Reading Group Roundup: January 2026
PRG groups were very active all the way through 2025, with meetings full of ambitious books and lively book talk. In November and December choices ranged from dystopian nightmares to the heartwarming redemption of A Christmas Carol.
The group at the Mount read Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, first published in 1985 but still relevant more than 25 years later. It has also been made into six very successful TV series, running from 2017 to 2025.
Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. But Offred fights back.
Discussion ranged widely around the questions raised by the book: the meaning of freedom and the difference between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’; the structure of the book and the frequent flashbacks that reminded some members of prison experience and time spent thinking back to happier times and wondering what went wrong.
At Wandsworth one of the groups read Yoko Agawa’s quiet dystopia, The Memory Police. On an unnamed and isolated island, familiar things – hat, ribbon, bird, rose – suddenly have no meaning and the inhabitants docilely co-operate with the memory police to destroy and forget all trace of them.
The book raises big questions and provoked great discussion. ‘What are we if our memories are simply removed?’ ‘What I found unsettling was that their life just continued despite the losses.’ One member had firsthand experience of Japanese customs and language which fascinated everyone. The memory police themselves were seen as an ‘unsettling and insidious threat’ and raised many questions: who were they?, why didn’t they forget? The overall effect of the book was well summed up: ‘It’s haunting and it stays with you’. For some the story brought back memories of dead loved ones. As the facilitator put it, their willingness to talk about this was ‘a testimony to the safe space the book club has become for the members’.
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a dystopian Western where it’s no longer possible to know who the bad guys are, much less overcome them. The story is set close to the Texas–Mexico border where drugs control everything. At the centre of the book is the voice of Sheriff Ed Bell, a kind of tragic hero who knows he’s defeated even as he tries to bring order and decency back.
The group at Wormwood Scrubs read it with great care and readers were alert to both the big questions of morality and McCarthy’s distinctive style, ‘I’ve never seen “and” used like that before’. There was detailed recall of individual scenes and the best kind of discussion, both lively disagreement and genuinely collective talk – ‘what did we all make of it?’ The power of the book had also already led one member to several other McCarthy novels. In the words of the facilitator, ‘Wonderful’.
The group at Wormwood Scrubs read it with great care and readers were alert to both the big questions of morality and McCarthy’s distinctive style, ‘I’ve never seen “and” used like that before’. There was detailed recall of individual scenes and the best kind of discussion, both lively disagreement and genuinely collective talk – ‘what did we all make of it?’ The power of the book had also already led one member to several other McCarthy novels. In the words of the facilitator, ‘Wonderful’.
Like many others, one of the Frankland groups read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for their December meeting. The discussion was full of gusto, from comparisons with the Muppets version to the book’s message: ‘do the right thing, repent your past failings and be reborn!’ Some were fascinated by the details of social history – ‘the goose cooked in the baker’s oven because there wasn’t one at home’ And how could anyone resist Dickens’ delight in Christmas, from the food and tomfoolery to the warm togetherness and good cheer.
Prison Reading Groups (PRG) was created in 1999 to set up, support and fund informal reading groups in prisons. We currently support more than 75 groups in over 50 prisons nationwide. If you’re interested, check with your library to see if there’s a group in your prison. PRG is part of registered charity Give a Book.