Wednesday, 27 November 2024
Tremor by Teju Cole
Our next book is Tremor by Teju Cole. At the centre of the novel is Tunde, a Harvard professor of photography and a man of the world who, like an antenna, picks up the voices of friends, family, strangers and fictional characters, as well as his own inner dialogue. A rich cascade of stories as innovative as it is meditative, it's a book about human survival, the brutality of history, the passage of time and the possibility of joy.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 30 October 2024
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Our next book is Orbital by Samantha Harvey. In this quietly optimistic (and newly Booker Prize-shortlisted) novel, a team of astronauts circle Earth in their spacecraft, observing and studying the silent blue orb from a faraway vantage point. Still feeling their home planet's psychological pull, they can only look on in wonder at its natural beauty, and also in protective fear for the fragility of human life. They start to contemplate and to ask each other, what is life without Earth, and what is Earth
without humanity?
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 25 September 2024
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Our next book is Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova. Gothic, gory and quivering with raw emotion; Monstrilio is an uncannily moving four-part tale of loss, loyalty, monsters and motherly love. Insensible with grief after losing her eleven-year-old son Santiago, Magos vows to keep a piece of him alive, carving out part of his lung and nurturing it til it grows into a carnivorous little creature. Hidden in the walls of the family's crumbling Mexico City estate, Monstrilio comes to resemble the boy he once was, only with added murderous compulsions that put his own tenuous life at risk...
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 28 August 2024
Mother Naked by Glen James Brown
Our next book is Mother Naked by Glen James Brown. It is the year 1434, and as the Black Death reigns and the Peasants’ Revolt rages, an ageing minstrel arrives at Durham Cathedral to regale the city's wealthiest men with a tale... His name is Mother Naked, and in writing the novel that bears his name, Brown was inspired by the lowest-paid performer to feature in over 200 years of records at Durham Cathedral, a man listed only as Modyr Nakett. What begins as a ghost story becomes a broader parable of class, religion, art and ale, as the minstrel speaks truth to power, bearing a message more real and chilling than the privileged few could ever imagine…
Keep an eye out for our in-conversation event with Glen James Brown in September!
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 31 July 2024
The Guest by Emma Cline
Our next book is The Guest by Emma Cline. A hazily intoxicating poolside novel with a certified female creep at its centre, The Guest takes the saying 'sink or swim' to new depths. Alone and broke on Long Island after she is dismissed by her sugar daddy, Alex is an eternal trespasser in a world of privilege and excess, a ‘set’ to which everyone else seems to belong. She chances, charms and grifts her way into the private lives (and swimming pools) of the island's wealthy residents, leaving a wake of damage and disorder behind her. How long can she stay at the party, before someone realises she was never invited?
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 26 June 2024
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Our next book is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann. This year's International Booker Prize winner, it's a novel as private as it is political as an ill-fated love affair plays out against the collapse in the late 1980s of East Germany's GDR. After a chance meeting on a famously sensual BUS, a student and an older married man form a potent attraction sparked by a shared love of music and art and intensified by secrecy. When she strays one night and he cannot forgive her, a toxic rift opens up between them, even as the world around them is shifting, and old certainties are giving way to the rise of a seismic new era.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 29 May 2024
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
Our next book is The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. A characteristically boundary-pushing title from Peninsula Press, the novel is narrated by a young artist who goes deaf overnight and is forced to recalibrate her relationship to the world. On waking with a 'deep drone' in her right ear that doctors can neither treat nor explain, and with the prospect of total deafness looming, she starts to keep a score of the estrangements and enchantments of her days, the loneliness and the sometimes comical, sometimes poignant chance meetings she has with doctors, strangers, ex-lovers and faraway friends. She engages too with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians and philosophers, as the act of making meaning becomes a form of consolation and a way to survive.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 24 April 2024
Shy by Max Porter
Our next book is Shy by Max Porter. Another abstract but affecting character study from the author of Lanny and Grief is a Thing with Feathers, Shy shadows its protagonist, a teenage boy in crisis, as he follows his bruised conscience into a dark night of the soul. By turns sensitive, vicious, arrogant and repentant, Shy listens to the voices in his head; people he has wronged and those who are trying to love him. Jagged and dreamlike, Shy is a modern fable of imagination, boyhood and shame; a book about straying off course and (hopefully) finding your way back...
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 27 March 2024
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
Our next book is Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh. Based on the real-life mystery of a mass poisoning in postwar France, it's the darkly sensuous story of a town stricken by a collective hysteria born of obsession, envy, desire and... baked goods gone bad. The novel takes the shape of a fever-dream confessional by baker's wife Elodie whose unsatisfying daily life is leavened overnight with the appearance in town of an alluring ambassadorial couple. Strange things start to happen as a deadly intoxicant leaks into the town; six dead horses are discovered in a field, laid out neatly; a teenage boy throws himself into a bonfire; widows hallucinate their late husbands on the moonlit river, coming back to claim them...
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 28 February 2024
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Our next book is Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. The scene-stealing premise for this offbeat sort-of-rom-com (with many twists) is this: Greta, a committed cynic, underachiever and transcriber for a sex therapist, falls in inappropriate love with one of the clients whose sessions she is transcribing. Greta contrives a meeting with the tall and apparently glacial woman from Switzerland, whom she nicknames Big Swiss, at a local dog park. A new and not entirely honest relationship begins to bloom, one that will reshape both of their lives. And there are bees! If the plot sounds TV-worthy, it is, and shall soon become a series starring Jodie Comer.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 31 January 2024
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
Our next book is The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas. A chill wind shakes the pages of this eerie Norwegian novella from 1963, a glacial fable of friendship, loss and the vanishing innocence of childhood. Schoolgirls Unn and Siss become fascinated by the gleaming spires of the Ice Palace, a frozen waterfall that becomes their special meeting place, until one day Unn visits the palace alone and doesn't come back...
