GW Book Club

March 2016

This month's book choice is:

Butterfly Fish  
by Irenosen Okojie


Irenosen Okojie is a writer, curator and Arts Project Manager. She has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Southbank Centre, and the Caine Prize. Her writing has been featured in the Guardian and the Observer.

Her short stories have been published internationally, including the Kwani 07 and Phatitude.

She was a selected writer by Theatre Royal Stratford East and Writer in Residence for TEDx East End. In 2014, she was the Prize Advocate for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. She is a mentor for the Pen to Print project supported by publisher Constable & Robinson.
She lives in east London.

A spiritual successor to the tales of Marquez, Irenosen's debut novel, Butterfly Fish masterfully combines elements of traditional Nigerian storytelling and magical realism in a multigenerational take of the legacy of inheritance.

After the sudden death of her mother, London photographer Joy struggles to pull the threads of her life back together, with the support of her kind but mysterious neighbour Mrs Harris. Joy’s fortune begins to change when she receives an unexpected inheritance from her mother: a huge sum of money, her grandfather’s diary and a unique brass warrior’s head from the nineteenth century kingdom of Benin.

Joy’s search for the origins of the head take us on a journey through time as dark family secrets come to light. Joy unearths the ties between her mother, grandfather, the wife of the king, and the brass head’s pivotal connection to them all.


If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

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Past Books:

February 2016

This month's book choice is:


The Falafel King is Dead  
by Sara Shilo



SARA SHILO was born in Jerusalem and currently lives in a small town in northern Israel with her family. This is her first book for adults.


The town has lost its famed falafel king, but the Dadon family have also lost a father and husband. Living with the daily threat of Katyusha missiles from neighbouring Lebanon, and struggling to survive amid the rubble of their lives, Simona and her three children each find their own way of coping with their grief, their fear, and their hopes. Raw, lyrical, shocking and moving, Sara Shilo's powerful debut novel recounts the life of an ordinary Israeli family over the course of a single, extraordinary day in prose that we have never been encountered in contemporary Hebrew literature.


If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com


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January 2016

This month's book choice is:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)
by Richard Flannagan

Born in Tasmania in 1961, Richard Flanagan is one of Australia’s leading novelists. His novels, Death of a River GuideThe Sound of One Hand ClappingGould's Book of Fish (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting have received numerous honours and been published in 26 countries. His father, who died the day Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the sixth novel by Richard Flanagan. It received critical acclaim on its release, and won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. 
It is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife. Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com


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December 2015


A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
by Marlon James


Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. The 44-year-old, now resident in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican author to win the Man Booker prize in its 47-year history. 

James’ first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.

James’ writing has appeared in EsquireGrantaPublisher’s Weekly and The Caribbean Review of Books.

Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught.

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a dazzling display of masterful storytelling exploring this near-mythic event. A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker Prize 2015. It is a 686-page epic with over 75 characters and voices. three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists, and even the CIA. Gripping and inventive, ambitious and mesmerising, A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the most remarkable and extraordinary novels of the twenty-first century.

If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com
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October 2015

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (2015)
by Katarina Bivald


Katarina Bivald grew up working part-time in a bookshop. Today she lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden, with her sister and as many bookshelves she can get by her. She's currently trying to persuade her sister that having a shelf for winter jackets and shoes is completely unneccessary. There should be enough space for a book shelf or two instead. Limited success so far. Apparantly, her sister is also stubbornly refusing to even discuss using the bath room to store books. 


The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life.

Katarina Bivald sometimes claims that she still hasn't decided whether she prefer books or people but, as we all know, people are a non-starter. Even if you do like them, they're better in books. Only possible problem: reading a great book and having no one to recommend it to.

If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

We read the book by November 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.
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September 2015 Book Club


This month's book choice is:

A SPORT AND A PASTIME (1967)
by James Salter


James Arnold Horowitz (June 10, 1925 – June 19, 2015), better known as James Salter, his pen name and later-adopted legal name, was an American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters.


A Sport and a Pastime is set in France in the early 1960s, the sad and tender story concerns the erotic affair of American middle-class college drop-out Philip Dean and young French girl, Anne-Marie, as witnessed by a self-consciously unreliable narrator. The unnamed narrator freely admits that much of his observation is in fact his own fantasy of the couple, and includes a number of sexually-explicit descriptions of their day-to-day existence as he imagines it. 

After a brief career in film writing and film directing, in 1979 Salter published the novel Solo Faces. He won numerous literary awards for his works, including belated recognition of works originally criticized at the time of their publication. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post is reported to have said that with a single sentence, Salter could break one's heart. The book is generally regarded by critics as a modern classic.


If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com


We read the book by October 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.

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August 2015 Book Club



This month's book choice is:



Things We Have In Common (2015) 

by Tasha Kavanagh

Tasha Kavanagh worked in film editing for ten years, on features including Twelve MonkeysSeven Years in Tibet and The Talented Mr Ripley. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. She has published several children's books under her maiden name, Tasha Pym. She lives in Hertfordshire with her family. Things We Have in Common is her first novel and has recently been shortlisted for the Not the Booker Shortlist.

Utterly fresh and chillingly dark, Things We Have In Common is reminiscent of both Emma Donoghue's Room and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. With a fantastic sense of place, perfectly constructed characters and a voice which confidently captures the essence of teenage obsession, Tasha Kavanagh is a writer to watch out for. 'A striking and highly enjoyable debut' Sophie Hannah. Yasmin would give anything to have a friend . . . And do anything to keep one.

If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

We read the book by September 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.


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July 2015 Book Club

This month's book choice is:

Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) 
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is the author of three novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), of a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008).

A masterly, haunting novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed. Half of A Yellow Sun garnered numerous accolades and was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007.

If you want to join in with the GW online book club either comment via Twitter @greenacrewriter or email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

We read the book by August 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.



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June 2015 Book Club

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014) by Karen Joy Fowler



Karen Joy Fowler is the award-winning author of three short story collections and six novels, including her bestselling The Jane Austen Book Club (2004)She is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. 


Her latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a remarkable story of a seemingly ordinary American family, where behavioral science trumps love, where a chimp is a sister, and daughters are research subjects. Fowler serves up a heartrending tale of loss and despair with her signature wit and humor, challenging our definition of what it means to be family, what it means to be human, and what it means to be humane. From a family undone by ambition and grief, narrator Rosemary takes a surprise filled search for brother (Lowell) and sister (Fern) through a forgotten past that explores the mysterious workings of memory.


If you want to join in with the GW online book club email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

We read the book by July 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.


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May 2015 Book Club


The Paying Guests (2014) by Sarah Waters 


GW was selected as one of the 12 book clubs who will shadow the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. Our book is The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters which will be this months book club choice.


Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.


She has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998), which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity (1999), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith (2002), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch (2006), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; The Little Stranger (2009), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award and The Paying Guests (2014) which has been shortlisted for The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

The Paying Guests takes place after WW1. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.


If you want to join in with the GW online book club email: greenacrewriters@gmail.com

We read the book by July 9th and discuss it online or at the next Writers Meet-Up (Second Wednesday of alternate months) for anyone interested in writing.

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