1984 — Eric Blair

Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth, altering historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a coworker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. One day, Winston receives a note from her that reads “I love you”.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

This week's book is Eric Blair's 1984 and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Plot Against America — Philip Roth

Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, joins the America First party. After making a surprise appearance on the last night of the 1940 Republican National Convention, he is nominated as the Republican Party's candidate for President. Although criticized from the left, and hated by most Jewish-Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and Midwest, and wins the election over incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide under the slogan ‘Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war’. Increasingly, some Americans feel like outsiders in American society ...

This week's book is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Night Watch — Sarah Waters

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners — three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching. Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret. Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover. Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances ... Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A towering achievement.

This week's book is Sarah Waters's The Night Watch and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

A Burnt-out Case — Graham Greene

Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a ‘burnt-out case’, a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a married woman, will ever be taken as innocent ...

This week's book is Graham Greene's A Burnt-out Case and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

As we're coming to the end of our reading list, we'll be choosing books at the meeting. You may like to consider the unread books list and the unreadable books list.

The Women in White — Wilkie Collins

In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white.

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

This week's book is Wilkie Collins's The Women in White and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Golden Hill — Francis Spufford

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746.

One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money.

Should the New York merchants trust him ? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay ? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him ?

This week's book is Francis Spufford's Golden Hill and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Please note change of book.  This is our last book this year, and we meet next on 12 January 2017 for The Woman in White.

Gold — Chris Cleave

If your dreams pull you in one direction and your heart in another, which should you follow ? This is the question that haunts Kate Meadows, a world champion athlete whose eight-year-old daughter Sophie is battling a recurrence of childhood leukemia just as Kate is about to compete for her last chance at an Olympic gold medal. For years, Kate has sacrificed everything for her family and watched her best friend and closest rival, Zoe Castle, conquer the world stage. Kate has never won gold and will have to go through Zoe — who has everything to lose — to get it. Now her child is facing a life-threatening illness, and the stakes are higher than ever. How can she do what is right for her daughter without abandoning all of her dreams ?

This week's book is Chris Cleave's Gold and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Rendezvous with Rama — Arthur C Clarke

Rama is a vast alien spacecraft that enters the Solar System. A perfect cylinder some fifty kilometres long, spinning rapidly, racing through space, Rama is a technological marvel, a mysterious and deeply enigmatic alien artefact. It is humanity's first visitor from the stars and must be investigated ...

“The focus is all about unfolding the mystery of Rama; the awe it inspires and the process of coming to terms with the mind-boggling possibilities it presents. It works a treat. This is top grade ‘wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in Darrien’ material. Among the best I've read” — The Guardian.

This week's book is Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

At the Existentialist Café — Sarah Bakewell

Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, “You can make philosophy out of this cocktail !” From this moment of inspiration, Sartre will create his own extraordinary philosophy of real, experienced life — of love and desire, of freedom and being, of cafés and waiters, of friendships and revolutionary fervour. It is a philosophy that will enthral Paris and sweep through the world, leaving its mark on post-war liberation movements, from the student uprisings of 1968 to civil rights pioneers. As read on Radio 4's Book of the Week !

This week's book is Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

And as a special Hallowe'en Treat, we'll also be reading Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

A Very British Coup — Chris Mullin

Harry Perkins, an unassuming, working class, very left-wing Leader of the Labour Party and Member of Parliament for Sheffield Central, becomes Prime Minister in March 1991. The priorities of the Perkins Government include dissolving all newspaper monopolies, withdrawal from the North Atlantic Alliance, removing all American military bases on UK soil, unilateral nuclear disarmament, and true open government. As MI5 conspires with the press barons to bring him down, Harry finds himself caught up in a no-holds-barred battle for survival.

This week's book is Chris Mullin's A Very British Coup and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Goodbye to Berlin — Christopher Isherwood

Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin evokes the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people at threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles.

This week's book is Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Vile Bodies — Evelyn Waugh

In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life.

This week's book is Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Revenant — Michael Punke

It is the year 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

This week's book is Michael Punke's The Revenant and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Night Manager — John le Carré

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when an attempt to pass on information to the British authorities - about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings - backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine. His quest takes him from the cliffs of west Cornwall, via northern Quebec and the Caribbean, to the jungles of Panama. His quarry is the worst man in the world.

This week's book is John le Carré's The Night Manager and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Thérèse Raquin — Émile Zola

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

In the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend Laurent, but their animal passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever.

This week's book is Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

As we're coming to the end of our reading list, we'll be choosing books at the meeting. You may like to consider the unread books list and the unreadable books list.

Thank You, Jeeves — P G Wodehouse

I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a ‘sir’ on to every sentence. The two things don't go together.

This week's book is P G Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Child 44 — Tom Rob Smith

Stalin's Soviet Union is a paradise for its workers, providing for all of their needs. One day the body of a dead boy is found on the railway lines outside Moscow, hit by a train. The boy's father claims he was murdered and his body was cut up by a madman. But he must be mistaken, because Soviet citizens live free from the fear of ordinary crime and criminals.

This week's book is Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.