It is your turn to choose but you don't know what to pick or you have some time to read titles other than the bookclub title but not sure what to select? Well here are some recommendations from your fellow bookclubbers:
| Title details | Story summary | Suggested
by |
Title: Oscar and Lucinda |
Oscar and Lucinda are two of the most perfectly realised characters in modern fiction. An immensely skilful and absorbing juxtaposition of a gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate vision of human existence. |  |
Title: Handbags and
gladrags |
Fashion stylist Emily Pointer is a natural blonde, a tall size 10, travels the world for work and gets 30 per cent discount at Prada. As far as she's concerned, life is perfect. So surely a night of wild sex with a hunky Australian photographer will be just another fabulous experience to add to the package? Instead, Emily starts to discover that life can be messy - and the designer clothes in your closet can be squeezed out by the skeletons lurking there too. From Milan to London, Paris and New York, Emily does her utmost to conceal the rampant affair - Miles is her secret lover and that's the way it's going to stay. But secrets come at a cost and Emily is about to be hit with the bill. After all, you can't live on emotional credit forever . . . can you? |  |
Title: The Rice Mother |
A multigenerational narrative that spans the nightmare of World War II and the Japanese occupation, "The Rice Mother" gorgeously evokes a world of exotic beauty and vivid characters, where small pleasures offset unimaginable horrors. |  |
Title: Cloudstreet |
From separate catastrophes two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again. |  |
Title: Vanity Fair |
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and wordly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, only longs for the caddish soldier George. |  |
 Title: Possession Author: A.S. Byatt Length: 528pp |
Winner of the 1990 booker prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th-century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of "victorian verse". It is structured in the form of a literary and biographical treasure hunt. | |
 Title: Atonement Author: Ian Mcewan Length: 384pp |
A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and england, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution. |  |
Title: Journey from
Venice |
The serene city beckons, promising paradise regained for Ruth Cracknell and her husband, Eric, as they set forth on a carefully planned holiday but things do not go as planned. | |
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