CLASSIC BOOK CLUB:
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
Wednesday 18th March – 7:15 for :7:30pm
`Her present life appeared like the dream of a distempered imagination, or like one of those frightful fictions, in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted. reflections brought only regret, and anticipation terror.’ Such is the state of mind in which Emily St. Aubuert – the orphaned heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic Classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho – finds herself after Count Montoni, her evil guardian, imprisons her in his gloomy medieval fortress in the Apennines.
Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily struggles against Montoni’s rapacious schemes and the threat of her own psychological disintegration. A best-seller in its day and a potent influence on Walpole, Poe, and other writers of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic horror, The Mysteries of Udolpho remains one of the most important works in the history of European fiction.
BOOK CLUB:
The Homemade God
Wednesday 8th April – 7:15 for :7:30pm
Goose and his three sisters gather at the family’s house by Lake Orta in Piedmont, Italy. Their father, a famous artist, has recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead and there is no sign of a painting.
Although the siblings have always been close, as they search for answers over that summer, the things they learn – about themselves, their father and their new stepmother – will drive them apart before they can come to any kind of understanding of what their father’s legacy truly is. Extraordinarily compelling, at heart this is a novel about sibling relationships and those hairline cracks that can appear within a family: what happens when they splinter, and what it would take to mend them.
Everyone is welcome – either let us know beforehand or just turn up on the night. If you would like to be added to the emailing list just go to our contacts page and put your details in with ‘Book Club’ in the Subject line. Our book club meetings cost £5 which includes a glass of wine.
