Synopsis:
Do you remember when you believed in magic?
It is 1917, and while war wages across Europe, in the heart of London, there is a place of hope and enchantment.
The Emporium sells toys that capture the imagination of children and adults alike: patchwork dogs that seem alive, toy boxes that are bigger on the inside, soldiers that can fight battles of their own. Into this family business comes young Cathy Wray, running away from a shameful past. The Emporium takes her in, makes her one of its own.
But Cathy is about to discover that the Emporium has secrets of its own…
Average Score: 3.56
Review: Most people enjoyed the realism with a touch of magic although others found it a convenient explanation for unusual happenings. The sibling rivalry portrayed in the book while harsh at times, had an undercurrent of genuine affection that felt more realistic than other sibling relationships in literature. The Long War the brothers played was a useful device to mirror the World War I. The story is immersive and is not predictable. It’s well written and is quite fast paced. We did wonder if magic fading through the book is symbolic of the loss of childhood feelings of awe and wonder. Some of the stereotypes of PTSD were a little overdone and we had sympathy for the book’s ‘villain’. The second half of the book is much darker than the first half and the ending doesn’t quite redress the balance.
Synopsis:
Tokyo, Japan
Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork.
That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.
London, England
Nick Miller never knew his father, and was always told he wasn’t missing much. But when an old friend of his late mother says there are things that Nick needs to know about his parents, he can’t ignore it.
When a chance encounter brings Wada and Nick together, they couldn’t know the series of violent events set off by their investigations. And when they discover Nick’s father might have been the only witness to a dark secret forever buried, they realise there are some powerful people who will do whatever it takes to keep it that way…
Average Score: 2.71
Review: Our overriding response to this book was “meh”! We all had high hopes for this book that unfortunately weren’t met. The story chops and changes protagonists with no warning which is confusing in both physical and audiobooks. It has a very slow start and the twists were a little obvious. The characters weren’t interesting but it was nice to have a non-typical protagonist. Despite the diversity of characters and locations there was very little sense of place in the book. The most interesting review was the suggestion that the author could be a chess player because the book read a little bit like a chess game.
Synopsis: The Nowhere Man is a legendary figure spoken about only in whispers. It’s said that when he’s reached by the truly desperate and deserving, the Nowhere Man can and will do anything to protect and save them.
But he’s no legend.
Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He’s also a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as part of the off-the-books black box Orphan program, designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence assets—i.e. assassins. He was Orphan X. Evan broke with the program, using everything he learned to disappear.
Now, however, someone is on his tail. Someone with similar skills and training. Someone who knows Orphan X. Someone who is getting closer and closer. And will exploit Evan’s weakness—his work as The Nowhere Man—to find him and eliminate him. Grabbing the reader from the very first page, Orphan X is a masterful thriller, the first in Gregg Hurwitz’s electrifying new series featuring Evan Smoak.
Average Score: 3.18
Review: While this review was written by only one member of the group it is an accurate representation of a lot of our comments and is truly hilarious. This is Alan Fitch’s review who, despite having left the company a while ago, still reads along with us and submits reviews by email.
Alan sat down at the new Dell XPS 13 laptop with 1TB Nvme Disk and Intel Core I7 processor. The keys clicked purposefully as he started the Tor browser, searching the dark web for links to his friend and confidante, the now-retired renowned symbolist Dr Robert Langdon. After routing through boxes in Lagos, Cricklewood, and Svalbard, he finally piggy-backed on the WiFi signal of the Raspberry Pi he had secreted some years ago in a lamp-post outside his house in Bitterne. It looked just like a birdbox, but could easily be destroyed by a simple UDP broadcast message.
Alan sipped from his glass of triple-refined Sainsbury’s apple squash – didn’t the chemicals in the flimsy yet transparent plastic bottle cause fish to change sex? Alan realised he was becoming distracted, and decided to sit cross-legged on the floor, practising the mindlessness exercises he had been taught as a child by his father-figure and mentor Jack Sparrow.
A soothing ping from the laptop prompted Alan to return to the glowing 13″ screen – now-retired renowned symbolist Dr Robert Langdon had triggered the messaging box on his disguised Myspace page. Alan typed in the agreed codeword and they were in communication.
“Robert – I need your help”
He messaged the cipher he’d discovered attached to the rectangular plastic-covered paperback novel, obtained from the red-brick mid 20th-century building known only by the codename “Bitterne Public Library”. Almost instantly, a lengthy and turgid screed returned from Dr Langdon.
