Current book list (NOT AN EVENT)

Tooting Book Club - current book list
Here is the list of books on the current list - if you would like to add a book to the list please bring your suggestion to the next meeting.

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (288 pages)
Kindle £5.99 Paperback £10.99

In the darkening embers of a communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm.

But when the charismatic Irimias - long thought dead- returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (318 pages)
Kindle £5.99 Amazon Paperback £7.99

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.

The Will Of The Many - James Islington (720 pages) - WARNING; OVER 400 PAGES
Kindle £5.99 Amazon paperback £8.47

Fantasy Novel. The story follows the orphaned Vis Telimus as he is recruited for the prestigious Catenan Academy and tasked with rising through the cutthroat competition to uncover the secret behind a mysterious accident. But Vis has his own shadowed past, and it threatens to follow him even into the heart of the Republic.

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles (440 pages) WARNING; OVER 400 PAGES
Kindle £8.99 Amazon paperback £9.49

A Bolshevik Tribunal sentences Count Rostov to lifelong house arrest in the opulent Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Stripped of his wealth, he lives through decades of political and social upheaval within the hotel's walls, ultimately discovering profound purpose, lifelong friendships, and unexpected love.

The Coin - Yasmin Zaher (240 pages)
Kindle £4.99 Amazon paperback £8.95

The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.

In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.

But America is stifling her--her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Mere - Danielle Giles (384 pages)
Kindle £4.99 Amazon paperback £5.52

Mere' follows an autumn and winter in a convent in the Norfolk marshes in 990CE through the eyes of the infirmarian, Sister Hilda. It is a tale of old curses and secrets, forbidden love and heresies, borderlands and edge-places.
Mere is a medieval folk horror gem of a novel that drags you deep into the Fens of 990 AD, where a convent rots from within. When the mere swallows a boy, the fragile order of prayer and devotion begins to unravel. Sister Hilda senses the secrets festering beneath the Abbess’s iron grip, and Sister Wulfrun arrives like a vision-haunted storm who may be savior or curse.