Library Forum

It's time for historical fiction, a genre I have neglected in this club! And no better novel than Ben Kane's latest Sunday Times bestseller Fields of Blood set in ancient Rome. The fields of Cannae provide the setting for one of the bloodiest battles in history. But who will triumph? Hannibal and hi...

With all this beautiful sunshine this month's book is unashamedly a holiday read and a total escape. Described by Kate Furnivall, author of The White Pearl as "..The perfect summer read' When Tess Angel receives a solicitor's letter inviting her to claim her inheritance - the Villa Sirena, perched o...

This is the choice for this month's morning book club in Scariff Public Library. I chose it for two reasons, one because I heard Kevin Barry on the radio and he sounded so nice and made me laugh and two because it it short-listed for the 2013 IMPAC award, the only Irish writer on the list! The once-...

I feel we need an injection of sunshine and no better book than this vivid account of life in Montalcino, an intriguing hilltop medieval village in southern Tuscany! From Library Journal This isn't just another "we moved to a foreign country for a better quality of life" book. Instead, it is a leisu...

This book struck me as an unusual and wholly original debut. It's written from the point of view of ten-year old girl Judith McPherson. Judith and her father don’t have much—their house is full of dusty relics, reminders of the mother she’s never known. But Judith sees the world with the clear Eyes ...

How time is flying past. It's February's book time already and this time I thought we should go on an odyssey, 'an odyssey into the frozen heart of a dying continent, sparkling with vignettes if human endurance.' (The Times). I've always loved travel literature and love heading off on adventures wit...

I thought we'd start the year with a well-loved classic Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles. I submerged myself in the world of Hardy for a while and images from this book stay with me to this day. The characters and landscapes are so vivid and intertwined, you will feel what the characters feel, you w...

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happ...

Longlisted for the 2011 MAN BOOKER PRIZE for Fiction, FAR TO GO is a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family's epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy. Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews,...

What if society wasn’t fundamentally rational, but was motivated by insanity? This thought sets Jon Ronson on an utterly compelling adventure into the world of madness. Along the way, Jon meets psychopaths, those whose lives have been touched by madness and those whose job it is to diagnose it, incl...

Who wouldn’t want to read the private thoughts of a Victorian Lady and no ordinary Victorian lady at that. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale instantly grabbed me and I must say I’ve never exclaimed out loud so much while reading a book! For instance w...

It is the photos in this book that sell it to me- a giant otter and the conservationist Diane McTurk; a very proud looking African man with a tooth of some wild animal, (a jaguar perhaps?) on a string around his neck. I want to know more about this inaccessible country and more about the descendants...

I had a look at the returns trolley to see if there was anything interesting and straight away I found Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn and turning to the back cover discovered she has written Daisy Bates in the Desert. I read that non-fiction book some years ago and loved the way it was written and ...

"1971 December Eight days after the end of the war, Sohail Haque stands in a field of dying mustard. The petals of the mustard flower, dried to dust, tickle his nose and remind him of the scent of meat, which he has not tasted in several months." This is the opening of this month's book The Good Mus...

A borrower returned this book to the library today and said it was really good so I'm sharing it with you. Brought up in the Anglo-Welsh borders by an affectionate but alcoholic and feckless mother, Owen Ithell’s sense of self is rooted in his long, vivid visits to his grandparents’ small farm in th...