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2025

  • Daphne du Maurier: The King's General
  • Deborah Lawrenson: The Secretary
  • Richard Cohen: How to Write like Tolstoy
  • Adrian Tinniswood: Noble Ambitions
  • Adrian Tinniswood: The Power and the Glory
  • Martin Williams: The King is Dead, Long Live the King
  • Gavin Plumley: A Home for all Seasons
  • Robert Harris: Precipice
  • Nigel Slater: A Thousand Feasts
  • Joan Aiken: Tales of London Town
  • Alan Connor: 188 Words for Rain
  • Ben Robinson: English Villages: An Extraordinary Journey through Time

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Cornflower book group

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Dark Puss

As a teenager I used to devour factual accounts of Arctic exploration (especially in Sammiland) and on mountaineering in general. Your last word piques my interest in this book. I'll see if I can borrow a copy. Oh! I see it is available at my local library; time to get out into the falling snow again I think.

Cornflower

I hope you'll enjoy it, DP!

Dark Puss

I made it through the snow, joined the other 40 people queuing up for the library to open at 11:00 and got the only copy. It has a totally different cover from the one you show in your post however. I'll let you know how I find the book.

Cornflower

The cover here is for the paperback which is due out shortly; you presumably have the hardback.
Please do let us know how you find it.

Simon (Savidge Reads)

Oh hoorah you have read this too. I oddly posted my review a few days after yours, I had decided to read it whilst being snowbound, though I had been meaning to read it since it was on the Fiction Uncovered initiative.

I think you liked this more than me, only because I was left a little unsatisfied by it and wanted more. I basically wanted it to be about 200 pages longer so all the back stories and sub plots had more air to breathe and room to grow if you know what I mean?

Cornflower

I know what you mean, Simon, but I liked that quite 'airless', stifled atmosphere which kept the various subplots partially hidden and hinted at things rather than making them explicit - the repression/obsession theme taken even further!

Dark Puss

I agree with Cornflower, this was an absolutely superb book. It took me back to the days when I was more active in the mountains than I have been in recent years. I've not done any proper climbing but I've been closer than I'd like to avalanches while walking in the Pyrenees and I have certainly walked in blizzard conditions and used my ice-axe on Lochnagar ascending to the plateau.

It made me want to get back out there right away. The book needed not a single extra word; I'll invent and dream my own stories to fill any gaps. Curiously I wasn't all that chilled by Grace's story not Parr's detached approach to life and death on the mountains ...

Cornflower

So glad to hear you enjoyed it!

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