Book Group members are asked to indicate their top 10 favourites for reading next year from this listing in order of preference (first choice to tenth choice in order) so that a short list of books can be finalised in a fair and democratic manner.
(Note: Books 1-11 are included within the ACC Library Book Group listings)
| Book 1 | Kate Atkinson – Life after Life |
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What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? (more) |
| Book 2 | Ray Celestin – The Axeman’s Jazz |
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New Orleans, 1919. As a dark serial killer – The Axeman – stalks the city, three individuals set out to unmask him…Though every citizen of the ‘Big Easy’ thinks they know who could be behind the terrifying murders, Detective Lieutenant Michael Talbot, heading up the official investigation, is struggling to find leads.But Michael has a grave secret – and if he doesn’t find… (more) |
| Book 3 | Neil Gaiman – The Ocean at the End of the Lane |
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Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond… (more) |
| Book 4 | Emma Healey – Elizabeth Is Missing |
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Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn’t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable or her daughter, Helen, seems a total stranger.
But there’s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to… (more) |
| Book 5 | Tim Kendall (ed) – Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology |
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The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent. Its poets mark the conflict in ways that are both intensely personal and as enduring as any monument. Their lines have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and consequences of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets and off… (more) |
| Book 6 | Sue Monk Kidd – The Invention of Wings |
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From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a New York Times bestselling novel about two unforgettable American women. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world… (more) |
| Book 7 | Sally Magnusson – Where Memories Go |
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This book began as an attempt to hold on to my witty, storytelling mother with the one thing I had to hand. Words. Then, as the enormity of the social crisis my family was part of began to dawn, I wrote with the thought that other forgotten lives might be nudged into the light along with hers. Dementia is one of the greatest social, medical, economic, scientific… (more) |
| Book 8 | R J Palacio – Wonder |
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August Pullman wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things. He eats ice cream. He plays on his Xbox. He feels ordinary – inside. But Auggie is far from ordinary. Ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids… (more) |
| Book 9 | Anita Shreve – The Lives of Stella Bain |
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From bestselling author Anita Shreve: An epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I, of a woman searching for the secret of her identity.When a young American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell shock in the exclusive garden of London’s Bryanston Square, residents August Bridge and his wife selflessly agree to take her in… (more) |
| Book 10 | Salley Vickers – The Cleaner of Chartres |
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From the author of Miss Garnet’s Angel, a story of the redemptive power of love and community in the famous French cathedral townThere is something very special about Agnès Morel. A quiet presence in the small French town of Chartres, she can be found cleaning the famed medieval cathedral each morning and doing odd jobs for the townspeople. No one knows where she came from… (more) |
| Book 11 | Kirsty Wark – The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle |
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Elizabeth Pringle has lived on the beautiful island of Arran for over 90 years; the retired teacher and spinster is a familiar and yet solitary figure tending her garden and riding her bicycle around the island. When she dies she leaves her beloved house, “Holmlea” to a woman she merely saw pushing a pram down the road over thirty years ago. That young mother, Anna, had… (more) |
| Book 12 | Ben Aaronovitch – Rivers of London |
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“I used to be probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right – thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service, and to everyone else as the Filth..”Meet DC Peter Grant. He will show you his city. But it’s not the capital that you see as you make your way from tube to bus, from Elephant to Castle. It’s a city that under its dark surface is packed… (more) |
| Book 13 | Gerbrand Bakker – The Detour |
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A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it’s the work of a local fox… (more) |
| Book 14 | Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending |
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A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged… (more) |
| Book 15 | Aimee Bender – The Color Master |
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Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange” (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet” (Vanity Fair), and “full… (more) |
| Book 16 | Arthur La Bern – It Always Rains on Sunday |
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| Book 17 | Bertolt Brecht – Collected Short Stories |
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Everyone knows that Bertolt Brecht was one of the great 20th-century innovators in theatre – the literary-theatrical equivalent of a Picasso or Stravinsky – and Germany’s greatest poet of the last century, but the playwright was also a dazzling writer of stories. Storytelling permeated his art as a dramatist; fundamentally in his plays he was a storyteller… (more) |
| Book 18 | Edna Buchanan – Never Let Them See You Cry |
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From Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Edna Buchanan–the national bestselling author of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face–a book of the shocking and offbeat true-crime stories that made her famous. Buchanan describes murder, mayhem and madness in Miami… (more) |
| Book 19 | Jessie Burton – The Miniaturist |
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On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives at a grand house in Amsterdam to begin her new life as the wife of wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt. Though curiously distant, he presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift; a cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations ring eerily true… (more) |
| Book 20 | Brian Catling, Alan Moore – The Vorrh |
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Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse ofThe Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy.”Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast-perhaps endless-forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the… (more) |
| Book 21 | Nora Chassler – Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space |
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Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space… (more) |
| Book 22 | Tim Clare – The Honours |
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1935. Norfolk.War is looming in Great Britain and the sprawling country estate of Alderberen Hall is shadowed by suspicion and paranoia. Thirteen-year-old Delphine Venner is determined to uncover the secrets of the Hall’s elite society, which has taken in her gullible mother and unstable father… (more) |
| Book 23 | J.M. Coetzee – Disgrace |
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After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and… (more) |
| Book 24 | Joshua Cohen – The Book of Numbers |
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A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search-for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration… (more) |
| Book 25 | Jim Crace – Harvest |
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Jim Crace’s biggest novel since Being Dead draws once more on his genius with landscape and myth, to create a lost and bewitching English world.As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders – two men and a dangerously magnetic woman – arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp… (more) |
| Book 26 | Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists |
