Welcome to Pictures & Pages
Read Between the Wines BookClub
Information Page
If you're looking for a great inclusive grown-ups' book club, this is the group for you.
This BookClub is an open group for past and present book club members, so if you know anyone who is interested in coming to our meetings, please feel free to pass on details and message our facebook page to have them added to our online discussion.
About us
Our BookClub hosted by Sharon Rigby and Lee Berger. We are the owners of Pictures & Pages bookshop.
Sharon is an avid reader of eclectic taste, anything that takes her fancy, and currently has a fascination for True Crime.
Lee is an avid reader of fan fiction and can tell you just about any of our books that are published evolving from that medium.
Group Workings
Please bring a plate of food or something to drink to share at a meeting where possible. This will keep BookClub free.
Please find a way to communicate if you will be at the next meeting. If not on facebook we are happy to contact you via email or send a text. Feel free to bring a friend you think might enjoy it.
IMPORTANT
You are never required to have read the book to come to meetings or join in discussions, but it is always more fun if you do.
Email us pictureandpages@optusnet.com.au
We look forward to bringing you great reads during the year!
Book Club 2017.............................................
June/July '17 Read
The Ravenous Gown
and 14 More Tales
about Real Beauty
In a day when princesses have been boiled down to beautiful ball gowns comes a new kind of fairy tale.
April/May '17 Read
Scoundrel Days by Brentley Frazer
Febuary/March '17 Read
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
2016 Reads
November/ December
The Girl on the Train
October BookClub
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it?
Sep/Oct 2016
Deeper Water
Jessie Cole
One day, during a heavy downpour, Mema saves a stranger from a raging creek. She takes him into her family home, where, marooned by rising floods, he has to stay until the waters recede. His sudden presence is unsettling - for Mema, her mother and her wild friend Anja - but slowly he opens the door to a new world of beckoning possibilities that threaten to sweep Mema into the deep.
August 2016
Eligible
They've come home to suburban Cincinnati to get their mother to stop feeding their father steak as he recovers from heart surgery, to tidy up the crumbling Tudor-style family home, and to wrench their three sisters from their various states of arrested development. Once they are under the same roof, old patterns return fast. Soon enough they are being berated for their single status, their only respite the early morning runs they escape on together. For two successful women in their late thirties, it really is too much to bear.
June
The Reader on the 6.27
by
Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
May
Jinx
By Hugh McGinley
One spring morning a woman is found dead in a Brunswick alley adorned with symbols of the occult. Catherine Kint, milliner, gin enthusiast and raconteur, has no reason to be involved until her friend is under investigation. Armed with her sharp wit, a crime scene background and a barman named Boris, Catherine walks into a world of new age prophecies, curses and money. Honestly, it would drive a girl to drink.
March/April
The Time We Have Taken
by Steven Carroll
One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old. That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love. As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael's friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area's history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal? Meanwhile, Rita's sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband's death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long. The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.
February
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller The Secret Life of Bees comes an extraordinary novel about two exceptional women. Sarah Grimke is the middle daughter. The one her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, Hetty 'Handful' Grimke is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift. Sarah knows what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept. And so, indeed, the trouble begins ...A powerful, sweeping novel, inspired by real events, and set in the American Deep South in the nineteenth century, THE INVENTION OF WINGS evokes a world of shocking contrasts, of beauty and ugliness, of righteous people living daily with cruelty they fail to recognise; and celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood against all the odds.
2015 Bookclub Reads
Nov/Dec
Tilly Dunnage has come home to care for her mad old mother. She left the small Victorian town of Dungatar years before, and became an accomplished couturier in Paris. Now she earns her living making exquisite frocks for the people who drove her away when she was ten. Through the long Dungatar nights, she sits at her sewing machine, planning revenge. The Dressmaker is a modern Australian classic, much loved for its bittersweet humour. Set in the 1950s, its subjects include haute couture, love and hate, and a cast of engagingly eccentric characters. It is now a major motion picture, starring Kate Winslet and fine Australian actors including Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, Liam Hemsworth and extras from the author's hometown of Jerilderie.
Oct Book
By The River
Life for Harry means swimming in Pearce Swamp, eating chunks of watermelon with his brother and his dad, surviving schoolyard battles, and racing through butterflies in Cowpers Paddock. In his town there's Linda, who brings him the sweetest-ever orange cake, and Johnny, whose lightning fists draw blood in a blur, and there's a mystery that Harry needs to solve before he can find a way out...
Septembers Book
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Meeting Sunday 26th September
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II, from the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr. When Marie Laure goes blind, aged six, her father builds her a model of their Paris neighborhood, so she can memorize it with her fingers and then navigate the real streets. But when the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, is enchanted by a crude radio. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent ultimately makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
Hades by Candice Fox
Hades Archer surrounds himself with the things others leave behind. Their trash becomes the twisted sculptures that line his junkyard. The bodies they want disposed of become his problem - for a fee. Then one night a man arrives on his doorstep, clutching a small bundle that he wants 'lost'. And Hades makes a decision that will change everything...Twenty years later, homicide detective Frank Bennett feels like the luckiest man on the force when he meets his new partner, the dark and beautiful Eden Archer. But there's something strange about Eden and her brother, Eric. Something he can't quite put his finger on. At first, as they race to catch a very different kind of serial killer, his partner's sharp instincts come in handy. But soon Frank's wondering if she's as dangerous as the man they hunt.
June Book
Let's Pretend This Never Happened
(A Mostly True Memoir)
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was not to be, thanks to her eccentric taxidermist father and a truly bizarre family life. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humour in the most terribly human moments - the ones we want to pretend never happened - the very same moments that make us the people we are today, for better or worse.
Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess already has a devoted worldwide following on her blogg. thebloggess.com. She attracts millions of page views per month, half a million unique visitors per month (40k visits from Australia and 10k from New Zealand), and has more than 150,000 twitter followers.
April/May
Meg Wolitzer-The Interestings
On a warm July night in 1974 six teenagers play at being cool. The friendships they make this summer will be the most important and consuming of their lives. In a teepee at summer camp they smoke pot and drink vodka & Tangs, talk of Gunter Grass and the latest cassette tapes; they also share their dreams and ambitions, still so fresh and so possible.
March
Trigger Warning is a rich cornucopia of horror and ghosts stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry that explores the realm of experience and emotion. In Adventure Story-a thematic companion to The Ocean at the End of the Lane-Gaiman ponders death and the way people take their stories with them when they die. His social media experience A Calendar of Tales are short takes inspired by replies to fan tweets about the months of the year-stories of pirates and the March winds, an igloo made of books, and a Mother's Day card that portends disturbances in the universe. Gaiman offers his own ingenious spin on Sherlock Holmes in his award-nominated mystery tale The Case of Death and Honey. And Click-Clack the Rattlebag explains the creaks and clatter we hear when we're all alone in the darkness. More information here
Purchase book here or in store.
February 2015 book club
Richard Flanagan- The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Please register in store or email for more information. 1st Meeting will be Sunday March 1st @3pm
