[issybird]

Let's select the book we'll read and discuss in November 2019.

We love new participants. We're happy for you to vote, but in the interest of a vibrant conversation, we'd like to request that you not vote unless you plan to join the discussion whatever the selection. So if you haven't posted in a book club thread yet, do please say a quick hello here or in the Welcome thread.

This is a poll. Vote for as many books as you'd like. Questions? FAQs | Guidelines Or just ask!

Choices:

Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer
Kobo: CA$13.59; US$11.19; AU$12.99 Kindle: US$9.68

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Every family has secrets, but now they are turning deadly...

On a dark night, along a lonely country road, barrister Frank Amberley stops to help a young lady in distress and discovers a sports car with a corpse behind the wheel. The girl protests her innocence and Amberley believes her—at least until he gets drawn into the mystery and the evidence incriminating Shirley Brown begins to add up.

Why Shoot a Butler? is an English country-house murder with a twist. In this beloved classic by Georgette Heyer, the butler is the victim, every clue complicates the puzzle, and the bumbling police are well-meaning but completely baffled. Fortunately, amateur sleuth Amberley is as brilliant as he is arrogant as he ferrets out the desperate killer—even though this time he's not sure he wants to know the truth...

320 pp.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Amazon U.S. $12.99

Spoiler:

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller.

This is the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching. Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret. Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover. Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances…

Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A towering achievement.

513 pp.

The Overstory by Richard Powers
Kindle: UK£5.99; US$9.99; AU$12.99; CA$14.72

Spoiler:

From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers' twelfth book unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century timber wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn to see that world and are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

500 pp.

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield
US$12.99, CA$14.99, GB£4.99, AU$12.99.

Spoiler:

Blurb from Kobo:

On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the Thames, the regulars are entertaining themselves by telling stories when the door bursts open and in steps an injured stranger. In his arms is the drowned corpse of a child.

Hours later, the dead girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life.

Is it a miracle?

Is it magic?

And who does the little girl belong to?

An exquisitely crafted multi-layered mystery brimming with folklore, suspense and romance, as well as with the urgent scientific curiosity of the Darwinian age, Once Upon a River is as richly atmospheric as Setterfield’s bestseller The Thirteenth Tale.

Goodread's blurb is a bit long-winded, but here's the link

464 pp.

Ever After by Graham Swift
Kobo prices: $US11.99, $A12.99, ￡5.99.

Spoiler:

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe.

It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?"

295 pp.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Public Domain

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

A mysterious young widow arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion which has been empty for many years, with her young son and servant. She lives there in strict seclusion under the assumed name Helen Graham and very soon finds herself the victim of local slander. Refusing to believe anything scandalous about her, Gilbert Markham, a young farmer, discovers her dark secrets. In her diary, Helen writes about her husband's physical and moral decline through alcohol, and the world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled.

500 pp.