Struggling to decide what to read next? Never fear – help is here. Te experts at independent bookshop Pages of Hackney come to the rescue of a north London book group
Met the readers … The Camden Girls
“We’re a bunch of women who meet monthly in north London to discuss, over a glass of wine, a book voted for at the previous month’s meeting. Recent titles have included The Satanic Verses, Female Chauvinist Pigs and Fifty Shades of Grey. This year some of our favourite books have been Blue Mondays, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Pigeon English. We picked three books we’ve recently read and enjoyed to help the experts choose something new for us to try. We were gripped right to the final word by The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. This story of a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki during the time of the European nations’ quest for power in Asia is so much more than a powerfully
engaging historical novel – it is a moving story of love, betrayal and a quest for truth. A vivid and powerful portrait of 1980s college life,
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides manages to brilliantly reconstruct the period while at the same time address some of life’s timeless issues. An engaging tale of three characters traversing the emotional landscape of early postgraduate life, this novel prompted lively discussion within our group as we recollected our own university experiences. A melancholic novel, Alison Moore’s The
Lighthouse is a human drama populated with a variety of unlucky, disappointed and sad characters. Nevertheless, this a beautifully written story that we found completely absorbing. The unflowery prose had just enough urgency to make compulsive reading, and we thoroughly enjoyed the parallel stories of the two main characters Esther and Futh.” Find out more about the Camden Girls at camdengirls.wordpress.com