Our May session saw us having plenty to say on two books that both packed in plenty of provoking content. The shorter and leaner of the two, A Short Stay in Hell, went down rather better (scoring 75) than the longer, Notre Dame de Paris (44), whose meandering around medieval Paris left a few of us a little lost!
For June we have the opportunity to experience “the most exciting development in spy fiction since the Cold War” and enter an alternative 21st century Britain in a novel published last year.
Please note, with thanks, we appreciate attendees making a contribution of £1.50 at the meeting to help cover meetup charges.
Happy Reading.
Slow Horses by Mick Herron (nominated by David)
Spooks are supposed to be stealthy . . . But those who make a noisy mess of their careers end up in Slough House.
This is Jackson Lamb's kingdom: a dumping ground for spies who've screwed up. Once high fliers, they're now slow horses, condemned to a life of pushing paper as punishment for crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal.
In drab and mildewed offices, these highly trained spies moan and squabble, stare at the walls, and dream of better days - not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a slow horse, and the one thing they have in common is their desire to be back in the action.
So when a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, his beheading scheduled for live broadcast on the net, the slow horses aren't going to just sit quietly and watch. And unless they can prove they're not as useless as they're thought to be, a public execution is going to echo round the world.
Pagans by James Alistair Henry (nominated by Paul)
The Norman conquest never happened.
The ancient tribes of Britain remain undefeated.
But murders still have to be solved.
The small, mostly unimportant, island of Britain is inhabited by an uneasy alliance of tribes - the dominant Saxon East, the beleaguered Celtic West, and an independent Nordic Scotland - and tensions are increasing by the second. Supermarket warpaint sales are at an all- time high, mead abuse shortens the lives of thousands, and social media is abuzz with conspiracy theories suggesting the High Table's putting GPS trackers in the honeycakes.
Amid this febrile atmosphere, the capital is set to play host to the Unification Summit, which aims to join together the various tribes into one 'united kingdom'. But when a Celtic diplomat is found brutally murdered, his body nailed to an ancient oak, the fragile peace is threatened. Captain Aedith Mercia, daughter of a powerful Saxon leader, must join forces with Celtic Tribal Detective Inspector Drustan to solve the murder - and stop political unrest spilling onto the streets.
But is this an isolated incident? Or are Aedith and Drustan facing a serial killer with a decades-old grudge? To find out, they must delve into their own murky pasts and tackle forces that go deeper than they ever could have imagined.
Other books nominated were:
Blindness by José Saramago
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
