The Magician's Nephew — C S Lewis

The Magician's Nephew is a prequel to the Narnia series and is set a thousand years before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The frame story is set in England and features two children ensnared in experimental travel via ‘the wood between the worlds’. Thus, the novel shows Narnia and our middle-age world to be only two of many in a multiverse, which changes as some worlds begin and others end. It also explains the origin of foreign elements in Narnia, not only the lamp-post but also the White Witch and a human king and queen.

This week's book is C S Lewis's The Magician's Nephew and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Terror — Dan Simmons

A fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic, in 1845–1848, to locate the Northwest Passage. In the novel, while Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and illness, and forced to contend with mutiny and cannibalism, they are stalked across the bleak Arctic landscape by a monster.

This week's book is Dan Simmons's The Terror and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Franklin Expedition is well worth reading about, and you may like to consider Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by John G. Geiger and Owen Beattie, or Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson.

Norse Mythology — Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's retelling of the great northern tales, beginning with the genesis of the nine worlds, delving into the exploits of the deities, dwarves, and giants and culminating in Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time and people, vividly brings to like Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki, the son of giants, a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator.

This week's book is Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

This is our last book this year, and we meet next on 10 January 2019 for The Terror.

We — Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful ‘Benefactor’, the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity — until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World.

This week's book is Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

His Dark Materials 2: The Subtle Knife — Philip Pullman

Will has just killed a man. He's on the run. His escape will take him far beyond his own world, to the eerie disquiet of a deserted city, and to a girl, Lyra. Her fate is strangely linked to his own, and together they must find the most powerful weapon in all the worlds ...

This is the second part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

This week's book is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials 2: The Subtle Knife and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes — Stephen King

Stephen King short story collection.   Suggested stories:

The End of the Whole Mess 28pp
Suffer the Little Children 14pp
Chattery Teeth 37pp
You Know They Got a Hell of a Band 48pp
Rainy Season 25pp
My Pretty Pony 29pp
Crouch End 33pp
The Doctor's Case 38pp
Umney's Last Case 56pp
The Beggar and the Diamond 4pp

This week's book is Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Tin — Pádraig Kenny

Christopher is ‘proper’: a real boy with a real soul, orphaned in a fire. He works for an engineer, a maker of the eccentric, loyal and totally individual mechanicals who are Christopher's best friends. But after a devastating accident, a secret is revealed and Christopher's world is changed for ever ...

This week's book is Pádraig Kenny's Tin and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended the westward expansion of the United States, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world.

This week's book is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

For continuity purposes we'll also be discussing Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit, the utility of time travel in addressing the problems of inchoate totalitarianism, and the wisdom of superimbibation.

Mort — Terry Pratchett

Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome.

For Mort however, it is about to become one of the tools of his trade. Henceforth, Death is no longer the end, merely the means to an end. He has received an offer he can't refuse. As Death's apprentice Mort'll have free board, use of the company horse, and no need to be dead. It's the dream job until he discovers that it can be a killer on his love life ...

This week's book is Terry Pratchett's Mort and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Sing, Unburied, Sing — Jesmyn Ward

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black and her children's father is white. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, and about love.

This week's book is Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Under The Frog — Tibor Fischer

The adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the revolution of 1956. In this spirited indictment of totalitarianism, the two improbable heroes, Pataki and Gyuri, travel the length and breadth of Hungary in an epic quest for food, lodging, and female companionship.

This week's book is Tibor Fischer's Under The Frog and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Cat's Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to humanity. For he is the inventor of ice—nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. Writer Jonah's search for his whereabouts leads him to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to an island republic in the Caribbean where the absurd religion of Bokononism is practised, to love and to insanity.

This week's book is Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

Kathy's attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world.

This week's book is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

The saccharine confession and fluent justification of the most unreliable of narrators, Humbert Humbert.

This week's book is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Power — Naomi Alderman

What would the world look like if men were afraid of women rather than women being afraid of men ?

This week's book is Naomi Alderman's The Power and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.

The Secret Speech — Tom Rob Smith

The Soviet Union 1956: after Stalin's death, a violent regime is beginning to fracture. Stalin's successor Khrushchev pledges reform. But there are forces at work that are unable to forgive or forget the past.

Leo Demidov, former MGB officer, is facing his own turmoil. His adopted daughters have yet to forgive him for his part in the brutal murder of their parents. They are not alone. Leo, his wife, and their family are in grave danger from someone with a grudge. Someone transformed beyond recognition into the perfect model of vengeance. Leo's desperate mission to save his family will take him from the harsh Siberian Gulags, to the depths of the criminal underworld, to the centre of the Hungarian uprising — and into a hell where redemption is as brittle as glass.

This week's book is Tom Rob Smith's The Secret Speech 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.

Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi

The tale begins in the late 18th century in an Asante village, part of the Gold Coast which eventually became Ghana. A young girl, Effia Otcher, is sold by her father to a slaver as a bride, not as a slave — and taken to live with him in Cape Coast Castle, a fort overlooking the sea. The slaves are in dungeons underneath the castle, awaiting transit to the Americas and the Caribbean. Amongst them is 15-year-old Esi Asare, Effia’s half-sister. In a series of subsequent interconnected stories, the bloodlines of these two women are followed through seven generations covering the associated histories of the US and Ghana up to the turn of the 21st century.

This week's book is Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.