The Books
Each year City Reads chooses a different book by a different author and encourages Brighton & Hove to get reading. Here are some sneaky peaks of books from previous years’ authors that you might have missed!
2013
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
Guards! Guards! is the eighth novel in the Discworld series, published in 1989, and the first in the series to centre on the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork– a police force like no other, generally (and accurately) regarded as a group of unaccomplished and pretty powerless layabouts. The drunken and world-weary Captain Vimes, cowardly Sergeant Colon, opportunistic Corporal Nobbs (of dubious parentage)…and their newest recruit, Lance Constable Carrot, who is upright, literal, law-abiding and keen. Aiding them in their fight for truth, justice and the Ankh-Morporkian way are a small swamp dragon (Errol) and the Librarian of Unseen University (who just happens to be an orang-utan). An aura of mean-minded resentfulness is thick in the streets of Ankh-Morpork but when even the Watch have trouble telling right from wrong, you know that Law and Order ain’t what it used to be.
2012
My Policeman by Bethan Roberts
My Policeman is the tender and tragic story of a secret gay love affair played out in 1950s Brighton. Tom, a dashing young policeman, has caught the eye of love-struck suitor Marion, but he has another powerful claim on his affections. Patrick, curator at Brighton Museum, is also besotted with Tom and opens up a world previously unknown to him. But in an age when those of ‘minority status’ were condemned by society and the law, Tom’s immediate safety lies with Marion and the smokescreen of marriage…
Awash with fear and suspicion, My Policeman brilliantly evokes a buttoned-up post-war Britain, perfectly capturing a bygone gay Brighton too – a covert rendezvous at The Argyle and Black Lion and furtive nights and illicit liaisons at the infamous Spotted Dog.
2011
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
In her follow-up to Small Island, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, Andrea Levy once again reinvents the historical novel. Told in the irresistibly willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, The Long Song is at once defiant, funny, and shocking. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her “Marguerite.” Together they live through the bloody Baptist War and the violent and chaotic end of slavery. An extraordinarily powerful story, “The Long Song leaves its reader with a newly burnished appreciation for life, love, and the pursuit of both” (The Boston Globe).
2010
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
James Bond is marked for death by the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH in Ian Fleming’s masterful spy thriller, and the novel that President John F. Kennedy named one of his favourite books of all time.
SMERSH stands for ‘Death to Spies’ and there’s no secret agent they’d like to destroy more than 007. But ensnaring the British Secret Service’s most lethal operative will require a lure so tempting even he can’t resist - Tatiana Romanova, a ravishing Russian spy. Her mission: seduce Bond, then flee to the West on the Orient Express. Waiting in the shadows are two of Fleming’s most vividly drawn villains…
Bursting with action and intrigue, this is one of the best-loved Bond books —a classic that set the standard for sophisticated literary spycraft.
2009
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
It is 1939. In Nazi Germany, the country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier - and will become busier still.
By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed forever when she picks up a single object, abandoned in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, and this is her first act of book thievery. So begins Liesel’s love affair with books and words, and soon she is stealing from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library . . . wherever there are books to be found.
But these are dangerous times, and when Liesel’s foster family hides a Jew in their basement, nothing will ever be the same again.
2008
A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
Winter 1963: two children have disappeared in Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezing day in December, another child goes missing: 13 year-old Alison Carter vanishes from an isolated Derbyshire hamlet. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation filled with dead ends and closed faces, an outcome that reverberates down the years.
Part psychological profile, part police procedural and part study in gothic atmosphere, A Place of Execution is a taut, masterfully plotted suspense thriller that exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion.
2007
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again… The first line of Rebecca has slipped into conversation culture and Rebecca remains one of the best-loved and most widely read novels of the 20th century, over seven decades after it first burst onto the bestseller list in 1938.
We are ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten, a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper. With an eerie presentiment the second Mrs de Winter walks in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the dark secrets surrounding Maxim’s first wife, the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.
2006
Hotel World by Ali Smith
One hotel. One night. Five characters. Four living, one dead. Set in the luxurious anonymity of the upmarket yet lacklustre Global Hotel chain, Ali Smith’s second novel offers a compelling glimpse into the lives of five women, each connected in some way to a bizarre and tragic death.
Each chapter takes a new perspective on the events of those 24 hours, as seemingly unconnected worlds collide in a dizzying meditation on love, loss, fate, chance, grief and redemption. Ultimately a spirited celebration of life, Hotel World offers an invigorating reposte to Muriel Spark’s memento mori ‘Remember You Must Die’ with the uplifting ‘Remember You Must Live, Remember You must Love.’
2005
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland is the most successful and enduring work of fantasy fiction of all time. Since Lewis Carroll first sent his spirited heroine down the rabbit hole to Wonderland in 1865, her subterranean adventures have launched a hundred careers, a thousand imitators, and seeped into our cultural consciousness like nothing before or since.
Alongside its companion piece Through the Looking Glass, Alice remains the most quoted and translated book in the English language after the Bible and Shakespeare. Its nonsensical world if improbable encounters and incongruous characters has inspired writers (James Joyce to T.S Eliot); artists (Ralph Steadman to Salvador Dali); filmmakers (Walt Disney to Jonathan Miller), and rock ‘n’ roll icons (Jefferson Airplane to Marilyn Manson).
Have you taken part in City Reads in the past? Leave your memories in the comments box below.
