Big Read 2023

The Big Read 2023

Our new theme of Drugs, Herbs and Medicine, and country focus Benelux inspired this selection from Arnold NWR.

All descriptions are taken from Goodreads and all books are widely available in multiple formats.

Fiction

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier

Little is known about the life of 17th-century painter Johannes Vermeer, yet his extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries, and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of this novel. Girl with a Pearl Earring centres on Vermeer’s prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel’s quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant—and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model.

American Dirt

Jeanine Cummins

Lydia lives in Acapulco. She has an eight-year-old son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And although cracks are beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, Lydia’s life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. But after her husband’s tell-all profile of the newest drug lord is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and Luca find themselves joining countless others trying to reach the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?

Tulip Fever

Deborah Moggach

In 1630s Amsterdam, tulip mania has seized the populace. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy. Cornelis yearns for an heir but, so far, he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. However, as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia’s likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between them. As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household’s inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception, and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax.

The Children Act

Ian McEwan

A fiercely intelligent, well-respected High Court judge in London faces a morally ambiguous case while her own marriage crumbles. Fiona Maye presides over cases in family court, deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law.

But her professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, wants her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house.

She throws herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Pressure to resolve the case, as well as her crumbling marriage, tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled.

A View Across the Rooftops

Suzanne Kelman

An unforgettable story of love, hope and betrayal, and a testament to the courage of humanity in history’s darkest days. As Nazis occupy Amsterdam, Professor Josef Held feels helpless. So, when he discovers his former pupil Michael Blum is trying to escape the Gestapo, he offers Michael a place to hide in his attic. In the quiet gloom of the secret room, Michael talks of his beautiful, fearless girlfriend, Elke. Michael insists that not even the Nazis will come between them. But Michael is Jewish and Elke is not, and their relationship is strictly forbidden. Josef sees the passionate determination in his young friend’s eyes. Furious with the rules of the cruel German soldiers and remembering his own heartbreak after the loss of his beloved wife, Josef feels desperate to give Michael and Elke’s love a chance. But then tragedy strikes, and Josef is faced with an impossible choice.

The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker

When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days “with his head under a cow”. After his old, wornout father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. “A double bed and a duvet”, advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?

The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands.

The Apothecary’s Daughter

Charlotte Betts

Susannah Leyton has grown up behind the counter of her father’s apothecary shop. When she receives a proposal of marriage from handsome merchant Henry Savage, she believes her prayers have been answered. But Henry is a complex and troubled man. As the plague sweeps through the city, tragedy strikes and the secrets of Henry’s past begin to unfold.

The Pull of the Stars

Emma Donoghue

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works in the maternity ward of an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders— Doctor Kathleen Lynn, rumoured to be a rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

Over three days, in the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

Memoirs

The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story

Christie Watson

Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astounding account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness. We watch Christie as she nurses a premature baby who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side during her patient’s agonising heart-lung transplant, and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In our most extreme moments, when life is lived most intensely, Christie is with us. And in these dark days of division and isolationism, she encourages us all to stretch out a hand.

The Cut Out Girl

Bart van Es

The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland during the second world war, hidden from the Nazis in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author’s grandparents.

Bart van Es has lived in Britain since the age of three, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: a young Jewish girl named Lien had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents, who understood the danger they were in all too well. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but after the war there was a falling out, and they were no longer in touch. What was the girl’s side of the story, Bart wondered, what really happened?

Eventually, he learned that Lien was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and they struck up a remarkable friendship. The Cut Out Girl braids together a powerful recreation of Lien’s harrowing childhood story with the present-day account of Bart’s efforts to piece that story together.

Revolution revelations

Market Drayton NWR Book Group held a meeting with a difference this March. The book under discussion was Mr Keynes’ Revolution by E J Barnes, and the meeting was unusual because we were able to invite the author to answer our questions. We met on Zoom and had an hour on our own— so that we could say exactly what we thought—followed by the author, Emma, joining us for a further hour.

Emma is a published children’s author but this is her first book for adults. It is a novel that charts a period in the life of the economist John Maynard Keynes, from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference to shortly after his marriage to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. It was a time that in many ways echoes our own, with political and financial upheavals that led many to wonder whether capitalism would collapse.

Keynes was probably the most important economist of the 20th century and the book includes explanations of his thinking about economics in terms which are comprehensible to the general reader. Our group found this aspect very interesting rather than off-putting.

He was a member of the Bloomsbury group and they form an important part of the novel, particularly Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Duncan Grant, who had been one of Keynes’ lovers. If this sounds complicated, it was. To the utter astonishment of the Bloomsbury group Keynes suddenly fell in love with Lydia Lopokova. They didn’t want the relationship to last, and thought it couldn’t last but then, reader, he married her. Lydia was a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and quite a character.

Emma originally wrote the book as a film script and the large amount of dialogue is one of the many delights of the novel. Lydia had a forceful and eccentric way of speaking which is both moving and, in places, very funny.

We had many questions. Was Vanessa Bell as bitchy as the book describes her? Might the powers that be have prosecuted Keynes over his relationships with men? Why did she invent the character of Gates? (No-one else is an invention.) Was Keynes the first economist to bring psychology into economics? Did Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell really keep painting Keynes’ flat?

Our group described the book as a delight and a joy, with great dialogue. We wish Emma well in trying to have it made into a film, which it certainly deserves to be. We now await the sequel. Sheila Halsall Market Drayton NWR

Educated

Tara Westover

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “headfor-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor. The family was so isolated that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Tara began to educate herself, and was admitted to Brigham Young University to study history, learning for the first time about world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Harvard and Cambridge followed, and only then would she wonder if she’d travelled too far, and if there was still a way home.

