The second category in my books of the year list is for best book group books. If you've taken part in the Cornflower Book Group at all - and look, we're famous now! - please join in here and let us know which titles made the biggest impression on you. I'm giving my top four, though others are close contenders, but these books stood out in my fiction reading overall this year, not just in what the group has read.
J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was a beautiful, finely-balanced study of a brief period in a man's life, both for what it was and for what it might have led to. (Our thoughts on it are here).
Robertson Davies was another author I'd never read before he came up on the list of suggestions for the group, but his Fifth Business was a most interesting, thought-provoking read, with a narrative of "page-turning force".
Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, a study of an uneasy marriage undermined by an unlikely affair, certainly got us all talking!
Wallace Stegner was another great find for those of us who read his Crossing to Safety; much to admire and much to ponder.
