The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch

A quick note to say that if you would like to help me with the running costs of the book group, you can give a small contribution via Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/annabookgroup

Thank you to everyone who helped me with the Meetup fees in 2025!

We will meet from 6:30 onwards at the pub and go to the room upstairs between 6:30 and 7:00. Please check with the bar staff before going up that the room is ready and please don't go up before our start time. We will start the discussion at around 7:00pm and talk about the book for an hour or so before having a break. Then we can vote on next month's book.

If you have any suggestions for short (or shortish) books for the next shortlist, please message me ahead of time.

Thanks!

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The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch (1964, 171 pages)

The funeral of Edward’s mother brings him home for the first time in years. Though his return rekindles his affection for his childhood home, it also triggers a resurgence of the family tensions that caused him to leave in the first place. As Edward becomes tangled in his family’s web of corrosive secrets, his homecoming tips a precariously balanced dynamic into sudden chaos.

The Italian Girl is Murdoch’s compelling story of a man’s reunion with his estranged family, and of the tragedy that shocks them all into confronting their dark past.

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Shortlist for April

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin (1968, 304 pages)

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke (2020, 245 pages)

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927, 160 pages)

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.