December 2020
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhikers Guide started as a BBC radio series in 1978. The first of the five novels was published in 1979 and there has also been a TV series and a 2005 feature film.
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace
bypass, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the last fifteen years, the alien Prefect has been posing as an out-of-work actor on earth.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Since it was first published in 1843 A Christmas Carol has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the traditions of Christmas.
One of Dicken’s most enduring and memorable characters, Ebenezer Scrooge is a miser, penny-pinching with no care for his own happiness or those of any others.
Then, one Christmas Eve, he is visited by three ghosts: the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. As they turn the clock back on Scrooge’s own life, it’s tragedies and misdemeanours, and reveal the shadow of the life that is yet to come, they reveal to him the true meaning of Christmas.
November 2020
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese
A selection of witty and provocative essays from the father of New Journalism. Frank Sinatra in a pool hall, troubled by a cold, unable to sing and not in the best of moods; the boxer Floyd Patterson, gentle and dignified, haunted by the sense that he was always a loser; Fidel Castro being introduced to an ageing and infirm Muhammad Ali.
In these compulsively readable profiles one of America’s finest journalists lays bare the man behind the myth.
October 2020
Small Island by Andrea Levy
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn’t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It’s desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door.
True Grit by Charles Portis
There is no knowing what lies in a man’s heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross’s unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster – a man, she’s told, who has grit – and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down and avenge her father’s murder.
September 2020 – You are welcome to pick from these choices too.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
In this latest novel, following the Pulitzer Prize -winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors.
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
The first volume in Philip Pullman’s groundbreaking His Dark Materials trilogy, is a timeless and truly magical journey.
Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and carefree among scholars of Jordan College, Oxford.
The destiny that awaits her will take her to the frozen lands of the Arctic, where witch-clans reign and ice-bears fight. Her extraordinary journey will have immeasurable consequences far beyond her own world…