Tag: O

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

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About the book

‘Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.’

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.

In a small cafe in Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place – and voice – through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.

Weaving across continents and decades, and exploring the relationship between reader and writer, fact and fiction, A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.

 

Reviewed by Reading Between the Lines

Hard work, but worth persevering. Thought provoking, profound. An imaginative storyline, well told. Some traumatic themes interwoven with hope

star rating ****

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The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

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Between the first and second world wars a group of young, non-English-speaking Japanese women travelled by boat to America. They were picture brides, clutching photos of husbands-to-be whom they had yet to meet. Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign land.

 

Reviewed by CC Readers

All admired the writing and the unusual style gradually grows on the reader. Most liked it very much, others found it too much like a ‘list’ rather than a narrative but they all felt they had learnt a great deal about the history of the people and the period. It created great discussion”

star rating ***

 

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The Bolter by Frances Osborne

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On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge’s Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know. Fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville shocked high society by leaving his multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man. An inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character The Bolter, painted by William Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a picture of her first love by her bed. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left one husband murdered and branded her the ‘high priestess’ of White Mischief’s bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya. Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. Now, Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind Sackville’s road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.

Reviewed by Godshill WI

Mixed feelings. A controversial character – but how much was accurate? A tad overwritten – understandable after five marriages!

star rating **

 

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Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

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About the book

George Orwell’s vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society.

‘You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.’

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his ‘first contact with poverty’. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris’s vile ‘Hôtel X’, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time – and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

Reviewed by Museum

For most of us this was a re-read after a period of many years. We were still impressed by Orwell’s commitment and his sharp and lucid prose – but with an average age well over70 we found it fascinating to look back on changes in our knowledge of other social classes and the progress in food hygiene! We also opened a sympathetic thought for Mrs Blair. Eric must have been a sore trial to a woman with a French- Colonial background”

star rating ****

 

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Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

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It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children – two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce – back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.

Reviewed by Enjoying Books

“This is a book about relationships within a family. Vividly portrayed, intense, Irish family lives brought to life. Some thought it short on plot, but most enjoyed it”

star rating ***

 

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The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell

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Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved. Marnie and her little sister Nelly have always been different. Marnie leads a life of smoking, drinking and drugs; Nelly enjoys playing the violin, eating cornflakes with Coke and reading Harry Potter. But on Christmas Eve, the sisters have to join forces and put their differences aside. And when Lennie, the old guy next door, starts to get suspicious, it’s only a matter of time before their terrible secret is discovered.

Reviewed by Stubbington Book Ends

After a disturbing beginning, a surprisingly good read. Believable characters with whom we could sympathise”

star rating ****

 

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Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

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About the book

While 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is more timely than ever. 1984 presents a “negative utopia”, that is at once a startling and haunting vision of the world — so powerful that it’s completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of entire generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions — a legacy that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

Reviewed by Happy Days Reading Group:

After reading 1984, we felt that George Orwell was very forward thinking, dealt with deep political issues in a passionate manner but tended to let the political issues overtake the plot.

Star rating: ***

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Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill

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About the book

Baby is twelve years old. Her mother died not long after she was born and she lives in a string of seedy flats in Montreal’s red light district with her father Jules, who takes better care of his heroin addiction than he does of his daughter. Jules is an intermittent presence and a constant source of chaos in Baby’s life – the turmoil he brings with him and the wreckage he leaves in his wake. Baby finds herself constantly re-adjusting to new situations, new foster homes, new places, new people, all the while longing for stability and a ‘normal’ life. But Baby has a gift – the ability to find the good in people, a genius for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap. She is bright, smart, funny and observant about life on the dirty streets of a city and wise enough to realise salvation rests in her own hands.

Reviewed by Anon reading group:

A very well constructed novel. It was shocking in its reality. Vivid portrayal of a child’s experience expressed by an adult.

Star rating: ***+

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Only Half of Me by Rageh Omaar

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About the book

A Muslim boy goes to a madrassa in Mogadishu to learn the Koran. His parents take him on two pilgrimages to Mecca. He arrives in Britain as a child just as Somalia collapses into a state of civil war, which will continue throughout his childhood and prevent him from going home. He watches Black Hawk Down in horror. He watches the invasion of Iraq in disbelief. To the media, government and general public, this is the classic background story to the most feared figure of our times: the young, male, black, British, Muslim. It is also the story of Rageh Omaar’s childhood. Rageh Omaar’s unique and profoundly moving book is the story of his childhood in Somalia, his family’s attitude to religion, his double life as a British Muslim and that of other British Muslims: the failed suicide bomber from Somalia; his cousin who was stabbed in the neck on a London street on 8th July 2005. Full of humanity and rage, empathy and insight, “Only Half of Me” takes us into lives that are widely misunderstood, and tries to make sense of our own fractured world.

Reviewed by Anton Bookies:

There was a mixed reaction amongst the group from great interest in his description of Somali culture to ‘a complete turnoff’, but it certainly stimulated a very lively discussion.

Star rating: ***

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Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

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About the book

In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage-clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for more than sixty-one years.
Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face.
Esme has been labeled harmless—sane enough to coexist with the rest of the world. But she’s still basically a stranger, a family member never mentioned by the family, and one who is sure to bring life-altering secrets with her when she leaves the ward. If Iris takes her in, what dangerous truths might she inherit?

Reviewed by Museum Book Group:

This clever story uses the interaction between the characters and its effect upon them, of Esme being incarcerated for sixty years. This book caused much lively discussion. we remembered the closing of the asylums and the reason for many old ladies being patients was that they were socially inconvenient.

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