A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.
‘A gripping tale of love, death and religion set in the not-too-distant future’ Daily Mail ‘A cracking good read’ Daily Telegraph.
July/August 2010 The Rapture by Liz Jensen
March 2010 The Spy Game by Georgina Harding
The Spy Game`In her finely composed second novel, Harding conjures up the enigmatic home life of eight-year-old Anna Wyatt and her older brother Peter. An aching, delicate and affecting interpretation of loss and acceptance’
`The most elegant novel of the year. Two children concoct a theory about their mother’s past that might not, we learn, be entirely fantasy. With subtly dispatched wisdom, it asks the question, what do we really know about our parents?’ — Independent
`Harding skilfully weaves together history, memory and imagination in this haunting and beautifully written novel’
January 2010 – The Outlander
For January 2010 the team at Hexham Book Festival Book Club recommend you read the Outlander.
On a moonlit night in 1903, a mysterious young woman flees alone across the Canadian wilderness, one quick step ahead of her pursuers. Mary Boulton is nineteen years old, half mad, and widowed – by her own hand.
Tearing through the forest with dogs howling in the distance, she is desperate, her nerves burning, and she is certain of one thing only – that her every move is being traced. Two red-headed brothers, rifles across their backs, lurch close behind her: monstrous figures, identical in every way, with the predatory look of hyenas. She has murdered their brother, and their cold lust for vengeance is unswerving.
As the widow scrambles to stay ahead of them, the burden of her existence disintegrates into a battle in which the dangers of her own mind become more menacing than the dangers of the night. Along the way, the steely outlaw encounters a changing cast of misfits and eccentrics. Some, like the recluse known as ‘The Ridgerunner’, provide a brief respite from her solitude; others, like the Reverend Bonnycastle, offer support only to reveal that they too have their own demons raging inside. As she is plunged further away from civilisation, her path from retribution to redemption slowly unfurls.
A startling transformation of the classic western narrative, The Outlander is the haunting tale of one young woman’s deliberate journey deep into the wild.
December 2009 – Little Bird
For December 2009 the team at Hexham Book Festival Book Club recommend you read Little Bird.
Three identities, no known name – and an obsessed pursuer from the past. It took one second to snatch the child. One silent, unseen moment to pluck her from the world. In a click of a finger, a blink of an eye, she was gone. As if, like a bird, she had just flown away. Kate never speaks about the past, and you would never know at first who she was. But, if you looked closely, you might see how she glances nervously over her shoulder, as if she were being followed. If you paid attention, you might hear how carefully she speaks. And if you were to search, you might find the old newspaper clippings she keeps hidden away: Kidnap Girl “Like Wild animal”, The Mysterious Disappearance of “Little Bird”. But these are just fragments of a long buried past – another life, another girl. Secrets left unspoken, until now!
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November 2009 – The Thing Around Your Neck
For November 2009 the team at Hexham Book Festival Book Club recommend you read The Thing Around Your Neck.
From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come twelve dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. In ‘A Private Experience,’ a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far,’ a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of ‘Imitation’ finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prodigious storytelling powers.
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October 2009 – The Vagrants
For October 2009 the team at Hexham Book Festival Book Club recommend you read The Vagrants.
One day in the spring of 1979, Gu Shan is executed for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old, and has already spent ten years in prison. Her father, an intellectual, is unable to accept what his rebellious daughter has become; her mother is devastated by the loss of her only child. The citizens of her town – including seven-year-old Tong, crippled Nini, the idler Bashi, and beautiful Kai – stage a protest after her death. Over the following six weeks, they go through uncertainty, hope and fear, until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed.
In this brilliant first novel, based on a true story, Yiyun Li weaves together these lives, and devastatingly illuminates the reality of oppression and pain.
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