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!
Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life after the loss of his wife Naina. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his disinterested granddaughter, Priya, who tucks herself away reading whilst he watches David Attenborough. Aleisha is working at the local library on Harrow Road for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of 'To Kill A Mockingbird' with a list of books that she's never heard of before - let alone read. In turn, each story on the reading list gives up its magic, transporting Aleisha away from the painful realities she's facing at home. And when Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm of a granddaughter, Aleisha discovers that the reading list will be a lifeline for him too. And so begins a new chapter between two lonely souls, who'll learn that fiction can teach them a whole lot about real life.
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Andy's story wasn't meant to turn out this way. Living out of a suitcase in his best friends' spare room, waiting for his career as a stand-up comedian to finally take off, he struggles to process the life-ruining end of his relationship with the only woman he's ever truly loved. As he tries to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery of his broken relationship, he contends with career catastrophe, social media paranoia, a rapidly dwindling friendship group and the growing suspicion that, at 35, he really should have figured this all out by now. Andy has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story.
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco's parents send her overseas to live with an aunt and uncle in their opulent San Francisco mansion. There she meets Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family's Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms, but following Pearl Harbor the two are cruelly pulled apart. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love they are forever forced to hide from the world. Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to reconcile her own troubled past, meets the older woman and her grandson, Seth, at Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? 'Life After Life' follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, she finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past.
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A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car - also borrowed - onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.
October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast.
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Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian Castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories of the past return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
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A misfit man finds a misfit dog. Ray, aged fifty-seven, 'too old for starting over, too young for giving up', and One Eye, a little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved - but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship of sorts.
Bolger's spellbinding novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the MV Kerlogue's crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors. The story is seen through the eyes of Jack, a boy who followed his father to sea, and finds himself rescuing the men who killed his dad. This is a brilliant portrayal of the unarmed Irish ships that sailed alone through hazardous waters, of young romance, and of a boy encountering a world where every experience is intense and dangerous.
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Maurice Swift is handsome, charming, and hungry for fame. The one thing he doesn't have is talent--but he's not about to let a detail like that stand in his way. After all, a would-be writer can find stories anywhere. They don't need to be his own. Working as a waiter in a West Berlin hotel in 1988, Maurice engineers the perfect opportunity: a chance encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann. He quickly ingratiates himself with the powerful - but desperately lonely - older man, teasing out of Erich a terrible, long-held secret about his activities during the war. Perfect material for Maurice's first novel. Once Maurice has had a taste of literary fame, he knows he can stop at nothing in pursuit of that high. Moving from the Amalfi Coast, where he matches wits with Gore Vidal, to Manhattan and London, Maurice hones his talent for deceit and manipulation, preying on the talented and vulnerable in his cold-blooded climb to the top. But the higher he climbs, the further he has to fall. . . .
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In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
"Summer, 1976. Mrs Creasy is missing and The Avenue is alive with whispers. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly decide to take matters into their own hands. But as doors and mouths begin to open and the cul-de-sac starts giving up its secrets, the amateur detectives will find more than they could have imagined...Beware of straying from the flock for fear you'll be left out in the cold."
Aoife knows everyone in Dundalk's underworld. Too well, in some cases. But when she meets Annie, a beautiful whirlwind of a woman, and brings her to the town, she finds that she doesn't know nearly enough about her. Annie is magnetic and wild and Aoife's desire to learn more quickly becomes a need, and then an obsession - to know this dangerous woman, to love her, to keep her. So when Aoife's friend and collaborator the Rat King asks her to help him dispose of ten kilos of cocaine, swiped from a rival, she brings Annie along for a road trip through a Britain that she only knows as a place to be suspicious of.
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The name of your first-born. The face of your lover. Your age. Your address... What would happen if your memory of these began to fade? Is it possible to rebuild your life? Raise a family? Fall in love again? When Claire starts to write her Memory Book, she already knows that this scrapbook of mementoes will soon be all her daughters and husband have of her. But how can she hold on to the past when her future is slipping through her fingers...?
In 'Barcelona', we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son's true nature. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage. The stories in 'Barcelona' reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity. Whether on city streets, long car journeys or in suburban rooms, we glimpse characters as they approach those moments of desperation - or revelation - that change or reshape fate.
Ireland, 1959. Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well: his mother's death in childbirth. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling. But still, always, they are treated as outsiders. As Christy struggles with his new classmates, he starts to question who he is and where he belongs. But then the discovery of an old newspaper photograph, and a long-buried secret, changes his life for ever.
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Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth - all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?
`Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.' For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories ofMarie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks - young Trian and old Cormac - he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?
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Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him. 'How to Build a Boat' is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community.
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In the resort town of Tramore, County Waterford, visitors arrive in waves with the tourist season, reliving the best days of their childhoods at the seaside amusements. Local teenager Helen is indifferent to the charm of her surroundings; infatuated with her glamorous classmate Stella, she yearns to escape with her to art college, and from there, the world. But leaving is easier said than done. With an alcoholic father and an unsympathetic mother, Helen's free-falling family may wreck her dream, just as it seems to be within reach. As it follows Helen, Stella and their families' and neighbours' lives over two decades 'The Amusements' is an unforgettable story about roads taken and not taken. It is a brilliantly observed portrait of life in a small town, echoing with truth and compassion.
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In the late 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol set out to make an unconventional novel by following a cast of his most famous characters around New York, recording their conversations with his tape recorder. The twenty-four one-hour tapes were transcribed by four women: The Velvet Underground's drummer Maureen Tucker, a Barnard student Susan Pile, and two young women. In 'Nothing Special', Nicole Flattery imagines the lives of those high school students: precocious and wise beyond their years but still only teenagers, living with their mothers but working all day in the surreal and increasingly dangerous world of Andy Warhol's Factory, and learning to shape and reshape their identities as they navigate between their low-paid, grueling jobs and their lives at home, in a time of social change for girls and women in America.
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Nick Dunne's wife Amy suddenly disappears on the morning of their 5th anniversary. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. Then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.
1990. When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec's 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there's still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance. Now. After years away, Etty returns home to the small East Anglian village where she grew up to help move her father into a care home. Now in his eighties, Alec has dementia and often mistakes his daughter for her mother. All the Salter children have spent decades running and hiding from their mother's disappearance. When their childhood friends, Greg and Morgen Ackerley, decide to do a podcast about Charlotte's disappearance, it seems like the town's buried secrets might finally come to light.
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook.
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