A Quiet Belief in Angels - RJ Ellory

Good Day

Be amazed at the speed at which this post has been posted.

This last book was excellent and one we would all recommend you read. There were quite a lot of unanswered questions but I thought this made the book all the more interesting. We did discuss it more than any other book we have read.

Pippa
Would have liked the ending to give more closure.

Kath
If you think you wont enjoy a crime novel, then think again!



Synopsis from Amazon
Joseph Vaughan's life has been dogged by tragedy. Growing up in the 1950s, he was at the centre of series of killings of young girls in his small rural community. The girls were taken, assaulted and left horribly mutilated. Barely a teenager himself, Joseph becomes determined to try to protect his community and classmates from the predations of the killer. Despite banding together with his friends as ' The Guardians', he was powerless to prevent more murders - and no one was ever caught. Only after a full ten years did the nightmare end when the one of his neighbours is found hanging from a rope, with articles from the dead girls around him. Thankfully, the killings finally ceased. But the past won't stay buried - for it seems that the real murderer still lives and is killing again. And the secret of his identity lies in Joseph's own history...

We ate at The Ferry Inn at Stone on the Marsh.

The food was ok. Nice to see the locals drinking in it. Not sure the pudding was homemade as they said as Pippa found a piece of plastic in it which looked very much like packaging - home heated possibly.



Working out the bill...





Love to you all

Kate

Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirozsky

Hello

This was my choice and a bit disappointing. It had great reviews but I did not research it enough and didn't realise it was unfinished which would have made it a great book but horribly long.

I would recommend it but be aware that you will need to make up your own mind about some of the characters as it is not complete. It is worth reading the appendix at the back as this gives quite an insight



Synopsis from Amazon
In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through, not in terms of battles and politicians, but by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. She did not live to see her ambition fulfilled, or to know that sixty-five years later, "Suite Francaise" would be published for the first time, and hailed as a masterpiece. Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, "Suite Francaise" falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion and make their way through the chaos of France; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation who find themselves thrown together in ways they never expected. Nemirovsky's brilliance as a writer lay in her portrayal of people, and this is a novel that teems with wonderful characters, each more vivid than the next. Haughty aristocrats, bourgeois bankers and snobbish aesthetes rub shoulders with uncouth workers and bolshy farmers. Women variously resist or succumb to the charms of German soldiers. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places. Irene Nemirovsky conceived of "Suite Francaise" as a four- or five-part novel. It was to be a symphony - her War and Peace. Although only two sections were finished before her tragic death, they form a book that is beautifully complete in itself, and awe-inspiring in its understanding of humanity.

We ate at The White Dog Inn at Ewhurst Green. The main meal was good and well priced but the puddings a bit disappointing in their plainess.



Kate

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Hello my book lovers

This was the choice by Kath and a great book. I have read nothing like it before and loved it.



Synopsis from Amazon
Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby...Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.

We had our meeting at Kath's house but got a little distracted from the book by newly arrived Chloe



but we were all there



and we did discuss the book.



I would like to read another by this author

Kate

The House at Riverton - Kate Morton

Hello book worms

Now I am organised again I have this blogging thing off to a tee and am back in full swing - what a lot of sporting metaphors.

Great book. We all enjoyed this one.



Synopsis from Amazon
Summer 1924: On the eve of a glittering Society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again. Winter 1999: Grace Bradley, 98, one-time housemaid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and memories, long-consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind, begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge; something history has forgotten but Grace never could. A thrilling mystery and a compelling love story, "The House at Riverton" will appeal to readers of Ian McEwan's "Atonement", L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between", and lovers of the film "Gosford Park".

I have even managed to get our reviews this time..

Pippa
8/10 A good book to curl up in front of an open fire on a Sunday afternoon. A romantic read

Sarah
8/10
Lost the plot but a good read.

Kath
7/10
Love the ending but wish it had appeared earlier in the book. All the story is at the end.

We ate at The Globe in Rye. A very good meal with interesting 1940's decor. It was quite pricey but worth it I thought.




Here we are looking gorgeous as ever.



If you are a romantic and like costume dramas you would love this book.

Kate

A History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Maria Lewycka

Dear Readers

I loved the cover of this book and also the book was good. Great characters



Synopsis from Amazon
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget...



We ate at The Langate Bistro in Rye. Another set meal which I was feeling a bit dubious about after our last one but it was good food and resonably priced.

Half a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hello

This was my choice of book..

Another book I would recommend but a bit explicit in places so not for the faint hearted.



Synopsis from Amazon
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.



We ate at The Great House in Hawkhurst which was so disappointing. It was a set menu and so small in portions that we left hungry. Good thing that Kath was unable to make this one as she would have been very annoyed. Oh and yes they tried to overcharge us yet again.

After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell

Here we are again

Kath choose After You'd Gone which sounded a rather serious title but was in fact a good read.

Synopsis from Amazon
A distraught young woman boards a train at King's Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London. After You'd Gone follows Alice's mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story which is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at the family's heart.



We ate in Tenterden at Restuarant 87 (?) which had a special offer on. Good enough food but it was very quiet so not a lot of atmosphere but then again it was a week night.