Reading

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Come and join the

EuroMayenne Reading Group

We share a love of books !

This EuroMayenne group is for members to get together each month to discuss a book that they have all just read.

It will encourage you to read more books and books that you might not normally choose.

The reasons that people give for joining a reading group include reading a wide variety of books, making friends, having fun, meeting like-minded people and stimulating the brain cells!

So please come and join us for our fourth year in this venture.

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All dates are subject to current Government and Local Authority restrictions regarding Coronavirus Covid-19 and subject to change or cancellation.

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When

Monthly on the last Wednesday at 2.30 pm.

Please let Pam know (contact details at the bottom of this page) at least one week in advance if  you will be going.

So, make notes in your diary for

Book titles – see table below. 

These are to be across a wide range of genres including general fiction, mysteries, historical fiction and non-fiction. They are always available in English and French versions. They allow for discussion between both English and French speakers.

Future books to read are decided by the group members.

2022

Month	Title	Author	Synopsis
September 28	Long Walk to Freedom	Nelson Mandela	“Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it.” – President Barack Obama   Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country.
October 26	Small Island	Andrea Levy	It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours don’t approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, she has little choice in the matter. Small Island explores a point in England’s past when the country began to change. In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit.
November 30	The Master	Colm Toibin	In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master Colm Toibin captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.
December			(no meeting)

2023

Month	Title	Author	Synopsis
January 25	Lessons in Chemistry	Bonnie Garmus	Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality.  Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (‘combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride’) proves revolutionary.
February 22	The Anomaly	Hervé Le Tellier	No one knows how it happened. But it’ll change their lives forever . . . During a terrifying storm, Air France flight 006 – inexplicably – duplicates. For every passenger, there are now two: a double with the same mind, body and memories. Only one thing sets them apart – while one plane lands in March, the other doesn’t arrive until June. Nothing can explain this unprecedented event. But for each duplicated passenger, an impossible moment of reckoning awaits.
March 29	10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world	Eli Shafak	For Leila, each minute after her death recalls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women’s legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each fading memory brings back the friends she made in her bittersweet life – friends who are now desperately trying to find her . . .
April 26	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	“It’s a sin to kill a Mockingbird.” A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man falsely charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s.
May 31	Strong Poison	Dorothy L Sayers	Can Lord Peter Wimsey prove that Harriet Vane is not guilty of murder – or find the real poisoner in time to save her from the gallows? Impossible, it seems. The Crown’s case is watertight. The police are adamant that the right person is on trial. The judge’s summing-up is also clear. Harriet Vane is guilty of the killing her lover. And Harriet Vane shall hang. But the jury disagrees.
June 28	The Secret River	Kate Grenville	London, 1806. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. Soon Thornhill, a man no better or worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life.

Where

At the home of a member in Evron

Contact Pam Davies for details (see below)

Cost

There will be no cost other than the member purchasing/downloading the book of the month.

Refreshments (tea/coffee/cakes) will always be available – all that is asked is for a small donation.

Interested ?

Contact the reading group:

Pam DAVIES

02.43.00.87.17

contact@euromayenne.org