Book Club: January 2025

Book Group this month was based upon a book we had read which was translated from a different language. This led to very interesting discussions on the reason for choice as well as the book.

Japanese fiction is experiencing an extraordinary boom at the moment. The first was Banana Yoshimoto Dead End Memories. This is a book of five short stories about young women overcoming personal tragedy. It is quite surreal. Butter by Asako Yuzuki is a satirical, socially conscious crime novel based upon true stories of women on death row in Japan. It was felt to be misogynistic and sexist.

Our other reviews covered writers from several different countries. The Home of the Gentry Ivan Turgenev (Russia) was a challenging and atmospheric love story with an insight into another world and time. Orphan Panuk’s My Name is Red (Turkey) was a detective story set in Istanbul.  Also, it looks at the tensions between east and west cultures.

A German classic The Lost Honour of Katarina Blum by Heinrich Boll looked at the negative power of the media. Letters from my Windmill by Alphonse Daudet was a set of short stories set in Provence in 1860s; some were bleak and others amusing.

Journey without a Ticket was read because the story was similar to our reviewer’s own history. It describes an idyllic childhood in Poland that becomes horrific under occupation. The author Krystyna Kawecka now lives in Nottingham.

A few of us reviewed books of our own choice: Conclave by Robert Harris that the popular film was based upon. Do you read the book before watching the film or the other way round?  Our Hidden Lives by Simon Garfield was a set of diary entries of 1940’s/50’s by ‘ordinary’ British people which told of the hardships of the time. Kate Atkinson’s latest Jackson Brodie novel Death at the Sign of the Rook; former wealthy aristocrats had to convert part of their house into a hotel for murder mystery weekends.

Pamela Ede-Cooper