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 29 November 2023
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay
Our next book is Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay. The latest book from New Zealand writer Laura Jean McKay, Gunflower is a mesmeric collection of short-form fiction that travels at light-speed; skimming across genres, and putting a surreal, speculative slant on the world as it is now, and as it might one day be. In one story; a brood of chickens finds its voice, and in another, a family of cat farmers sets its captive animals free. In the title story, the crew of a feminist medical ship find that all the world's landmasses have disappeared overnight, leaving them adrift on an infinite sea.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 25 October 2023
Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale
Our next book is Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale. An arch comic study of human avarice and misplaced trust, it’s the sinister story of a slick criminal scheme devised by two women to strip elderly people of their pensions. First published in 1988 and now reissued by Daunt Books, the ink-black final novel from late author Celia Dale follows the merciless exploits of mastermind Janice and her accomplice Grace, who, on their release from Holloway Prison, begin posing as Social Services representatives, preying on pensioners wherever they find them; betting shops, libraries, the post office, and in fine weather, park benches. "It was a livelihood which comprised skill, nerve, an understanding and manipulation of human nature, and risk", writes Dale. "The risk made Grace Bradby’s cold blood run warmer and faster".
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 27 September 2023
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Our next book is The Vegetarian by Han Kang, a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea; a tale of shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others. Recently re-issued by Granta in a new series celebrating their bestselling titles, The Vegetarian follows the story of Yeong-hye who one day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion. Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies...
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 30 August 2023
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Our next book is After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz, a joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 26 July 2023
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
Our next book is The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers, a tender and melodic folksong to the disappearing English countryside, extolling the potential of beauty as a balm for trauma and a weapon against inequality. From the author of The Gallows Pole, The Perfect Golden Circle unfurls over the course of one burning hot summer in 1989, as two men set off each night in a campervan to work on an extraordinary project; forming crop circles in the green-and-gold fields of Wiltshire. Traumatised Falklands vet Calvert and amiable, chaotic Redbone weave a close friendship as they create ever more elaborate designs, eventually gaining international notoriety for their work.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 28 June 2023
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
Our next book is When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, a many-hued tale of one family living and dying among the summits of the Pyrenees. In a savage, sloping landscape still haunted by the ghosts of the Spanish civil war, a man - a father, poet, dreamer - is struck by lightning, leaving his two small children to live wild, and to face life's joys and sorrows alone. As time rolls by, the creatures of the mountain, humans and animals and 'others' alike, join in a chorus of voices that’s translated into mellifluous English by Mara Faye Lethem.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 31 May 2023
The Way the Day Breaks by David Roberts
This month we’re reading The Way the Day Breaks by David Roberts. Set in the late 1980s, this formally-daring first novel listens in on a close-knit family as they talk at the dinner table, laugh, and quarrel on car trips over the Yorkshire Dales. Yet beneath all the light-hearted chat, the get-rich-quick schemes, the stolid displays of unconditional love, runs a dark current of worry and disquiet. Dad is changing; his ideas becoming wilder, his behaviour more unpredictable as his mental health disintegrates. His eventual breakdown will reverberate down the years; particularly with youngest son Michael, whose poetic remembrances and attempts to make sense of his father's life, and his own, form their own strand of the story.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 26 April 2023
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
This month we’re reading Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. Marine biologist Leah is back from a deep-sea research trip that ended in unnatural disaster when the submarine she was in sank to the ocean floor. Back on dry land, after months harbouring a dwindling hope that she'd see her love again, wife Miri finds Leah much changed; barely eating and distracted, wandering from room to room, and slowly slipping away. Whatever happened down in the depths, Leah has dragged part of it back with her, and into their home. As Miri dredges for answers, she begins to face the possibility that the woman she loved is lost for good.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 29 March 2023
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
This month we’re reading I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, originally published by Rough Trade Books and named Foyles Fiction Book of the Year, now out in paperback with Granta. An arch and acidic storyboard featuring strong themes of sex, social media, politics and privilege, this addictive debut follows its narrator into a triangular fixation with an older man, "the man I want to be with", and his lover, "the woman I am obsessed with". Patel's sharp-eyed narrator makes parallels between the intimate dynamics at the heart of human relationships, and those rife in the world at large, dishing a caustic critique of patriarchal systems of power.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! We’d love for there to be a changing group of people, with an eclectic selection of reads which we will endeavour to choose as democratically as possible. The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
Wednesday, 22 February 2023
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Our very first bookclub read is Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan, from Daunt Books Publishing. Kick the Latch is a whittled-down, propulsive account of one woman's hard life at the racetrack, drawn from transcribed interviews with a horse trainer named Sonia. In a series of short, sharp mini-chapters, Scanlan smartly corrals the sights, sounds and particular aromas of Sonia's world, from the rigorous run-up to a race, to the fancy suits and boots of the winner's circle, to the humid crush of the racetrack bar afterwards.
The Bookclub is open to all and there’s no requirement to read every book and turn up to every meeting, come whenever you fancy! We’d love for there to be a changing group of people, with an eclectic selection of reads which we will endeavour to choose as democratically as possible. The wonderful Fort Road Hotel will be hosting our meet-ups in their basement bar with a delicious selection of drinks and snacks.
6.30pm Fort Road Bar
