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I found one but it really has nothing good on..

Bookseller of Kabul By Asne Seierstad

Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they Communist or Taliban - in order to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul. But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a moving portrait of a family and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.
Asne Seierstad was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2000 she published With Their Backs to the Wall: Portraits from Serbia. In autumn 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
(ISBN: 1844080471) Published by Time Warner

Notes on a Scandal By Zoe Heller

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this - it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power - he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes much of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession - and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover.
Zoe HellerÂ’s first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. She writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was Columnist of the Year for 2002. She lives in New York. Notes on a Scandal was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0141012250) Published by Penguin

The Know By Martina Cole

Joanie Brewer’s children mean the world to her. She’d do anything to make sure they’re fed and clothed – even if it means going on the game – and she lives in constant fear that one of them will be taken from her. Eighteen-year-old Jon Jon is already knee-deep in crime, and Jeanette, only 14, knows more than is good for her. In a world where no one is to be trusted her 11-year-old daughter Kira is the most vulnerable to danger. When she disappears Joanie’s darkest fears are realised. She thinks she knows what’s happened to her little girl, and her obsession to uncover the truth threatens to destroy them all.
Martina Cole has written nine previous novels, all of which have been outstandingly successful bestsellers. Her most recent novels, MauraÂ’s Game and Faceless, both shot straight to No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller lists and total sales of MartinaÂ’s novels now exceed three million copies. Dangerous Lady and The Jump have gone on to become hugely popular TV drama series and several of her other novels are in production for TV. Martina Cole has a son and daughter and she lives in Essex.
(ISBN: 074726967X) Published by Headline

White Mughals By William Dalrymple

Set in and around Hyderabad, India at the beginning of the nineteenth century, White Mughals tells the story of the improbably romantic love affair and marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a rising star in the East India Company, and Khair-un-Nisa, a Hyderabadi princess. As Kirkpatrick gradually goes native (adopting local clothes and undergoing circumcision) he becomes a secret agent working for his wife's royal family against the English, as he tries to balance the interests of both cultures.
Dalrymple is steeped in India, having lived there for six years, and written a series of remarkable travel books chronicling its past and present, including City of Djinns and The Age of Kali. Having already earned comparisons with great travel writers like Chatwin and Theroux, Dalrymple has now produced a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical narrative on one of the most colourful but neglected aspects of British colonial rule in India. William DalrympleÂ’s first book In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award. His second City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third From the Holy Mountain was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Award. He also wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
(ISBN: 0006550967) Published by Harper Collins

The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

Susie Salmon, raped and murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet. The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.
At the age of 18 as a college student, Alice Sebold was beaten and viciously raped by a stranger. The police said she was very lucky not to have been killed because another girl was found dismembered in the same place. AliceÂ’s memoirs, Lucky, was published at the same time as The Lovely Bones and follows her dreadfully difficult path to recovery and justice - including taking the man to court and seeing him locked up behind bars. The Lovely Bones is her debut novel and in the US has become the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind. Alice lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.
(ISBN: 0330485385) Published by Pan Macmillan

Starter For Ten By David Nicholls

The year is 1985 and Brian has just started his first term at university, armed with the obligatory CND membership and a complete set of Kate Bush albums. But he also has a dark secret - a long-held, burning ambition to appear on University Challenge and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the team, they've successfully completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match in January. Surely it's only a matter of time before Brian is shaking hands with Bamber Gascoigne and holding aloft the silver-plated commemorative plaque? But Brian has a whole lot of living to do before then and when he falls in love with his team-mate, the off-puttingly posh Alice, he finds there's more than a spanner in the works.
David Nicholls is one of the most successful young screenwriters working in television. His credits include the third series of Cold Feet (for which he received a BAFTA nomination for his writing), I Saw You and Rescue Me, which he also created. In the past he has worked as an actor and script-editor, before starting work as a full-time writer in 1999, when he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Simpatico, an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play, which starred Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone, Albert Finney and Nick Nolte. Starter For Ten is DavidÂ’s debut novel.
(ISBN: 0340734868) Published by Hodder

