Can you recommend a good book for my bookgroup please??????????????

[MarsLady]

Off to bookgroup in 20 minutes. Haven't a clue what to suggest. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

Small Island by Andrea Levy?

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (not sure of sp)

stasiland by someone 9 sorry not much help_

Oh anna funder really good

would second small island too

Notes from a Scandal, Zoe Heller

go for small island
really goos and no one woudl hate it

What's 'small island' about Coddy?

The Sari Shop by...crikey, I can't remember. Anyway, it's v. good.

We've done notes on a scandal. Small Island looks interesting, esp as in paperback. Any more, like to have a few up my sleeve. Very grateful to my lifesavers here.

its a bout theri are several main characters west indians who arrive in the uk during ww2 or afterwards and their treatment asn so on and its layered with theri realtionship with a london family/woman

hard to describe really
really readable

"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. Gilbert's wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. "

"really enjoyed reading this book. I felt that I learned something about what it was to be English during and immediately after WW2, which I didn't expect.

The story moves between Jamaica in the late 1930s and 1940s and England and contrasts the myth of the British Empire with the harsh realities of every day life. The story is told in three threads, narrated by a male and female Jamaican couple and an English woman struggling to cope with the hand that life has dealt her.

Certainly worth a read.

"

Small Island also v. good

Like the sound of that Coddy - thanks.

Middlesex is good in that it has some history in too - about a Greek couple that move to the US in the 30's. Also about incest and the resulting offspring.

I loves stasiland if you want more factual
it written by an austalian
oh hold on will cut and paste from amazon

sounds good coddy. we yellows must stick toegther

lol
"Amazon.co.uk Review
Anna Funder's penetrating and dispassionate Stasiland really begins with one significant date: the year 1989. The Berlin Wall falls and the history of a country that had become a microcosm of the Cold War is changed irrevocably. With the hated symbol of the enforced division between East and West reduced to rubble, the two GermanysEast and Westare able to reunite; grey, depressed East Germany becomes a memory.
After the initial euphoria, the change was hard for the world to accept, but it was both exhilarating and unsettling for the denizens of the Soviet bloc state, who had lived under the brutal, paranoid regime of the secret police, the dreaded Stasi of the title. For the inhabitants of East Germany, there were some stark statistics: one in 50 East Germans had informed on a fellow citizen, and human beings behaved in fashions unthinkable just the space of a wall away.

The amazing stories that Anna Funder tells in Stasiland bring to life with extraordinary vividness both the dark and the more human sides of life in the former East Germany: a young girl who could have started World War III, the man who laid down the line that became the Wall. These and a hundred other tales (from both the recent past and the present, as Berlin still struggles with the legacy of history) make for a highly unusual book, the final effect of which is as life-affirming and positive as the destruction of the Wall must have been for those who watched. --Barry Forshaw
"

( as I said, its good ;) )

you well read bunch

Thanks girls. Took the suggestions in. We decided that Stasiland could wait until after Christmas. The group decided on I'm not scared by Niccolo Ammaniti and The Kite Runne by Khaled Hosseini. We're not meeting until mid January now and so thought we would do 2 books about different types of childhood.

Thanks again.

Music and Silence by Rose Tremain (you will not want to put it down honestly) it's v.v. good!..set in 1629 and about 454 pages long

forgot to mention it's very raunchy in parts.

raunchy is good...

have bought zoe heller on your reccommendatiom

take a look at the absolutely unputdownable books thread under book club

Notes on a Scandal is fantastic