Book Club Reads! #NewBooks #Tbr #BookClubReads #HistoricalFiction #VMC

Good morning everyone I’m lucky enough to belong to two book clubs and I always enjoy reading the books that they select.

This month we’re reading:

⭐Shines Of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (Historical Fiction Bookclub)

⭐ Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden (VCM bookclub)

I’ve heard great things about Shines Of Gaiety so I’m very excited to read it soon. I’ve loved the author’s previous books so I have high hopes for it. It’s also set in one of my favourite historical eras so I’m very intrigued.

Black Narcissus is a book I hadn’t heard of before joining the VMC book club. I set myself a challenge to read more classics and this seemed like a great way to do it. The VMC books are very readable so I’m enjoying reading through them all plus they all have beautiful covers as you can see which I’m enjoying collecting.

Do you belong to a book club? What are you reading this month?

Shines Of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

At the heart of this glittering world is notorious Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson brings together a glittering cast of characters in a truly mesmeric novel that captures the uncertainty and mutability of life; of a world in which nothing is quite as it seems.

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

High in the Himalayas, the mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. Built for the General’s harem, laughter and music once floated out over the gorge. Now it sits abandoned, windswept and haunting.

The palace is bestowed to the Sisters of Mary, and what was once known as ‘the House of Women’ becomes the Convent of St Faith. Close to the heavens, the nuns feel inspired, working fervently to establish their school and hospital. But as the isolation and emptiness of the mountain become increasingly unsettling, passions long repressed emerge with tragic consequences . . .