Book Club

Friday, May 31st at 6pm.

This May we are reading ‘Mania’, by Lionel Shriver.

What if calling someone stupid was illegal?
In a reality not too distant from our own, where the so-called Mental Parity Movement has taken hold, the worst thing you can call someone is 'stupid'.
Everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is 'the last great civil rights fight'.

Exams and grades are all discarded, and smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it. You don't need a qualification to be a doctor.

Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect, and imagines a world in which intellectual meritocracy is heresy. Hilarious, deadpan, scathing and at times frighteningly plausible, MANIA will delight the many fans of her fiction and journalism alike.

For more details, please get in touch with one of our well-read staff members.

First Thursday of each month, 6.00 pm to 7.00 pm.

Our next book club pick is One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall, which will be discussed in store on Thursday 6th of June at 6pm.

About this month’s book:

Cole is the perfect husband; a romantic, supportive of his wife's career, keen to be a hands-on dad, not a big drinker. A good guy.

So when his wife leaves him, he's floored. She was lucky to be with a man like him.

Craving solitude, he accepts a job on the coast and quickly settles into his new life. Then he meets reclusive artist Lennie. And though she is quite different from the woman he'd expected, he believes he has finally found a soulmate.

But as their relationship develops, two young women go missing while on a walk protesting gendered violence, right by where Cole and Lennie live. Finding themselves at the heart of a police investigation and media frenzy, Cole soon realises they don't know each other very well at all . . .

If most men say they're one of the good guys, then why are so many women afraid to walk alone at night?