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Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese… (more) |
| Book 27 | Anne Enright – The Green Road |
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A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion – a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns… (more) |
| Book 28 | Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl |
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On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages… (more) |
| Book 29 | Tara Flynn – You’re Grand The Irish Woman’s Secret Guide to Life |
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Irish Women have been around for ages – some would say almost as long as Irish Men. We’ve learned a lot in that time but, until now, we haven’t shared it. Perhaps being shushed by priests/foreign invaders/the wind for too long has taken its toll – but our time has finally come to speak out.Here comedian Tara Flynn shares the wisdom of the Irishwoman, and why she holds the… (more) |
| Book 30 | Peter Frankopan – The Silk Roads: A New History of the World |
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From the rise and fall of empires in China, Persia, and Rome itself to the spread of Buddhism and advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to Western imperialism and the great wars of the twentieth century, this epic, magisterial work illuminates how the Silk Roads–the crossroads of the world, the meeting place of East and West–perhaps more than anything else, shaped… (more) |
| Book 31 | Anne Holt – The Lion’s Mouth |
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From the internationally bestselling author of 1222, called the “godmother of modern Norwegian crime” by Jo Nesbø, the next book in the Edgar Award – nominated mystery series: Hanne Wilhelmsen is on the case when someone murders the prime minister of Norway.Less than six months after taking office, the Norwegian Prime Minister is found dead. She has been shot in the head… (more) |
| Book 32 | Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Giant |
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An extraordinary new novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.”You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay…”
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son… (more) |
| Book 33 | Mikheil Javakhishvili – Kvachi Kvachantiradze |
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Kvachi Kvachantiradze… (more) |
| Book 34 | Han Kang – The Vegetarian |
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Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism… (more) |
| Book 35 | Kojo Laing – Search Sweet Country |
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A brilliant first novel from Ghana portraying a crucial period in the nation’s history–a poet’s story of Africa that has already provoked critical attention in Britain… (more) |
| Book 36 | Lisa McInerney – The Glorious Heresies |
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One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has… (more) |
| Book 37 | Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven |
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Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear.That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end… (more) |
| Book 38 | China Mieville – The City and the City |
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When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate… (more) |
| Book 39 | Andrew Miller – The Crossing |
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She is sailing. She is alone. Ahead of her is the world’s curve and beyond that, everything else. The known, the imagined, the imagined known.Who else has entered Tim’s life the way Maud did? This girl who fell past him… (more) |
| Book 40 | Benjamin Myers – Pig Iron |
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Pig Iron is the story of John-John, a young man wrestling with the legacy of brutality left by his bare-knuckle boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls John-John into the dark recesses of a north-east town where his family name is mud… (more) |
| Book 41 | Sofi Oksanen – When the Doves Disappeared |
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From the internationally acclaimed author of Purge comes a chillingly suspenseful, deftly woven new novel that opens up a little-known yet still controversial chapter of history: the occupation, resistance, and collaboration in Estonia during and after World War II… (more) |
| Book 42 | Laline Paull – The Bees |
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Enter a whole new world, in this thrilling debut novel set entirely within a beehive.Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey and serve, she is prepared to sacrifice everything for her beloved holy mother, the Queen… (more) |
| Book 43 | Anthony Quinn – Curtain Call |
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On a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1936 a woman accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a London hotel room. Nina Land, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: she’s not supposed to be at the hotel in the first place, and certainly not with a married man. But once it becomes apparent that she may have seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed ‘the Tie-Pin Killer’… (more) |
| Book 44 | David Van Reybrouck – Congo: The Epic History of a People |
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The Democratic Republic of Congo currently ranks among the world’s most failed nation-states. Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the history of this devastated nation from the beginnings of the slave trade through colonization, to the struggle for independence and Mobutu’s brutal three decades of rule. David Van Reybrouck ends with the civil war that has raged from… (more) |
| Book 45 | Julia Rochester – The House at the Edge of the World |
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Part mystery, part psychological drama, Julia Rochester’s The House at the Edge of the World is a darkly comic, unorthodox and thrilling debut When I was eighteen, my father fell off a cliff. It was a stupid way to die. John Venton’s drunken fall from a Devon cliff leaves his family with an embarrassing ghost. His twin children, Morwenna and Corwin, flee in separate directions… (more) |
| Book 46 | Robert Seethaler – A Whole Life |
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Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn’t ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child… (more) |
| Book 47 | James Shapiro – A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 |
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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and EnglandShakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and… (more) |
| Book 48 | James Shapiro – The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 |
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Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year – King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare’s great… (more) |
| Book 49 | Emma Sky – The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq |
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When Emma Sky volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, she had little idea what she was getting in to. Her assignment was only supposed to last three months. She went on to serve there longer than any other senior military or diplomatic figure, giving her an unrivaled perspective of the entire conflict… (more) |
| Book 50 | Leo Tolstoy – How Much Land Does a Man Need |
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How Much Land Does a Man Need… (more) |
| Book 51 | Anne Tyler – A Spool of Blue Thread |
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‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon’This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before… (more) |
| Book 52 | Fred Uhlman – Reunion |
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Reunion is a little-known novel. But it is also a universal story of friendship. It is a book of great power, waiting to be discovered.On a grey afternoon in 1932, a Stuttgart classroom is stirred by the arrival of a newcomer. Middle-class Hans is intrigued by the aristocratic new boy, Konradin, and before… (more) |
| Book 53 | Simon Wroe – Chop Chop: A Novel |
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An outrageously funny and original debut set in the fast-paced and treacherous world of a restaurant kitchen.Fresh out of university with big dreams, our narrator is determined to escape his past and lead the literary life in London. But soon he is two months behind on rent and forced to take a menial… (more) |