Details
Plenty of discussion and contrasting views at the April meeting which, of course, makes for the most interesting discussions; A Village in the Third Reich scored 70, A Sense of Freedom 66.
For June we will be reading a double award-winning science fiction novel that will be coming to the small screen at some time this year and a semi-autobiographic book considered to be one of the finest anti-war novels.
Happy reading.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (nominated by Gavin)
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.
This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (nominated by Julia)
Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, Billy finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.
Other books nominated were:
The Rising Tide: Vera Stanhope by Ann Cleeves
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Red Notice by Bill Browder
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Porgy by Du Bose Heyward
World War Z by Max Brooks