An Evening at the BBC*

*Best Book Club® (other book clubs are available)

Last night I met up with my friends from the BBC. That's the Best Book Club. A brainchild of my friend Claire, who had joined a reading group in the pre-Covid era and was lamenting the fact that having to read a book that someone else had chosen, and which she didn't necessarily like, felt like a chore rather than a pleasure.

Her idea of a “best book club”, something that she and I and our Gourmet Girls were already doing on an ad hoc basis as part of our monthly conversations at my mother's Gourmet Club (see my previous post on this in my Posts library) was for everyone to bring a book or books they had really enjoyed reading, talk about why they liked it, then lend it to anyone else in the group who was interested. This would mean that each subsequent meet up of the group would lead to richer and more varied discussion, as more people had read each book, more opinions were shared and new books continually added to the mix. It was a brilliant theory, and it took a galvanizing and organized personality such as Claire's to put it into practice. She invited people she knew from different walks of life, some of whom had not met before, but whom she knew would have affinities that spread wider than just a love of reading. And so the Best Book Club was born. Claire keeps an ongoing record of who has borrowed which book and from whom, which is extremely useful as most of us are rubbish at remembering and just as bad at naming our books.

The BBC has never had a regular monthly commitment, which gives people time to read several books between meetings. But even so, we can't meet as often as we would like to now, because in 2021 Claire moved from Brighton back to her native Guernsey. Still, whenever we can, we meet, catch up, eat and drink and share our thoughts and feelings on what we’ve been reading. This weekend Claire is over in Sussex for the celebration of life of an exceptional choir leader, Deborah Roberts, who was the founder and Artistic Director of the Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF), so we took the opportunity to hold our BBC at a tiny, eccentric Brighton restaurant, Bom-Banes. The proprietor, Jane Bom-Bane, is a warm, creative and effusive hostess who will regularly punctuate the serving of sausage, mash and Belgian beer with songs, many of her own devising, some incorporating fantastical head gear such as this:

It’s a beloved Brighton institution and the perfect place to catch up and delve deep into our latest reading passions. Here are some of the books we shared and discussed last night:

Dangerous Crossing by Rachel Rhys

Published in 2017, this murder mystery is immensely readable and has been passed round many BBC members with great enjoyment. An ocean liner sets sail for Australia in September 1939. Six weeks later, the world is at war and a young woman is escorted off the ship in handcuffs. What has she done and why? At times more of a “who dun what?” than a whodunnit, it keeps you guessing right up to the final page.

Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield

A 2018 novel that blends elements of mystery, historical fiction, fantasy and science. It’s also a meditation on the power of story itself to change and shape lives, in prose as languid and beautiful as flowing water. A drowned child is brought to an ancient inn on the Thames where the regulars are keeping themselves amused telling stories. Hours later, the child stirs, breathes and comes back to life. Magic? Miracle? Scientific breakthrough? Who is the girl and who does she belong to? A beautiful, many layered book, highly recommended by BBC members.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

I sourced and read this novella after visiting an amazing exhibition of Leonora Carrington’s work at the Newlands House Gallery. A Surrealist artist who came from a wealthy British family but who ran away to France with Max Ernst as a young adult and subsequently spent most of her life living and working in Mexico, Carrington was a proto-feminist autodidact and polymath who created paintings, sculpture, tapestry designs, theatrical masks, exquisite jewellery - and fiction, much of it originally written and published in French or Spanish. This story, probably written when she was in her 30s, is the most amazing portrayal of old age. The prose is wise and hilarious and vicious and eminently quotable, a skewering of the way society treats women, particularly old women, and the plot reads as if the writers of the surreal TV comedy Green Wing had been time travelling into the 1950s. Since reading it, I have bought 12 copies and given them out as gifts. I urge anyone over the age of about 40 to read it and relate hard. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll read. Apart from Carrington's short stories, which are equally bonkers, brutal and brilliant.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

I read this one when it first came out in about 2013, and it's stayed with me ever since. It's the perfect “what would you do if…?” novel, with elements of science fiction and dystopia but written with achingly delicate precision and emotional resonance. It starts like a YA novel - 11 year old girl in small town America, living a small town life - but with the difference that the rotation of the earth is gradually but noticeably slowing. What impact would that have on your daily routine? As the days got longer and longer, would you fight your circadian rhythms and just keep to your normal schedule, or change - and keep changing - your entire way of life? And what would be the impact on nature and the world? Decisions made at a micro and macro level are described completely realistically, and even when I thought the author couldn't possibly work this scenario through to a satisfying ending, I was wrong. I want to both lend this to my daughter and reread it myself immediately.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is hands down one of my favourite authors, alongside David Mitchell, Barbara Trapido, John Irving, Sarah Waters and the criminally underrated Frances Hardinge. Reading Hamnet nearly broke me, and I am extremely excited for the screen version coming this year. But for me, this is O'Farrell’s finest hour. A mystery within a mystery, it unravels generations of family secrets layer by layer, gently and not without humour, until the final crushing denouement. It also contains what I consider to be the best stream-of-consciousness portrayal of a mind ravaged by dementia that I have ever read in fiction - the ultimate unreliable narrator, who might just be the only person who knows what, exactly, happened to Esme Lennox…

Hex by Jenni Fagan

This links to the previous novel because it was given to me in a supreme act of delayed gratification by my friend Magali, member of my other book group, who shares my evangelical passion for The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. Last year, for my birthday, Magali gave me a box of twelve wrapped, numbered, second-hand books.

There was a label on each one giving the genre and the first hundred words. It’s one of the nicest presents I have ever received and literally the gift that kept on giving. Hex was book no. 12. Magali waited a whole year for me to read it before she could discuss it with me. It was well worth the wait. A novella written by a Scottish poet, it is an intimate and searingly furious piece on female nature and witchcraft, imagining a conversation between a modern Wiccan practitioner and the servant girl killed as a witch in Stuart Edinburgh, Geillis Duncan (side note: I had not realized until reading Hex that Diana Gabaldon’s character in the Outlander series was named after an actual person; this novella is completely separate from the Jamie Fraser world). I shared this book at BBC last night and by lunchtime today Claire had finished it on the train and will pass it on to the next BBC member tomorrow before she goes back to Guernsey. And that makes me very happy.

It may be a while before the Best Book Club can meet again, but I’m already looking forward to it.

Do you attend a book club? If so, do you actually talk about the books or do you just gossip and drink wine? And do you like having a book chosen for you, or does that sometimes feel too much like homework? Would you benefit from a Best Book Club? If so, Claire's brilliant idea is available to copy! And if you’ve read any of the books I’ve recommended, please do let me know your thoughts in the Comments. Until next time!