Book Lounge....... with Gloucester Book Club: Recent Episodes
Christina Young
With so many great books out there, do you find it hard to choose your next read? Are you a book club member or organiser looking for inspiration? Let our book group help you decide. Every month we pick one book we’ve read together and share our thoughts in our podcast!
Is your ability to focus and pay attention in free fall? You are not alone. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for just three minutes. But it’s not your fault. Your attention didn’t collapse. It has been stolen. Internationally bestselling author Johann Hari shows twelve deep factors harming our focus. Once we understand them, together, we can take back our minds.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
In the brief golden years of King Edward VII's reign, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is a 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled.Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love. So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Shortlisted for The British Book Awards 2023 Fiction Book of the Year. ‘O'Farrell paints as evocative a picture of Renaissance Italy as she did Shakespearean England in the former Waterstones Book of the Year Hamnet, as Cosimo de' Medici's third daughter learns to navigate an opaque Florentine court and an enigmatic new husband’ ~ Waterstones --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
The thrilling follow-up to the award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird: Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is on the hunt for a boy who's gone missing - but it's the boy's family of white supremacists who are his real target9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes dark.Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
It is the tale, simply told, of one ordinary middle-aged man - Bill Furlong - who in December 1985, in a small Irish town, slowly grasps the enormity of the local convent's heartless treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies (one instance of what will soon be exposed as the scandal of the Magdalene laundries).--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Gloucester Book Club’s top 3 books read and discussed in 2023 and voted for by members of book club --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
From Stories For Christmas and the festive season - British Library--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Taken from Stories for Christmas and the festive season - British Library Women Writers--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Redhead by the Side of the Road returns with a luminous new novel that paints a joyous and painfully truthful portrait of family life ~ Waterstones--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
The second episode of our Halloween series of short stories from Spooky Ambiguous, ghost stories and poetry fangs and fairy tales, published by Crumps Barn Studios. Suitable for children. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
Taken from Spooky Ambiguous - an intriguing collection of short stories and poetry where nothing and no-one is as they seem. With permission from Crumps Barn Studio in The Cotswolds --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
When the Nazis march into Paris, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear, including her beloved Library. Together with her fellow librarians, Odile joins the Resistance with the best weapons she has: books. But when the war finally ends, instead of freedom, Odile tastes the bitter sting of unspeakable betrayal.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
“A passionate condemnation of the misogyny Jack the Ripper's victims have been held in for over a century, The Five tells an engrossing group biography of Victorian womanhood, blighted by poverty and powerless against casual and constant abuse” ~ Waterstones --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
“Tackling the issue of long-term mental illness with wit and candour, Mason’s remarkable novel takes a rounded, empathetic look at the condition through the experiences of a middle-aged woman who has struggled to find contentment in her adult life” ~ Waterstones
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But there she was Sadie Green, in the flesh. And to see her almost made him want to cry. It was as if she were a mathematical proof that had eluded him for many years, but all at once, with fresh, well-rested eyes, the proof had a completely obvious solution. There’s Sadie, he thought. Yes. ‘A brilliant story about life’s most challenging puzzles: friendship, family, love, loss’ ~ Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
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Waterstones book of 2022, British Book Awards author of 2023, debut novelist Bonnie Garmus brings us Lessons in Chemistry. “smart,funny, joyous and powerful featuring an unconventional female scientist with a quiet game plan to change the world”. Listen in to our discussion! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. In this episode you’ll hear Christina, Tony and James sharing their thoughts about the book. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/christina-young31/message
A dazzling new novel of friendship, identity and the unknowability of other people – from the international bestselling author of Home Fire, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad.This year, 1988, anything seems possible for the girls; and for Pakistan, emerging from the darkness of dictatorship into a bright future under another young woman, Benazir Bhutto. But a snap decision at a party celebrating the return of democracy brings the girls’ childhoods abruptly to an end. Its consequences will shape their futures in ways they cannot imagine.Three decades later, in London, Zahra and Maryam are still best friends despite living very different lives. But when unwelcome ghosts from their shared past re-enter their world, both women find themselves driven to act in ways that will stretch and twist their bond beyond all recognition.Best of Friends is a novel about Britain today, about power and how we use it, and about what we owe to those who’ve loved us the longest.--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christina-young31/message
A brilliantly moving story of the cost of secrets and the power of hope, Flamingo revolves around two families, an unforgettable summer they spend together and a re-encounter decades later that changes everything. Waterstones--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christina-young31/message
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe, Still Life by Sarah Winman, A Town Solace called Solace by Mary Lawson--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christina-young31/message
“In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an English schoolboy arrives unannounced at his piano teacher’s house. He stands on her doorstep in his drainpipe trousers and sharp-toed winklepickers, twitchy with eroticised terror. The boy, Roland Baines, is 14; his teacher, Miss Cornell, is 25. Roland fears that the world is about to end, and he will die a virgin. Miss Cornell does not turn him away. What happens between them in that quiet cottage will score a line across Roland’s life. It is “the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail”. Guardian --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christina-young31/message
A festive tale from ‘Festive Spirits’ written by Kate Atkinson 2019. Read by Christina Young--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/christina-young31/message
Nineteen-year-old William’s decision to volunteer at the tragic scene of the 1966 Aberfan landslide transforms his life forever in this moving story about sacrifice and compassion.
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A moving and intensely felt examination of the lengths to which we will go to seek protection and security in others. Returning to haunted Cornish landscapes familiar from other Gale novels, it is the story of individuals in search of a family.
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A spooky short story taken from a wonderful collection of gothic fairy tales and poetry, where nothing and no one is as they seem…..
