If you think you’re familiar with Joanne Harris, our author-of-the-month for July, you might want to think again.
Joanne Harris
Tag: libraries blog
Books and me: on my shelves
Events officer at Hampshire Libraries, Jeremy Cole, talks about sci-fi, the human condition, and challenging our reading habits.
World Book Day 2020
This is the 23rd year there’s been a World Book Day, and on 5 March 2020, children of all ages will come together to appreciate reading. Very loudly and very happily. The main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading… Continue reading World Book Day 2020
Digital Readers – October book
Digital Readers is an online reading group for everyone who's older than 16 and has both a Hampshire Library card and a Facebook account. We're happy to announce October's book, the book we'll read or listen to and discuss in our Online Reading group Digital Readers in the weeks to come!And the book is... The… Continue reading Digital Readers – October book
Digital Readers
Digital Readers is an online reading group for everyone who's older than 16 and has both a Hampshire Library card and a Facebook account. Through the BorrowBox app, using your Hampshire Library Card, you will be able to download an eCopy of the selected title to your tablet or smart phone to read and enjoy.… Continue reading Digital Readers
Our Pride Bookshelf!
On Saturday 23 February, the 5th annual Hampshire Pride took place and we were thrilled to have a stall at QEII court! Besides meeting some lovely people and handing out booklists for our new LGBT+ collection, we had a mini bookshelf where people added books that had inspired them, made a difference to them or… Continue reading Our Pride Bookshelf!
World Book Day 2019
World Book Day is back! Taking place on Thursday 7 March, providing children and young people with the opportunity to purchase their own book using a £1 World book day token. Here are the 10 books available for children and young people to choose from. How does World Book Day Work? Millions of book tokens are sent to… Continue reading World Book Day 2019
Why be Happy When You Could be Normal by Jeanette Winterson
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has grown to love the quiet routine of his life as a care assistant at a Cambridge nursing home, until the fateful day when he is lured into King's College chapel by the otherworldly sound of an organ. There he meets and falls in love with Iris Bellwether and her privileged, eccentric clique, led by her brother Eden. A troubled but charismatic music prodigy, Eden convinces his sister and their friends to participate in a series of disturbing experiments. However, as the line between genius and madness begins to blur, Oscar fears that danger could await them all ...
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa Dalloway is a woman of high-society – vivacious, hospitable and sociable on the surface, yet underneath troubled and dissatisfied with her life in post-war Britain. This disillusionment is an emotion that bubbles under the surface of all of Woolf’s characters in Mrs Dalloway.
Centred around one day in June where Clarissa is preparing for and holding a party, her interior monologue mingles with those of the other central characters in a stream of consciousness, entwining, yet never actually overriding the pervading sense of isolation that haunts each person.
One of Virginia Woolf’s most accomplished novels, Mrs Dalloway is widely regarded as one of the most revolutionary works of the 20th century in its style and the themes that it tackles. The sense that Clarissa has married the wrong person, her past love for another female friend and the death of an intended party guest all serve to amplify this stultifying existence.