Brick Lane By Monica Ali

Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.
Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She lives in London with her husband and two small children. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2003. Brick Lane was one of this yearÂ’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0552771155) Published by Transworld

http://www.exclusivebooks.com/interviews...Interviews - Diane Awerbuck:


Diane Awerbuck has just published her first novel, Gardening at Night, and it is without a doubt one of the most refreshing books to hit our shelves in quite some time. It is completely autobiographical, and follows Diane's life as a young girl growing up in Kimberley, going through adolescance and womenhood, all the while under circumstances that are not always that easy. Diane has got a unique style of writing, and her very individualistic personality and off beat sense of humour is highly entertaining. Diane currently stays in Cape Town, and has taken the time to answer some questions via email for us.
____________________________________________________


EB: This is your first novel, so people don't know you yet. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who is "Diane Awerbuck"?

DA: "Know" as in the Biblical sense? Everything people need to know about me is in the book. I am a post-feminist young white South African woman with a taste for Ray Bradbury and The Magnetic Fields. And licorice. I believe that black gives you the edge, that everyone needs a Dolly Parton tape, that stone-washed denim was always a bad idea. I believe in God. I believe in love. Tell me when to stop.

EB: Was there any specific motivating factors that propelled you into writing?

DA: I thought my mother was going to die - she kept having lumps removed from her left breast. There was so much I needed to say still. I wasn't ready to let her go. She's safe now, but wasn't always. Trauma does that, sifts the silly and pointless from the poignant and real.

My partner left the country at about the same time, and left a spiritual gap as well as a geographical one. I applied for the Masters course so I didn't have to think. The irony.

EB: You're a high school teacher. How do you find the children's attitudes towards writing and literature? Do you feel that there is something that we can and should do to encourage a love for books and literature with them?

DA: Students at high school level are pretty much set in their ways - you have to catch them young. I loved teaching poetry and lit - powerful stuff without being sentimental - and I liked that they got excited, that I could facilitate that lighting up of dark corners - not in the "darkest Africa" sense, but just providing alternatives to their daily fare.

I don't teach much anymore. I was tired in a way that wasn't going away. I made myself sick. Literally. Now I'm unemployed. It's kif.

EB: Seeing that you don't write full-time, where and how do you find the time to write?

DA: I used to feel guilty and work-avoidant all week, sit in PTA meetings grinning my head off and desperately wanting to be at home, and then dash off two or three pieces on Sunday night because I knew I was going to see my Masters supervisor on Monday. Pressure worked for me - it probably doesn't work for everyone. I am incredibly lucky. Writing is easy, and there is just so goddamn much to say.

I'm writing "full-time" now (I still can't believe people are willing to pay me to do this) - wanting to do some travel writing. Two more novels in the head, but I'm trying to pace myself. You know, like a pace-maker.

EB: How long did it take you to write Gardening at Night?

DA: Nine months. My pseudo child. I had something to say.

EB: It is always interesting to see the titles authors give to their books. Can you tell us a little bit about your choice of title?

DA: I stole it from REM; it's off an old album. They've saved me repeatedly. But it's literal as well. My mother used to garden in the evenings. Kimberley is so hot that you can't water during the day. Your plants will boil. That smell - of rubber hosepipes and dog spit and her turning over the earth - stays in my head. It's a metaphor for starting over, the ability to do that, but it's also just itself.

EB: How much of the book is based on actual events in your life, and how much of it is just fiction?

DA: All real. There are some people who won't talk to me anymore. It shouldn't make a difference, that fact-fiction split. Our entire lives are constructs. We live in our heads.

EB: Throughout the book you have a lot of references to mythology, legends and fairy tales. Is there any specific reason for using these? Is it a field of personal interest for you?

