Canny Minds Blog » Reading Group

Her Fearful Symmetry

Jenny — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:57:27 +0000

At last – another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of “The Time Travellers’ Wife”.

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers – normal, at least, for identical ‘mirror’ twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London.

They feel that at last their own lives can begin …but have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins’ mother – and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat…

With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, “Her Fearful Symmetry” is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger’s familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

If you have read the book, let us know what you think by commenting below.

To buy ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’, click here.

The Story of Lucy Gault

Jenny — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:56:08 +0000

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921.

But 8-year-old Lucy can’t bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods – so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens – an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come.

Trevor’s new novel beautifully evokes rural Ireland and the tensions existing there, but also is Hardy-like in its portrayal of the impact of mere chance on a life.

To buy this book click here.

Cutting for Stone

Jenny — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:33:40 +0000

A sprawling, epic story unforgetably set in exotic Ethiopia. Gripping and moving in its intensity.

Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor. Bound by birth but with widely different temperaments they grow up together, in a country on the brink of revolution, until a betrayal splits them apart. But fate has not finished with them – they will be brought together once more, in the sterile surroundings of a hospital theatre.

From the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and a riveting family story.

What did you think of the novel? Comment below to share your thoughts.

If you would like to purchase ‘Cutting for Stone’, click here.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Jenny — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:18:01 +0000

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare’s passionate love for each other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

Out in cinemas on 15th August.

Let us know what you thought. Comment below.

Click here to buy The Time Traveller’s Wife in the Canny Minds shop.

Watch the trailer for the new film below:

The Secret Scripture

Jenny — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:16:29 +0000

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she’s spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.

Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland’s changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Chapter One

Roesanne’s Testimony of Herself

(Patient, Recommon Regional Mental Hospital, 1957-)

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

Let us know what you thought. Comment below.

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