Berk Worms Book Club: Historical Fiction

Welcome to the Berk Worms Book Club🐛 2025. Each month we all read the same book that we have chosen from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it as well as other books we are reading.

For October 2025, we have chosen to resd a Historical Fiction novel, entitled: ‘The Long Take’ written by Robin Robertson. The novel has won many accolades including being Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, being the Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2018,
Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018, Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

This novel was published in February 2018 and is approximately 256 pages long. It is available in all formats including audible.

About the Novel:

Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties.

While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.

Critical views:

‘A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring.' --John Banville, Guardian

Reading ahead with the BERKWORMS

11 November: we are reading a 19th century classic called Therese Raquin by Emile Zola published in 1866.

9 December Is Christmas 🎄 Meal & celebration & we will be reading Sci-fi. This book will be selected in our October meet up.

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza