Author: 730bookclub

Macdonald, Finlay (2013) The art and life of Lynley Dodd. Penguin.  Storyteller Dame Lynley Dodd has found remarkable success with her Hairy Maclary and friends books. We follow her life from small country school to Elam Art School and a teaching career before she finds her stride as author and illustrator of one of the world's… Continue reading June Picks →

Flagg, Fannie (2013) The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion. Random House.  Mrs Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama has just married off the last of her daughters, and is looking forward to a relaxing future.  The only fly in the ointment is her formidable mother Mrs Leonore Simmons Krackenberry.  Sookie's new found peace is shattered when… Continue reading April – May Picks →

Hoffman, Alice (2014) The Museum of Extraordinary Things. Scribner.  Coralie  Sardie is the daughter of a sinister and self-proclaimed "professor", owner of a Coney Island freak show.  An exceptional swimmer Coralie is a mermaid in her father's museum, one of his menagerie of living wonders, and he is now casting her as a waterlogged and… Continue reading March Picks →

Weir, Alison (2013) Elizabeth of York; A Tudor Queen and her World.  Ballantine Books.  Elizabeth of York united the houses of York and Lancaster thus ending the War of the Roses.  Beloved consort of Henry VII and precious mother of Henry VIII her life spanned a dramatic and dangerous time in England's history. Weir's meticulous… Continue reading February Picks →

Forster, Margaret (2013) The Unknown Bridesmaid. Chatto & Windus. When Julia was eight she was a bridesmaid for her cousin Iris.  Julia was delighted but after this things started to go wrong.  A lifetime later Julia is a child psychologist dealing with troubled girls where she is constantly confronted by her own past.  Margaret Forster… Continue reading Jan’s Holiday Reads – January 2014 →

Hobb, Robin (2013) The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince.  Subterranean Press.  Felicity is the low-born companion of Princess Caution at Buckkeep.  Caution is the headstrong Queen-in-Waiting but when she gives birth to a bastard son who shares the piebald markings of his father’s horse, Felicity is the one who raises him.  As the prince… Continue reading December Picks →

Gilbert, Elizabeth (2013) The signature of all things. Bloomsbury. Alma Whittaker, the daughter of a very rich and bold botanical explorer, is a girl with a thirst for knowledge. Her botanical research and painstaking study of moss draws her into the mysteries of evolution, whilst at the same time she is challenged by the mystical,… Continue reading November PIcks →

Shannon, Samantha (2103) The Bone Season.  Bloomsbury.   In the first volume of a projected seven-book series we are introduced to 19 year old Paige Mahoney. Paige is a dream walker and one of the Seven Seals, the stars of a criminal syndicate fighting the Scion regime, in the forbidden realm of psychic powers. When her luck runs… Continue reading October Picks →

Koppel, Lily (2013) The Astronaut Wives Club.  Headline.  In April 1959 NASA's first spacemen, the Mercury Seven astronauts were announced; followed by the Nine, and the Fourteen from the Gemini and Apollo programmes.  Koppel offers a revealing glimpse into the lives the women behind the astronauts, with a personal portrait of each woman on how… Continue reading September Picks →

Disclafani, Anton (2013) The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. Riverhead Books. In the midst of the Great Depression, Thea Atwell, age fifteen, is exiled to a boarding school, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is far removed from her free and easy childhood, and as she comes to grips… Continue reading August Picks →