Howdy folks, the next meeting of Still Mostly Harmless will be on Thursday, 21 September 2017. Check out the Next Meeting page for more info on time and place.
These are the three, yes three, books we have selected for the this month, feel free to read one, two, three or none before the meeting. Looking forward to seeing you there!
BOOKS:
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Fantasy/Historical)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2017
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead’s razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
Link to Waterstones
Death Note Vol1 by Tsugumi Ohba (Fantasy/Horror/Manga)
Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects – and he’s bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and now Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Noteto rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his noble goal…or his life?
We’ve actually read this one before, in fact it’s on our recommended list but it’s been so long and the group membership has changed so much we decided that a re-read was in order.
Link to Waterstones
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh (Fantasy/Teen)
A sumptuous, epic love story inspired by A Thousand and One Nights.Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a terrible surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi’s wit and will get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she may be falling in love with a murderer.Shazi discovers that the villainous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. It’s up to her to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.”So you would have me throw Shazi to the wolves?””Shazi? Honestly, I pity the wolves.”
Link to Waterstones
Don’t forget your 20% discount @ Waterstones Poole – just ask.
