The London Girly Book Club is looking for a new venue! With over 1400 members in London alone and over 150 signed up to our first meeting of the year we need someplace new quickly!

Let us know if you have a place in mind.

Book Synopsis

Help choose May's book... vote above!

Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain 
Chamberlain (The Escape Artist) explores psychiatric tensions in this disturbing story of dark secrets and redemption. Before astronomer Laura Brandon's father dies, he asks her to visit Sarah Tolley, an elderly woman he's never before mentioned. This seemingly simple request sets off a series of alarming events, most dramatically the suicide of Laura's husband, Ray, and the subsequent emotional withdrawal of her five-year-old daughter, Emma. Laura tries to help her daughter by contacting Emma's birth father, Dylan Geer. Laura and Dylan's affair had been short-lived, and Dylan never knew he had a child. A bond is formed when the three get together, and Dylan decides to help Laura solve the mysteries. Despite minor flaws (the connection between Sarah and Laura's husband is obvious early on), the story offers relentless suspense and intriguing psychological insight (Chamberlain is a former psychotherapist) as well as a satisfying love story.

Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran

The marriage of Marc Antony and Cleopatra is one of the greatest love stories of all time, a tale of unbridled passion with earth-shaking political consequences. Feared and hunted by the powers in Rome, the lovers choose to die by their own hands as the triumphant armies of Antony’s vengeful rival, Octavian, sweep into Egypt. Their three orphaned children are taken in chains to Rome, but only two— the ten-year-old twins Selene and Alexander— survive the journey. Delivered to the household of Octavian’s sister, the siblings cling to each other and to the hope that they will return one day to their rightful place on the throne of Egypt. As they come of age, they are buffeted by the personal ambitions of Octavian’s family and court, by the ever-present threat of slave rebellion, and by the longings and desires deep within their own hearts.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

BOOK CLUB NEWS

March’s Book club meeting!

March’s meeting is early this month as author of the Postmistress Sarah Blake has agreed to join us and share some of the inspiration behind her wonderful book.

Please RSVP now and keep your RSVP current as space will be limited, and we want everyone to be able to benefit from this amazing opportunity.

RSVP NOW

The book is £4.00 on Amazon BUY IT

Literature Events: 

The London Book Fair 
The London Book Fair is coming to town! Okay, this might not be as exciting for you as it is for me… and it does cost £25.00 to get in but I can’t wait! Let me know if you’re interested in going and we can go together! April 11-13th Earl’s Court , London.
LONDON BOOK FAIR INFO

World BOOK Night
World book night is on Friday night. What organisers believe will be the biggest single literary event in history is to raise the curtain on next month's World Book Night, itself billed as "the biggest book  give-away ever". On 4 March London's Trafalgar Square will be given over to a "glittering celebration of the written word", with 10,000 people expected to attend. Graham Norton will be hosting the event, with readings from Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman (among others). Read more HERE  Tickets to the event are free, but limited. I will let you know when they are on general sale.!

Exclusive Event with celebrated Author Alexander McCall Smith
Date: 03 March 2011
Time: 1PM – 3:30 PM
Place: The Royal Geological Society, Piccadilly, London
Price: £15 ( proceeds will go to support The Pelican Post)
Booking: To Reserve a place please email events@pelican-post.org
MORE INFORMATION

The books that have defined the London Girly Book Club (to date)

Title	Author
Change of Heart	Jodi Picoult
Three Cups of Tea	Greg Mortensen
Purple Hibiscus	Ghimimanda Ngozi Adichie
Glass Castle	Jeanette Walls
Marley & Me	John Grogan
Open House	Elizabeth Berg
The Gift	Cecelia Ahearn
Shantaram	Gregory David Roberts
Double Blind	Chris Bohjalian
Sarabande	Marcus Fedder
Twilight	Stephanie Myers
Passion	Louise Bagshawe
The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society	Mary Ann Shaffer
White Tiger	Aravind Adiga
Call in the Midwife	Jennifer Worth
Half Broke Horses	Jeanette Walls
Still Alice	Lisa Genova
We Need to talk about Kevin	Lionel Shaffer
The Various Flavours of Coffee	Anthony Capella
Stones into Schools	Greg Mortensen
The Help	Kathryn Stockett
The Other Hand	Chris Cleaves
Single in the City	Michele Gorman
The Legacy	Katherine Webb
The Last Lecture	Randy Pausch
One Day	David Nicholls
The Postmistress	Sarah Blake

Women's Lit: The novels that defined 20th-century woman.

From Stylist Magazine

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. 1899. "Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life." A wife and mother begins asking herself difficult questions in this landmark work of proto-feminism.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. 1929. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” An eloquent extended essay railing against the inevitable strictures of a patriarchal society.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. 1963. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. Semi-autobiographical novel about a young writer who tries, and eventually refuses, to fit in.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Anais Nin. 1966. “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Seven volumes of unconventional wisdom and liberal sexuality from one of the 20^th century’s most inspiring thinkers.

The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker. 1982. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Pulitzer-winning novel dealing in racial and sexual oppression.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson. 1985. “Love has been diluted into paperback form and sole thousands and millions of copies.” Ground-breaking coming-of-age novel exploring religious and sexual repression.

The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf. 1991. “Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.” Academic yet palatable argument that the pressure to conform to an invented ideal of “beauty” is a means of controlling women.

The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler. 1996. “Just say c**t! Everything changes.” Episodic play dealing with rape, incest, pleasure and pain.

Vote for February's Book Choice!!!

Vote above for February's book! 

One Day by David Nicholls 

‘I can imagine you at forty,’ she said, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘I can picture it right now.’ He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Go on then.’

15th July 1988. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year which follows?

One Day is a funny/sad love story spanning twenty years, a book about growing up – how we change, how we stay the same. 

‘One Day is a wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad. It’s also, with its subtly political focus on changing habits and mores, the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up. – John O’Connell, The Times.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

It is 1940, and bombs fall nightly on London. In the thick of the chaos is young American radio reporter Frankie Bard. She huddles close to terrified strangers in underground shelters, and later broadcasts stories about survivors in rubble-strewn streets. But for her listeners, the war is far from home. Listening to Frankie are Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor’s wife. Iris hears the winds stirring and knows that soon the letters she delivers will bear messages of hope or tragedy. Emma is desperate for news of London, where her husband is working – she counts the days until his return. But one night in London the fates of all three women entwine when Frankie finds a letter – a letter she vows to deliver . . .

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. 

is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.

Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. 

Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney

and the WINNER is....

SYDNEY HILL!!!

Well done Sydney, who's read the most books off the BBC book list. She's getting a copy of something a touch less high brown than the books she's obviously been reading! Chick Lit!!!