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A short story for Halloween from Spooky Ambiguous - a collection of ghost stories and poetry, fangs and fairy tales published by Crumps Barn Studio in the Cotswolds and read by Christina Young
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Ten years ago, Sophie Shaw vanished. Kat, a technician who works in a DNA testing lab, is still haunted by the unsolved disappearance, and when she notices a suspicious tweet about the case online, she calls in a tip. A few weeks later she learns that a man is being questioned, and drunkenly sends out a tweet of her own, boasting about her role in this breakthrough by the police.
But the man is released and Kat quickly finds herself back on Twitter, navigating through the abusive messages she’s received and initiating an angry exchange with the anonymous man she’s convinced has escaped justice. Unfortunately, though, she failed to hide her real identity—and soon she starts feeling paranoid about every man she encounters. As her drinking escalates and her life begins to fall apart, it’s unclear whether someone is really out to destroy her—or if she is destroying herself . . .
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A spooky story for Halloween set in the English countryside taken from a collection of short stories and poetry with a witchy feel ‘Spooky Ambiguous’. Published by Crumps Barn Studios. Read by Christina Young
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * This sweeping novel from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.
"An immersive saga about a passion-filled life."--People
Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.
Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling.
She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics.
Through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.
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Award-winning novelist Jon McGregor returns with a stunning novel that tenderly unpicks the notion of heroism and explores the indomitable human impulse to tell our stories - even when words fail us. The line between sacrifice and selfishness, this is a story of the undervalued, unrecognised courage it can take just to get through the day.
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THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER*
'HELL YES. This is one of those books that has the potential to change things - a monumental piece of research' Caitlin Moran
Imagine a world where...
· Your phone is too big for your hand · Your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body · In a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured.
If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you're a woman.
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'Riveting, twisty, page-turning stuff' Guardian
A 'best books of 2020' pick for BBC Radio 4 Open Book, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Good Housekeeping
'The page turner you've been looking for. Sly, witty and gripping . . . I devoured it' Naomi Alderman 'An utter joy . . . wonderfully skilled' Sarah Perry 'Beguiling, brilliantly creepy, and an utterly compelling read' Claire Fuller 'Tender, creepy and gripping' Sunday Times 'Spellbinding and spooky . . . a dazzling high wire act, superbly absorbing' Sunday Mirror
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Longlisted for Booker Prize 2021. Waterstones Says The acclaimed Canadian author of Crow Lake intertwines the lives of three characters brought together by loss in a quietly moving novel – touched with flashes of humour – about the tenderness and tragedy of everyday lives in a small backwater town.
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From the author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a big-hearted story of people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster. 1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses’ mind that will shape the trajectory of his life – and of those who love him – for the next four decades. Moving from the Tuscan Hills and piazzas of Florence, to the smog of London’s East End, Still Life is a sweeping, joyful novel about beauty, love, family and fate.
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Waterstones Says Another acutely observed evocation of Middle America, Redhead by the Side of the Road is both a deliciously offbeat love story and an affectionate character study of a lovable eccentric, stuck in his ways.
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The Promise is a family saga spanning four decades, each of which features a death in the family. It concerns the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm located outside Pretoria. The family consists of Manie, his wife Rachel, and their children Anton, Astrid, and Amor.
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'A deeply emotional love story that follows one day in the life of Elle Bishop as she navigates the unravelling of secrets, lies and a very complex love triangle' REESE WITHERSPOON
Reviews A beautifully constructed, wonderfully intelligent and beguiling novel, rich with a multitude of pleasures William Boyd It's glorious and gorgeous. I was absolutely immersed and gripped and I'm devastated to have finished it Marian Keyes It's been ages since I was so absorbed in a contemporary novel. I loved it Nick Hornby In rich and sensuous prose, Cowley Heller, cracks open the human heart and exposes her character's choices: the paths not taken and the devastating consequences. I smelled the old cabins and the backwoods, felt the pond water lapping around my ankles, experienced the love and loss of family. A perceptive and powerful story which will stay with me for a long time Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest release and made it onto Barack Obama’s 2021 Reading List! A speculative story about a robot called Klara and her relationship with her human owner, with big implications about what it means to be human. Read with our book club in 2021
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This short story is read by Christina Young and is included in Val McDermid’s chilling short story collection ‘Christmas Is Murder’
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Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?
A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.
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In this episode I chat with Anita about her new book to be published next year.
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Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?
The Heart's Invisible Furies is a deeply engaging and accomplished work. Screamingly funny one minute and heartbreaking the next.' - The Daily Express
'A special read' - BBC Radio 4 Front Row
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An Extra Pair of Hands is beautiful, heartbreaking, honest and ultimately uplifting story of carers, and by carers I mean women. I read it in one sitting, and will be pressing into the hands of everyone I know. A celebration of ageing, womanhood and what love really means.' - Christie Watson
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Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed.
Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
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Normal People is the story of deceptive simplicity, a very accessible narrative of two seemingly mismatched young people who share a profound, inescapable understanding. Beyond that, a study of how one person can forever shape and impact another. In their different ways, Marianne and Connell emerge almost shockingly real and deeply vulnerable.
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This book was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2018 and won the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize.
Just days before Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years is terminally ill, their home is taken away and they lose their livelihood. With nothing left and little time they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the South West Coastal Path.
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In this episode we share our thoughts about this fantastic novel by Celeste Ng.
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In this episode we discuss the themes contained in Hamnet which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020. We also talk about the history of the time and some truths about Shakespeare!
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In this episode we discuss the themes in The Beekeeper of Aleppo
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In this episode we are talking about the themes contained in An American Marriage
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Episode 2 in which we're chatting about the Booker Prize winner Girl, Woman, Other.
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Gloucester Book Club is based in the South West of England. We regularly meet to discuss our monthly book club reads. In this episode a few of us are chatting about one of our favourites in our very first podcast.
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