Bookchat + road trip = a good day!

The Hastings Library Book Chat members went on a short road trip to the Flaxmere Library for our last meeting. Some of our members had not been out to this facility since it was renovated a couple of years ago and some had never been at all. Well were they in for a treat. Great books, great reviews and of course great service!

Anyway, we had a great time and it was hard to choose just a few favourites from the plethora of books we've read over the last month.

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

The award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale presents a collection of short stories that features such protagonists as a widowed writer who is guided by her late husband's voice and a woman whose genetic abnormality causes her to be mistaken for a vampire.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

Beware this is not nice reading! Compared to a modern day Handmaids Tale, this very unexpected read has characters finding interesting strengths and bringing their survival instincts to the fore.

Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert in a story of two friends, sisterly love and courage - a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. 

Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham

For rookie detective constable Fiona Griffiths, her first major investigation promises to be a tough initiation into Cardiff's dark underbelly. A young woman and her six-year-old daughter have been found brutally murdered in a squalid flat, the single clue a platinum credit card belonging to a millionaire businessman who died in a plane crash six months before. For her fellow cops, it's just another case of a low-rent prostitute meeting the wrong kind of client and coming to a nasty end, but Fiona is convinced that the tragic lives and cruel deaths of this mother and daughter are part of a deeper, darker mystery.

The Rich are with you Always by Malcolm MacDonald
"This really good read has historically correct timelines and facts right down to the cost of a whore in Bristol in 1851."
"The wife is a great character - strong and stroppy."




The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith
The sequel to The Cuckoo's Calling and written by JK Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the main character in this book (Strike) has been described by readers as "Physically repulsive but mentally interesting."

Posted by Cookie Fan