Search the Kerry Library Book Club Collection
Kerry Library currently holds a Book Club collection comprising of over 70 titles available for your book club to reserve and borrow. With a mix of contemporary and classic titles to choose from there's something to suit or challenge all reading tastes!
Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan |
After three years embedded in the Siege in Sarajevo, Tom returns to Dublin a haunted shell of his former self. His childhood friends Karl and Gus know they're comically unqualified to help him but are determined to see him through the darkness. So they embark on a journey for an unlikely cure, to an experimental Californian PTSD clinic called Restless Souls. But as they try to save Tom from his memories, they must confront their own - of what happened to Gabriel, their fourth childhood friend. And in doing so ask they must ask why their raucously funny teenage souls got stuck in adult prisons - and why life got so damn complicated and sad.
A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve |
Margaret and Patrick, married just a few months, set off on a great adventure ? a year living in Kenya. While Patrick practices medicine, Margaret works as a photojournalist, capturing a dizzying and sometimes dangerous city on film. When a British couple invites the newlyweds on a climbing expedition to the summit of Mount Kenya, they eagerly agree. But during their arduous ascent a horrific accident occurs. In its aftermath, Margaret struggles to understand what happened on the mountain and how it has transformed her and her marriage, perhaps for ever.
The Lives of Stella Bain by Anita Shreve |
Hauled in a cart to a field hospital in northern France in March 1916, an American woman wakes from unconsciousness to the smell of gas gangrene, the sounds of men in pain, and an almost complete loss of memory: she knows only that she can drive an ambulance, she can draw, and her name is Stella Bain. A stateless woman in a lawless country, Stella embarks on a journey to reconstruct her life. Suffering an agonising and inexplicable array of symptoms, she finds her way to London. There, Dr August Bridge, a cranial surgeon turned psychologist, is drawn to tracking her amnesia to its source. What brutality was she fleeing when she left the tranquil seclusion of a New England college campus to serve on the Front; for what crime did she need to atone - and whom did she leave behind?
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion |
Love isn't an exact science - but no one told Don Tillman. A thirty-nine-year-old geneticist, Don's never had a second date. So he devises the Wife Project, a scientific test to find the perfect partner. Enter Rosie - 'the world's most incompatible woman' - throwing Don's safe, ordered life into chaos. But what is this unsettling, alien emotion he's feeling?
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld |
The Bennett sisters have been summoned from new York City. Liz and Jane are good daughters. They've come home to suburban Cincinnati to get their mother to stop dfeeding their father steak as he recovers from heart surgery. With 5 sisters under the same roof old patterns return fast. Soon enough they are being berated for their single status and it really is too much to bear. That is, until the Lucas family's BBQ throws them in the way of some eligible single men... Chip Bingley is not only a charming doctor, he's a reality TV star too. But Chip's friend, haughty neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy, can barely stomach Cincinatti or its inhabitants
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman |
Would you accept a chance for happiness even if it wasn't yours to have? This is a story about a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who live on a lonely island with just seagulls, stars and buffeting winds for company. It's a story about right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same.
The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex |
A heart-stopping novel inspired by true events, 'The Lamplighters' is the story of three men who vanish from a remote lighthouse. The entrance door is locked from the inside, the clocks have all stopped and the table is set for dinner. Twenty years later, the mystery of their disappearance still haunts the heartbroken women left behind. The sea has kept its secrets, until now.
The Bricks That Built The Houses by Kate Tempest |
Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in south-east London _ the place they have always called home. As the story moves back in time, to before they had to leave, we see them torn between confidence and self-loathing, between loneliness and desire, between desperate ambition and the terrifying prospect of getting nothing done
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín |
In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when she is offered a job in America, she leaves her family to start a new life in Brooklyn, New York.
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín |
It is the 1960s and Nora Webster is living with her two young sons in a small town on the east coast of Ireland. The love of her life, Maurice, has just died so she must work out how to forge a new life for herself. As Nora returns to memories of the happiness of her early marriage, something more painful begins to intrude: memories of her own mother and what brought about the terrifying distance between them.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles |
On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval. Can a life without luxury be the richest of all?
Love and Summer by William Trevor |
It is summer and a stranger has come to quiet Rathmoye. He is noticed by Ellie, the young convent girl, who is married to Dillahan, a farmer still mourning his first wife. Over the long and warm days, Ellie and the stranger form an illicit attachment. And those in the town can only watch, holding their tongues, as passion, love and fate take their inevitable course.
Last Stories by William Trevor |
In this final collection of ten exquisite, perceptive and profound stories, William Trevor probes into the depths of the human spirit. Here we encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her pupil's theft in exchange for his beautiful music. These gorgeous stories - the last that Trevor wrote before his death - affirm his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler |
'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon'. This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. From that porch we spool back through three generations of the Whitshanks, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define who and what they are. And while all families like to believe they are special, round that kitchen table over all those years we see played out the hopes and fears, the rivalries and tensions of families everywhere - the essential nature of family life.
The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers |
There is something special about the ancient cathedral in Chartres, with its mismatched spires, astonishing stained glass and strange labyrinth. And there is something special too about Agnes Morel, the mysterious woman who is to be found cleaning it each morning. No one quite knows where she came from - not the diffident Abbe Paul, who discovered her one morning twenty years ago, sleeping in the north porch; nor lonely Professor Jones, whose chaotic existence she helps to organise; nor Philippe Nevers, whose neurotic sister and newborn child she cares for; nor even the irreverent young restorer, Alain Fleury, who works alongside her each day. But with a chance meeting in the cathedral one day, the spectre of Agnes' past returns, provoking malicious speculation from the prejudiced Madame Beck and her gossipy companion Madame Picot.
I'm Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait |
For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide and conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman |
Nathaniel Piven is a rising star in Brooklyn's literary scene. After several lean, striving years and an early life as a class-A nerd, he now (to his surprise) has a lucrative book deal, his pick of plum magazine assignments, and the attentions of many desirable women: Juliet, the hotshot business journalist; Elisa, Nate's gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; Hannah, lively and fun and 'almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice'. In this twenty-first-century literary enclave, wit and conversation are not at all dead. But is romance?
Kala by Colin Walsh |
In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They - Helen, Joe and Mush - were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot centre. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now human remains have been discovered in the woods - including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside - and the town is both aghast and titillated at the reopening of such an old wound. On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father's wedding; the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic; and Mush had never left. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala's disappearance.
Beautiful Ruins by Jesse Walter |
The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.
And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.
And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.
The Paying Guest by Sarah Waters |
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.
The Martian by Andy Weir |
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills - and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit - he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?
Stoner by John Williams |
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at 19 to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history and reclaims the significance of an individual life.
Still Life by Sarah Winman |
In Memoriam by Alice Winn |
It's 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt's German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit.