Strout is a magician when it comes to writing about the human condition and small town America. In this novel, she brings together a host of characters from previous books and cleverly links them into one narrative. We have Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, twins Bob and Jim Burgess and Isabelle from Isabelle and Amy.  Olive and Lucy form an unlikely friendship based on stories about themselves and other people they have known.  The book is a beautiful exploration of friendship, the glue that holds us together and how love is always love whatever form it takes.  Just a wonderful read.

Liz Mistry was one of the panellists at a crime writers' event recently held at Leigh and inspired a member of the group to give one of her books a try. The novel is very similar to that of Angela Marsons, a crime writer from the West Midlands. Last Request is one of a series about a female Asian cop, set in Bradford, where the group member was brought up. There is plenty of action, various sub-plots about the main character's family, lots of violence, and a serial killer.  The novel was so good that more of the series will be read.

Harris returns to magical realism in this fairy tale that could easily be a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet.  The King of the Moths and the Queen of the Butterflies fall in love, marry and have a child, but their constant arguing causes the boy to run away.  He visits his friend, the Spider Mage and disappears into another world, that of the Sightless Ones. The Queen is furious and casts everyone out of the Kingdom and there can be no return until a Moth and Butterfly fall in love.  The novel tells the story of yearning, love, loss and redemption.

The main characters are Miss Matty (Matilda) and Miss Mary Smith who is a friend of Miss Matty’s family. Mary has been staying with her from time to time and she is the narrator of this novel. Other characters include  Miss Pole, Mrs. Forrester and Mrs. Jamieson who are members of their social circle. None of them is rich but each feel they belong to a genteel, well-mannered and well-to-do kind of society.  ‘ ... pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.’ This quotation gave immediate interest to the story, a story that got better and better.

Miss Matty and Miss Pole were in their fifties when the story begins. They were so called spinsters and Miss Pole had a very strong opinion against any marriage while Miss Matty had had an admirer when she was young. Unfortunately, he wasn’t good enough of a gentleman for the daughter of the rector. This is very sad because Mr. Holbrook, a good man in his seventies, is still a bachelor and he dies shortly after visiting Miss Matty.

There is also Mr. Peter, a long lost brother of Miss Matty. The story becomes more interesting due to the appearance of a turbaned conjuror, Signor Brunoni whom they get to know closely later on. In fact, his real name was Samuel Brown and he’d been travelling with his wife and a little daughter. During their conversation, Mary found out that they had lived in India and mentions a kind Englishman who helped Mrs. Brown get back to England with her daughter. His name was Aga Jenkyns.

The plot thickens and it could be possible that poor Peter and Aga Jenkyns are one and the same. Mary decides to find out and the reader has to wait for the answer, just as Mary was waiting for mail from India. Meanwhile, Miss Matty has lost most of her fortune by investing unwisely and her situation becomes precarious. She is left with just enough to live on but not enough to engage a servant and she might have to sell the house and rent a small room to lodge in. However, all of her friends and neighbours come to the rescue by setting up a little fund discreetly with the help of Mary’s father.

Peter returns, making Miss Matty a very happy woman and life is getting back to what feels like normal. Whilst there is the hoped for happy ending, not everything is as it seems. There are disagreements, petty recriminations and down-right snobbery. However, no one is perfect and the characters  did try their best under the circumstances of such a different time and place.  It is a really enjoyable read.

This is Mosse’s fourth and last offering in the saga of the Joubert family.  Suzanne Joubert is a refugee, a Huguenot escaping war torn France.  With her elderly grandmother, she sails to Southern Africa in search of information about her ancestor, Louise Reydon-Joubert.  Life is tough in the new colonies but Suzanne learns of the intertwined relationships from the past.  Fast forward 180 years and another member of the Joubert family heads to South Africa.  Isabelle is a travel writer who is determined to write her family back into history but is she in danger and is time running out?

This is such a great debut novel set against the Aberfan disaster of 1966.  The main character is Willaim Lavery, the son of an undertaker.  William’s life is upended when his father dies and again when his mother has him enrolled at the Cambridge Choir School.  He has an incredible voice and is soon given solo parts to sing.  He develops a close friendship with a fellow chorister, Martin.   Something goes wrong, probably caused by his mother, and William leaves the school and returns to live with his Uncle and Howard, his partner.  His mother is furious as she did not want him to go into the family business. William trains to be an embalmer and is at the black tie event to mark his graduation when the news of the Aberfan disaster is announced. Compelled to help, William drives all night to help the community. This traumatic experience has a lasting impact on him and the choices he makes. A powerful read.

This is a book recommended by Stephen Mangan on BBC 2’s programme ‘Between the Covers’. Set in Ireland, it is the story of a long intense relationship between two people.  Steeped in cross border history, the couple find that they can’t live with each other but neither can they live apart. There is a time span from the 1960s to the 1990s and the story is a slow burner. You have to be committed to reading it but the payoff is massive.

Keegan’s economy of writing is fantastic and can be disturbing, leaving the reader unsettled. Here there are three stories about men and women and how a lack of understanding and communication can lead to violence.  There is one scene in particular that is horrible, leaving the reader crying and shaken.  It’s not a pleasant read but it is very thought provoking.

The Radleys seem to be a run of the mill family, with all the usual dysfunctions that entails. But there’s a big difference that Mr and Mrs Radley know but their children are soon to discover.  They are a family of vampires who are abstaining from the usual form of nourishment, that is until one of the children commits a rather blood thirsty faux pas.  It’s quite a funny book and Haig isn’t taking himself seriously here, unlike later books.

Klune is a writer who is gay and the characters in this novel are all male and so the relationships are all male to male.  Robots have killed humans as they have been responsible for the death of earth and now all ‘people’ are AI robots. Or are they? One man saves his son.

This is Austen’s favourite book, ‘her own darling child’.  It tells the love story of Elizabeth Bennett and her beau, Mr. Darcy.  (Yes, we all remember Colin Firth in that scene from the film!)  Austin’s wit is seen in the social sparring, flirtation and intrigue of Regency England.

Bronte used her own experiences to highlight the plight of women who worked as governesses.  Agnes is excited at the thought of leaving her stifling home and becoming a governess in a wealthy upper class family.  However, the reality is grim and she loses her sense of self-worth and her faith in humanity.

The novel is set in the molly houses of Georgian England, where gay men and transvestites can feel safe.  Strong women ran these clubs and protected the men from the possibility of being caught and hanged in the street.  Thomas True heads to London with a dark secret and carpenter, Gabriel Griffin, has to hide his double life as Lotty, a molly house guard.  But there is a rat among the mollies who is betraying them all.

Tessa Ensler is a working class girl made good and she loves her job as a criminal defence barrister.  She fights to defend those pleading not guilty, believing that the law and its system will uncover the real story of a crime.  Innocent until proven guilty is her bedrock and this can lead to the guilty party in a sex crime to be freed. However, when the tables are turned and a co-worker rapes her, Tessa has to be strong in order to bring her attacker to justice.  She has to face the fact that the law was not written for victims and finds herself on trial for what was done to her.  It is a powerful read that shows how sexual assault can be a small event for a man but totally life changing for a woman. It is a powerful but grim read.

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man conducts a one sided conversation with an uneasy American stranger. Our speaker is living the American dream, he’s the top of his class at Princeton, meets a woman who can get him into Manhattan society.  Then 11^th September happens and he finds that the city doesn’t want him anymore and nor does the beautiful woman.  His own identity breaks and reforms, he grows the stereotype beard and develops links to fundamentalism, rather than money, power and love.  He changed and became what people thought he was.

Earth is the second book in Boyne’s ‘The Elements’ series and it follows the trail of a footballer, Evan Kehoe, accused of rape and another player  being an accessory to rape.  You get the back story of each man and an account of the trial. The rapist has many secrets to hide and if convicted, his whole life and career will spiral downwards. On the jury is a doctor whose life is about to crumble but we don’t why. The jury will give their verdict but how will Kehoe judge himself?

James is the retelling of the Huckleberry Finn story from the perspective of James, a black man. Jim finds out that he is going to be sold and taken from his wife and family and so he decides to run away.  Huck fakes his own death in order to escape his abusive father.  There is a dangerous journey down the Mississippi in search of the free states and we see Jim’s real and beautiful character unfold.  It is a book that will make you cry.

It’s possible for women to be heroes and when twenty-year-old nursing student “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, she seeks to break away from her conservative upbringing. It’s 1965 and when her brother is sent to Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows him.  Her limited life has not prepared her and she is soon overwhelmed by the chaos and death.  However, the war is just the start of her journey to independence and adulthood and she has to face further battles back home as the USA becomes a nation divided by the Vietnam war.  Whilst the story focuses on one woman, she stands as a model for all those women who commit themselves to making sacrifices for the nation, even if that nation forgets who they are.

We all know the ending of the story but Bainbridge gives us a different perspective. The ship celebrates luxury, is the carries millionaires and hopefuls to a new life. Bainbridge has us follow the last hours of a group of rich and entitled young men as they wait for the inevitable, making the book based around the class system It is beautifully written but there's really nothing new and the book is slightly disappointing.

Sethe, the book’s protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's first novel, is set in her girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio and it tells the story of her people. Pecola is a lovely girl but each night she asks God for blue eyes so that she can become as popular as the privileged white students at her school. The novel looks at beauty and conformity, class, race and gender and highlights their impact on individual lives.  Pecola bears the heart of every young girl as she seeks love.  But here, there is no happy ending.