DA: Those stories saved this loser child for years - the idea that there is something out there that is bigger and better than your life. The redeeming power of stories. Kimberley is a cultural desert. I grew up to find that I didn't need the sword or the Lady. Or the Prince. Think about it - one hundred-year-old morning breath...

But in the ordinary there is magic too. We only find that out after divorces and drugs and saying never-agains. We just need to pay attention. It's not hard.

EB: Your book is truly South African in the sense that it is rich with South African culture, our way of thinking, our languages and ways of expressing ourselves. Having your novel published internationally, how do you find the response to be from people who are not that familiar with the South African way of doing things?

DA: Friends there who've read it have only been gracious. I did make a French girl cry at one of my lectures. I appreciated that. She said it made her think of her parents. So it's a bit hands-across-the-oceany, but that's cool. I wrote it so that girls don't have to think they are alone. And that's generic.

EB: What do you like to read? What are you reading at the moment?

DA: Other people's letters and email. Ray Bradbury. Barbara Kingsolver. Maja Kriel. Antjie Krog. Hunter S. Thompson. Tin Tin. At the moment I'm reading Schott's Original Miscellany and Young's The Book of the Heart. I'm a glutton for facts and a symbol ****.

EB: What inspires you?

DA: That's a strange question. The X-Files? Everything. Of course.

EB: What are your plans for the future in terms of your writing? Can we expect to see another novel from your side sometime soon?

DA: Little old Jewish ladies sidle up to me and ask what happened with Gordon. So I think I'm going to set their minds at rest - insofar as the minds of old Jewish ladies rest. I'd like to write about Daisy de Melker and Helen Martins, all these great and bizarre South African women. More travel writing, starting with Observatory. That's already begun, like that Carpenters song.There's a website I'll write for: http://www.extrange.com.

I know that everyone has a usual spot where they like to read where is yours ?

Mine for sure is day or night curled under a duvet, in bed - preferably with chocolate. I also enjoy reading on a plane, train when I go on holiday. I always end up buying a book at duty free, but I cheat cause I normally have another one with me - just a good excuse to buy another book. I hardly ever read in a chair unless it is a lazy boy which goes folds almost flat like a bed...then that's okay. :p

Edit: I almost forgot I HAVE to have company ie 2 cats curled up like ying/yang's next to me.

Okay here goes - let me get the ball going for a new book. Can we choose one from the list below. So please submit which ones interest you !!! OR if none do then please submit a few titles so we can get going soon. --

The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown

For details see dudette's synopsis in the BBC 100 list. I have heard this is a good book.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon

The title The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (or the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as it appears within the book) is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.
Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily.
Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him.

***Heard only good things about this book, it is different -- so maybe it is not everyone's cuppa tea***

Notes on a Scandal
Zoe Heller

Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them.
Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.
Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney
Synopsis
When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...

Child of My Heart
Alice McDermott

Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie



I know this has been done before, but not in this book club. How many have you read and how many would you read that you might have missed ?

I am not too sure what the next book on the list is .... as far as I remember it was Fire Baby ! I have been unable to get this one from our library....so I shall sit this one out and wait for the next.

If anyone has any ideas on the next book please give us the title so some of us who are slower readers can get ahead. (Ja, you Pam finishing them books in a day-:haha: )

I no one comes up with the next title I shall browse around for a new one....!

I was thinking about renting me a nice sports car next time I find myself in Cape Town. I reckon it would be great to check out the scenery in a speedy little number....

Does anybody know of any car-hire companies in Cape Town that hire out Sports cars?

I've only managed to find ones that do Porsche Boxter S's (hmm, maybe...) and Beemers (not quite what I'm after...)

Any advice would be great, thanks.

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If you know of people in Scotland, do let them know and then feedback would be great

If anybody has any old camera's, I have become quiet a collector,

if they work or not and you want to get them off your hands please send them my way and save them from the bin

Thanks very much