Manchester's Post Apocalyptic Book Club

Meet us online, or in person at The Lass O'Gowrie (36 Charles St, Manchester M1 7DB), for this hybrid meetup. At the Lass, we will either be in the snug or the upstairs room - ask the bar staff where the book club is this time.

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

Meet us in the Lass O'Gowrie to play boardgames once again!

We play mainly shorter 'party' and social deduction games such as codenames, resistance, secret Hitler and king domino, but you can find people playing other longer games like Pandemic, Azul or dead of Winter on occasion.

New people welcome and there will always be someone willing to teach a game.

Book Club Subs: paypal.me/MPABC (voluntary 50p contributions if you are able to in these times)

Meet us online, or in person at The Lass O'Gowrie (36 Charles St, Manchester M1 7DB), for this hybrid meetup. At the Lass, we will either be in the snug or the upstairs room - ask the bar staff where the book club is this time.

Jason Tavener woke up one morning to find himself completely unknown. The night before he had been the top-rated television star with millions of devoted watchers. The next day he was just an unidentified walking object, whose face nobody recognised, of whom no one had heard, and without the I.D. papers required in that near future.

When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.

It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in in some sort of cosmic shell game - but how? And why?

Philip K. Dick takes the reader on a walking tour of solipsism's scariest margin in his latest novel about the age we are already half into.