Double feature January and February
The January meeting didn’t take place due to bad weather so 8 of us discussed both books at the February meeting.
We started with A gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, a New York Times best seller. The story revolves around the Count, a Russian aristocrat in the time following the Bolshevik revolution. He is allowed to live as he was a war hero but is confined to the hotel where he lives, the punishment for leaving is death. He is moved from his luxurious apartment to an attic room and allowed to keep a few of his possessions. As time passes he is befriended by a young girl who lives in the hotel with her family and joins the staff of the hotel. Year’s later the girl who befriended him returns and asks him to take in her daughter but never returns from searching for her imprisoned husband. The Count’s relationship with his adopted daughter is touching and he develops a plan to get her out of Russia and to freedom in the West.
The general feeling was that the story took a while to get going and that if you stuck with it the second half of the book was far more engaging. One of our members noticed that the book was written in the third person and this allowed the reader to think about the characters emotions rather than being told what they were feeling. Most of us loved the book and we gave it a ranking of 7.5 out of 10.
We then moved onto the second book The Secret Hours by Mick Herron. This is a stand alone novel involving some of the characters in the Slough House Novels which were made into the Slow Horses TV series. We thought that the first half of the book jumped around a lot and that this made it disjointed and difficult to follow. The story took off in the second half of the book and was much faster to read.
The book revolves around the world of espionage in Berlin after the Wall came down. It describes a world with a different morality where duplicity and paranoia are rife. We thought that the book was cleverly written and liked the dry, wry humour. We thought that the book would make a good TV series and that it might be better if we’d read some of the other books first. We gave it a marking of 5.6/10.
Talking about the books also bought up other books we’d read and would recommend:
Nancy Wake WWII’s most rebellious spy by Russell Braddon. This book tells the story of New Zealander Nancy Wake and her brave exploits as a spy and actions against the Nazis.
Femina: A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it by Janina Ramirez. This book tells the stories of extraordinary women have held positions of power throughout history.
Finally, The King’s Curse by Philippa Gregory. This book tells the story of Margaret De La Pole, heir to the Plantagenets and a rival claimant to the Tudor throne.