“Alan, it’s a simple substitution cipher! I wrote the words ‘gregevansmoakophanxhurwitz’ on a thin strip of triple-pressed parchment and wrapped it round an original hickory walking stick with a diameter of 0.23 cubits – which I am sure you are aware represents the sum of the golden ratio, pi, and e in 12 point pica when measured in furlongs! The message was compressed using Huffman coding, but by hacking into the NSA Quantum Computing facility in Langley, I was able to decipher it – it reads ‘Jason Bourne woz ere ha ha ha’ “.
Alan reeled back from the screen, his three-legged office chair supported by palladium legs and mounted on wheels of buckminster-fullerene shot across the room, until the back of his head collided smartly on the triple-layered woodchip wallpaper.
Of course! The book was a complete rip-off of The Bourne Identity – but written in the clunking prose-style of Dan Brown – it all made sense!
Synopsis: Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission–and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian–while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
Average Score: 4.29
Review: We’re on a rollercoaster with recent books – two of the highest scores recorded sandwiching one of the lowest! Project Hail Mary was universally well liked and we thought it was an interesting premise. Some of our more scientifically minded group thought the science/maths was flawed and that the book had too much of an optimistic lean. We liked the writing style but felt a little like it had been edited to make it easier to convert into a screenplay. We’d definitely recommend giving it a read.
Synopsis: Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer is a cyberpunk, science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace…
Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
Average Score: 2.05
Review: This book united most of Book Club (with a few pending reviews), in its disappointment. As an intro to cyberpunk, it was likened to a tattoo or some other kind of identifying mark that showed you’re into something niche rather than a cohesive story. Everyone found the book hard to read, with too many invented words, characters and similes. The ending was disappointing, which is sadly too often the way with the first book in a series. The technological references have not aged well at all! For all that it was a genre defining book, its not one any of us are likely to return to!
Synopsis: For years, rumours of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
The story asks how isolation influences the behaviour of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.
Average Score: 4.6 New favourite book!
Review: As the score shows, we fans of this book. Its easy to read and weaves small town life with a murder mystery and courtroom drama. The book is very descriptive but in a really good way! The book blends flashbacks with current time very well. There are a few decisions that are taken by the author that feel a little unfeasible but its hard to know with certainty given the unique nature of the story. The differences spotted by our American reader vs our British readers were very interesting!
Synopsis: Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it’s a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he’ll be switched off, and they’ll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.
The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad – very mad.
Average Score: 3.8
Review: There’s a lot to like about We Are Legion. There’s a gentle humour throughout and if you’re a fan of “geek” culture there’s a lot of references to enjoy. The premise provides lots interesting moral dilemmas. The book has an unpretentious writing style that’s not particularly polished but still very readable. Its a little tricky tracking the different Bobs (made easier by different voices in the audio book!) which caused an interesting discussion in Book Club – has the author done this deliberately to give a feeling of how difficult that would be in real life should you ever find yourself in this unique situation?
Synopsis:
On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.
But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.
And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?
Average Score: 2.8
Review: In some ways this is a very interesting take on a locked room murder mystery, particularly because the victim isn’t revealed until late in the book. By the point the victim is revealed the author has made you dislike many of the characters. Its an easy read, if a little predictable in places. The timeline and narrator jumps around a lot but is handled very successfully by the author. It felt like there were too many coincidences that brought all the suspects together and some people felt it read like a romance novel with a side order of murder!
Synopsis:
Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.
Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all.
Average Score: 3.3
Review: This is a good spy novel with plenty of twists and turns. Its well written, as would be expected with someone with as much experience as John Le Carré! The main characters weren’t the most engaging and some of the twists were a little predictable. Some of the technology references make the book feel dated. The ending is very abrupt and all of us would have liked it to be longer with more information about what happens next.
Synopsis:
A funny, often poignant tale of boy meets girl with a twist: what if one of them couldn’t stop slipping in and out of time? Highly original and imaginative, this debut novel raises questions about life, love, and the effects of time on relationships.
Audrey Niffenegger’s innovative debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.
The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives, pursuing familiar goals—steady jobs, good friends, children of their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
Average Score: 4.0
Review: This book was well received by most of book club and is now our second highest rated book. Its a favourite book of at least two members of the club! The Time Traveler’s Wife is an unconventional tale and a truly original idea. Its an interesting take on time travel and doesn’t get too caught up in how/if its possible which makes it a little easier to avoid criticising the science behind it. Some of the situations that occur caused us to debate the moral dilemmas around which makes it a great choice for book club! There’s one part of the plot that we talked around for a while trying to figure out if it was a plot hole or just an unclear piece of writing! The second half of the book is a tougher read and slower than the first as various tragedies strike but all in all this is an easy read which we’d recommend.
The Next Chapter Book Club 