Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West

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. This helps me keep the group running as I pay the Meetup fee myself :) https://ko-fi.com/annabookgroup

We have changed location! Our next meetup will be at The Rose not far from London Bridge Station.

We will meet from 6:30 onwards at the pub and make our way to the room downstairs between 6:30 and 7:00. 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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Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West (1933, 208 pages

The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan. In the darkening curl of the Depression, misery is the fulcrum of national experience, a dismal engine that purrs especially for West’s titular protagonist. As a newspaper advice columnist, he is privy to the secret despair of an American chorus: the lost, the young, the deformed, the forgotten

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Shortlist for October

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson (1959, 246 pages)

Past the rusted gates and untrimmed hedges, Hill House broods and waits. . . .

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable noises and self-closing doors, but Hill House is gathering its powers and will soon choose one of them to make its own. . . .

The Hounding - Xenobe Purvis (2025, 205 pages)

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before.

The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818, 260 pages)

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.