
This month, the book club that meets regularly at the Spring Garden Memorial Library will discuss William Boyd's novel, Restless. This thrilling spy novel portrays a fascinating female character who has hidden her World War II-era activities from her family. Boyd's page-turner should make for some excellent discussion on Thursday, November 12th.
Restless won the 2006 Costa Book Award,
which recognizes excellent authors from Britain and Ireland, and is the only major award to consider children's literature alongside works intended for adults. The Costa Book Awards were formerly known as the Whitbread Awards, and the last book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award before the name change was Hilary Spurling's Matisse the Master. Using material from private archives and lots of family letters, Spurling evokes a more complete portrait of the master painter than has ever been available before.


Spurling enjoys writing about the lives of creative people, and the previous biographer to win the Whitbread award also made her mark by authoring accounts of famous authors. Claire Tomalin, winner of the 2002 Whitbread, has written biographies of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It was her account of Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self, however, that garnered her the Whitbread.

Byatt won the Booker in 1990 for Possession, and her recent novel The Children's Book has been very well received. The story takes place before World War I, at a time when the concept of childhood was changing dramatically, and the several children in one family become caught up in movements like feminism and socialism. As the Great War begins, the mother of the family remains caught up in her fairytale world of writing stories during the time of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. The line between adulthood and childhood becomes blurred as the world falls apart around the characters.

I really enjoy reading the Six Degrees of the Library Collection posts. However, since there's never any mention of the selection process, I wonder how the two authors to be connected in six degrees are chosen. What I would really like to see is if The Reader's readers could choose the authors! For example, if I were to suggest say J.R.R. Tolkien and, oh, Salman Rushdie, can you connect them in six degrees or less? Now THAT would be a challenge!
ReplyDeleteI love this challenge! I'm working on it. Stay tuned!
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