OK here are this month's choices - hope you find something here you like...
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
There is another 1985. somehwere in the could-have-been, where Thursday Next is a literary detective without equal, fear, or boyfriend. Thursday is on the trail of the villainous Acheron Hades, who has been kidknapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre herself has been plucked from the novel of the same name., and Thursday must find a way into the book to repair the damage.
A delight for anyone who has ever wondered where bananas come from or why Leigh Delamere motorway services are so peculiarly named, The Eyre Affair is classic storytelling at its most engrossing.
The world will never look the same again....
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
On a street ina ton in the North of England, perfectly ordinary people are doing totally normal things - children play cricket, window-frames are painted, a couple argues, students pack up their belongings, and nameless people pass each other like every other day, interweaving yet never connecting. But a terrible event shatters the quiet and no one who witnesses it will be the same again.
'This is ecstatic wiriting, suffused with delight both at the things evoked and at the language that can recreate them... McGregor's conviction will carry him a long way.' - TLS
Waiting by Ha Jin
This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every moce and stifle the promptings of his heart. For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young - a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.
A bit of a wild card:
The Little Girl and the Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre
A death-row inmate becomes a darling of the media when he deamnds his right to a final cigarette in smoke-free prison. Meanwhile, a little girl accuses a petty bureaucrat of sexual perversion when she catches him sneaking a cigarette in the bathroom. Charged with an unthinkable "crime against children", his 'paedophobia' only seems further proof of his guilt. In this world where children rule tyrannically, his nicotine addiction could lead him to the electric chair. Can a desperate bid to get the media on his side save him?
'Unmasks the fundamental stupidity of our modern world' - Milan Kundera
These are all from my TBR so if anyone wants to borrow it after I've read it, just PM me as am happy to lend/set up book ring etc
July's book
The Eyre Affair (25%)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (10.7%)
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (28.6%)
Waiting (21.4%)
The Little Girl and the Cigarette (14.3%)