Book Clubs

Book clubs are the life and soul of the reading world, and if you’re choosing one of my books for your book club, thank you!

I’ve listed a few discussion points below for each title.

Book clubs interested in purchasing copies may order direct from the publishers (links below), but please also consider ordering through your local bookshop. We love our wonderful independent booksellers and want to keep them in business!

I’m always happy to visit book clubs if circumstances make this possible. At the moment, some ‘visits’ are by Zoom or Skype, but online sessions give me the opportunity to connect with book clubs far away. Please feel free to send a message via the Contact Me page and we can work out the details.

Kathleen O’Connor of Paris

Discussion points include:

• Kate’s career and her artistic legacy
• Paris: La Belle Époque, Jazz Age, wartime, interwar, postwar
• challenges faced by women artists
• place and identity
• Kate’s troubled relationship with Perth and ideas of ‘home’
• hybrid forms of narrative

On the Fremantle Press Kathleen O’Connor of Paris page, you can download book club notes, read an extract and buy books direct

Elemental

Discussion points include:

• the herring girls (early 20th-century Scotland)
• women’s work (fishwives; herring industry; Mills & Ware biscuit factory, early 20th-century Fremantle)
• gender issues
• memory
• superstition
• heroism, sacrifice
• immigration, belonging

On the UWA Publishing Elemental page, you can buy books direct

The Sinkings

Discussion points include:

• intersex (19th century/late 20th century)
• socially/genetically constructed gender
• fiction, history and truth (read an article on this here)
• genealogical research
• mother–child relationships
• Potato Famine, Ireland
• tenement Glasgow (mid-19th century)
• colonial Western Australia (19th century)
• convict transportation

On the UWA Publishing The Sinkings page, you can buy books direct

Inherited

Discussion points include:

• short stories—ideal reading for busy people?
• inheritances (material, genetic, cultural, environmental)
• memorialisation, grief, loss
• collecting
• obsessions
• memory
• families, generations

On the UWA Publishing Inherited page, you can buy books direct

With Tracy Bock’s lovely book club at her Paris Cafe in Guildford

With the fabulous First Edition Book Club—ten years and still going strong (July 2014)

I was delighted to be invited to Susan Pearce’s book club for their discussion of Elemental

Bowie listened to the discussion, too!

Rose van Son invited me to talk to the lovely ladies of the Gooseberry Hill Book Club, who first got together 40 years ago! Photo courtesy Arnold van Son

The lovely ladies of Janet Moullin’s book club, March 2014, discussing Elemental and enjoying a supper of all things Scottish: smoked salmon, Dundee cake, shortbread. Delicious!

Thanks to all the book clubs who chose Elemental in 2013. Here are three: Fiona Daga’s group (top); Dot Longnecker’s ‘Read between the Wines’ group (middle); Sandy Boulter’s group (bottom)