Our book group choice for December 2025 is Village Christmas by Laurie Lee. For many readers, Laurie Lee is synonymous with the sun-drenched, cider-hazed memories of the Slad Valley immortalised in his classic, Cider with Rosie. But if Cider with Rosie is the golden heat of high summer, Village Christmas is the crisp, woodsmoke-scented chill of midwinter.
Our book group choice for November 2025 is Poor Cow by Nell Dunn. Poor Cow offers a raw, unsentimental portrait of Joy, a working-class young woman struggling to survive in the impoverished corners of Swinging Sixties London. The narrative is told largely through Joy’s vibrant, ungrammatical, first-person voice, interspersed with third-person commentary and her badly-spelt letters from prison, giving the
Our book group choice for October 2025 is The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. A work of historical fiction set in the 1950s, the narrative takes place on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and examines the political and personal ramifications of a proposed piece of legislation.
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Our book group choice for September 2025 is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. The novel is a seminal work of science fiction that delves into the complexities of gender, politics, and communication through the lens of a lone human envoy’s journey to a distant, icy planet.
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Our book group choice for June 2025 is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. A passionate and bleak tale of love, revenge, and obsession set on the windswept Yorkshire moors, the story is primarily narrated by Nelly Dean, a housekeeper, and Lockwood, a bewildered tenant, who unravel the tragic history of the Earnshaw and Linton families.
Our book group choice for May 2025 is Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym. The book is a delightful dance around the lives of two very different women in post-war England. Jane Cleveland, a vicar’s widow in her late fifties, potters gently through her days, finding solace in Trollope novels and the comforting routines of village life. She’s a kind
Our book group choice for April 2025 is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The novel paints a chillingly realistic portrait of a society’s rapid descent into totalitarianism.
Our book group choice for March 2025 is The Sea by John Banville. It is a haunting and elegiac exploration of memory, loss, and the deceptive nature of recollection. Following the recent death of his wife, Anna, art historian Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of Ballyless, the very place where he spent a formative summer as a young
Our book group choice for February 2025 is The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. A 40-year-old housewife, is hired to read a novel called Sweet Blasphemy by Aziz Zahara. The novel tells the story of Shams of Tabriz, a wandering dervish, and his meeting with the renowned poet Rumi in 13th-century Konya.
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Our book group choice for January 2025 is Eurotrash by Christian Kracht. Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash is a darkly comic and unsettling novel that follows a middle-aged man and his elderly mother as they embark on a bizarre road trip through Switzerland.
