Life is too short for **** books, that’s the premise of the book group I set up on Facebook during lockdown and it’s all the theme for this column.
Each week I’ll share a great recommendation for a book and podcast of any genre; as long it’s entertaining, informative, or educational. It could be a heart-stopping crime thriller, a quirky cookbook, magical memoir, a supportive self-help title or a lively listen.
Each recommendation shared should nourish your soul and your brain – all these suggestions are ones which our book group, myself and friends love.
If you’d like to join Bookface 2020 you’re most welcome. It’s a private group there are more than 2100 members from all over the world. We trade purely on the good recommendations, so it’s a positive and uplifting online space.
I host monthly sustainable book swap brunches, and these take place on the first Saturday of every month at Glaschu restaurant and bar in Glasgow. Join us for tea, coffee, prosecco, gin, and brunch as well as a guest author q+a. All the details are in the book group.
I’d love to know which one book you’d recommend and one which has a special place for in your bookshelves. You can find me on Twitter @onetakewoop or Instagram @onetakewoop. Or email me: hsuttie@mac.com
Read - The Heart's Invisible Furies, by John Boyne
This is without a shadow of doubt in my top 10 novels of all time. It’s up there with The Goldfinch, All The Light We Cannot
See and Where the Crawdads Sing.
I envy anyone who hasn’t yet read this epic novel. It’s one that I will return to again and again.
It’s an absolute favourite in my online book group and a title I’ve bought many times as a gift. In fact, some of my new friendships were borne out of a shared love for this book and it’s one I will defend to the hilt, should someone not be taken by it.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery – or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. But who is he?
At the mercy of good fortune, bad luck, and serendipity, Cyril will spend a life- time getting to know himself and where he came from. Over 70 years, he will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies has it all – love, tenderness and so much more as the characters go through ups and downs, heartbreaks and happiness, penance, and pain, right up until the final word.
We begin in 1945, as a philandering priest banishes 16-year-old unwed and pregnant Catherine Goggin from church and the village. Catherine’s son, Cyril, the book’s first-person narrator is adopted by a well-to-do and eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked redemptorist nun. Stick with me…
The author shares his version of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man, though his story is extraordinary. Boyne captures Cyril every seven years as he grows up. His later years seem to bring the promise of reconciliation on several fronts but what will transpire?
Set against a panorama of gay cultural history, this is ultimately a story of hope, shifting from a homo-
phobic Ireland dominated by the Catholic Church to the liberalism of Amsterdam to New York in the 80s, a city overwhelmed by the Aids epidemic.
At times riotously funny as well as deeply moving, Boyne’s storytelling style is a perfect balance. Be prepared to lose yourself in The Heart’s Invisible Furies, at over 700 pages it will demand your time and emotional energy.
I read it over five consecutive nights, ignoring everything around me and was bereft when it ended. It had the power to make me laugh and cry in equal measure many times over.
Listen to - How to Fail, by Elizabeth Day
Journalist, broadcaster, and author Elizabeth Day has made a career out of failure, though not quite literally! Day is a brilliant and engaging host who uses failure as a lens through which to view success, rather than dwell on mishaps, mistakes and misfortune. She highlights what we can learn from failure and to embrace it, rather than be paralysed by the FOF (fear of failure).
She has an enviable book of contacts and her guests include Jarvis Cocker, Delia Smith, Stanley Tucci, Delia Smith, Dr Ranjan Chatterjee, Alan Cumming, Brene Brown, Ed Milliband, Graham Norton, Matt Haig and many more and this makes for an informative and entertaining listen.
You will begin to realise that we can all embrace failure and make it a friend rather than foe.