Non-fiction The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

Scientists know Henrietta Lacks as HeLa. She was a poor tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells, taken without her knowledge during treatment for cervical cancer, became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, more than sixty years after her death. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; they have furthered research into cancer, viruses, in vitro fertilisation, cloning and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Henrietta’s family knew nothing of this until more than twenty years after her death, and though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry, they never saw any of the profits. This story is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Members’ Corner

Where there’s muck…

On a damp Monday morning in June a small group from Marlow NWR visited the Greatmoor Energy from Waste site in north Buckinghamshire, to learn about the destination of our local kerbside collection of general rubbish.

On arrival we were greeted by our guide and taken to the training room and, over a coffee, learnt about operations at the site, followed by a question and answer session. We then put on hard hats, high vis jackets, safety goggles, gloves and steel toe-capped boots, ready for our tour of the facility.

The facility processes 110,000 tonnes of non-recyclable household waste each year. Local dustbin collections are delivered straight to the site. Collections from further afield are delivered in articulated lorries from Waste Transfer Stations at various domestic waste sites. On arrival at Greatmoor the waste is weighed and then tipped into a vast 23 metre deep bunker. The waste is then loaded by one of two huge grab cranes into “the grate”, where it burns for approximately two hours. The crane looks like a giant version of the grab-a-gift machine at a fairground! The non-combustible items in the waste are removed with the ash, which is then cooled and sorted to recover metals for recycling. The remaining ash can be used as an aggregate in breeze blocks or kerb stones.

The emissions from this burning process pass through a chemical neutralising process with the result that what finally leaves the stack is 99.9% water vapour. All the steps in this process are continuously monitored to ensure compliance with safety and environmental standards. The plant is operational 24 hours a day for 49 weeks each year. It is closed for three weeks for maintenance.

Greatmoor is the largest of the more than 40 Energy From Waste sites in the UK. It generates 25 megawatts of electricity— enough to power 40,000 homes.

We were delighted to learn that none of our household waste goes to a landfill site. From the Greatmoor site we were able to see a huge landfill mound which is now no longer in use. It is being recommissioned as a green area and will be planted with trees.

We all agreed that we had spent a most informative and enjoyable morning. Chris Hill Marlow NWR

Budding artist

Janice Crowley of Rossendale and Bury North NWR has sent this wonderful painting in response to our request for artwork for our Buntingford office wall. Thank you Janice!

This was the topic suggested by a member of our Online Afternoon Group, Clare Buxton, and it definitely whetted our appetites. We were treated to a superbly researched and presented afternoon in July, with much new learning and appreciation of customs and dishes worldwide. In Clare’s quiz there were many dishes we had heard of, but linking them to their pictures and country of origin was quite a challenge. The most entertaining part was trying to match other countries’ idioms about food to their best-fit English equivalent.

Some examples: The rice is already cooked (Mandarin) What’s done is done To have bad milk (Spanish) To be in a bad mood To be caught in leeks (Greek) A cheapskate Just blueberries (Norwegian) Small, insignificant One day honey, one day onion (Arabic and Hebrew) Life is a succession of happy and sad days.

We were intrigued to learn that UNESCO recognises 25 food and drink-related traditions as part of its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The only one I had heard of was nsima, a thick porridge made from maize flour mixed with water that my daughter told me about after her gap year in Malawi. It is eaten with vegetables and a protein, and portions can be torn off to dip into side dishes.

The afternoon passed too quickly, but the knowledge gained may well increase our enjoyment when visiting foreign lands in the future.

Photo by Jonas Hensel on Unsplash

Alyson Elliman Online Afternoon Group

State of the nation

In March, Deepings NWR enjoyed a meeting about the 2022 theme country, USA. We had a quiz, in which each answer was an American state, then we listened to Perry Como’s Delaware, and attempted to list the 15 states that feature in the song. Food and drink followed: Californian wine, peanuts, popcorn, bagels with Philadelphia cheese, pineapple, pretzels, doughnuts and peanut butter cookies. We learned about Georgia, Chicago, George Washington Carver, Hershey’s chocolate, and the meaning of some American words. Beverley Tegala Deepings NWR

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash Deepings group’s USA quiz, answers on p23 1 Which state is home to the Liberty Bell? 2 In which state is the headquarters of the Church of the Latter Day

Saints? 3 Which state was home for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? 4 Name two states beginning with the letter l. 5 Which state does key lime pie originate from? 6 In which state would you find Mount Rushmore? 7 Which state did Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, come from? 8 Which is the most populated state? 9 In which state is the birthplace of Motown Records? 10 Which state is the only one of the original 13 colonies not to border the Atlantic Ocean?

Dibden Purlieu NWR

chose a lovely day for their summer lunch.

Pit stop

In June Playing Place and Carnon Downs NWR visited Gwennap Pit, a green hollow made famous by John Wesley who preached here on 18 occasions between 1762 and 1789. He described it as “the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen this side of heaven.” A service is held here annually on Spring bank holiday Monday. The Pit seats 1,500 and is the venue for religious services, musical events, theatre and even weddings.

In the visitor centre our group were given a short historical overview and then, following tea and cake, set off to see the famous Pit. If you walk around each of the twelve rings of seats to the Pit centre and return to the top in the same way, you will have walked a mile, and be rewarded with a certificate. Most members having completed their mile, it was then time for a picnic lunch. Stephanie Quinn Playing Place and Carnon Downs

Cool in Poole!

Poole NWR marked the end of their current programme and the end of Marilyn and Janet’s tenure as LOs with an evening at the beach. Happily, the date coincided with the end of the heat wave, so members were able to make the most of living in such a beautiful part of the country and enjoy a paddle, after sharing in a picnic at a member’s beach hut.

The group now looks forward to starting again in September with the new programme put together by new LOs Chrissie and Carol.