Our top picks of the month for book clubs

For book clubs interested in an espionage thriller…

The Imitator by Rebecca Starford

Out of place at boarding school, scholarship girl Evelyn Varley realises that the only way for her to fit in is to be like everyone else. She hides her real self and what she really thinks behind the manners and attitudes of those around her. By the time she graduates from Oxford University in 1939, ambitious and brilliant Evelyn has perfected her performance. War is looming. Evelyn soon finds herself recruited to MI5, and is schooled in observation and subterfuge before being assigned to the dangerous task of infiltrating an underground group of Nazi sympathisers working to form an alliance with Germany. But befriending people to betray them isn’t easy, no matter how dark their intent.


For book clubs who like novels based on true stories…

Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland

Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to America’s Playground and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams. Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond control.


For book clubs looking to explore a feminist western…

Outlawed by Anna North

Ada feels lucky. She loves her broad-shouldered, bashful husband and her job as an apprentice midwife. But her luck will not last. It is every woman’s duty to have a child, to replace those that were lost in the Great Flu. And after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are hanged as witches, Ada’s survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang. Its leader, a charismatic preacher-turned-robber, wants to create a safe haven for women outcast from society. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.


For book clubs who enjoy stories of inching tensions…

The Beach Caves by Trevor Shearston

It’s 1970, and young Annette Cooley is part of a small team working on an archaeological dig on the New South Wales south coast - a site that appears to prove that Aboriginal societies in the late Holocene were becoming less nomadic, even sedentary. The discovery is thrilling in its significance, and the atmosphere in the group is one of charged excitement. The team is led by a husband-and-wife pair, stars in their field, Aled Wray and Marilyn Herr, and working on their sites promises to be the making of Annette as an archaeologist. On a new site, linked to the first, Annette starts to fall for a fellow student, Brian Harpur. But there are strange tensions and a hidden darkness within the group. Then one of their party mysteriously disappears. When police arrive, Annette makes a decision that will irrevocably mark her life, and Brian Harpur’s.


For book clubs seeking emerging Australian voices…

Born Into This by Adam Thompson

Engaging, thought-provoking stories from a young Tasmanian Aboriginal author who addresses universal themes - identity, racism, heritage destruction - from a wholly original perspective.

The stories in Born Into This throw light on a world of unique cultural practice and perspective, from Indigenous rangers trying to instil some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania, to those scraping by on the margins of white society railroaded into complex and compromised decisions. To this mix Adam Thompson manages to bring humour, pathos and occasionally a sly twist as his characters confront racism, untimely funerals, classroom politics and, overhanging all like a discomforting, burgeoning awareness for both white and black Australia, the inexorable damage and disappearance of the remnant natural world.


For book clubs wanting a sexy, queer read about indulgence and desire…

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam - by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family - and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Melissa Broder tells a tale of appetites: of physical hunger, of sexual desire, of spiritual longing. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche - both sacred and profane.


For book clubs desiring a modern – and painfully real – love story…

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.


For book clubs looking for experimental and existential reading…

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter

A great painter lies on his deathbed. In a burst of literary brilliance, Max Porter translates into seven written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist’s mind.

The Death of Francis Bacon internally imagines the final days of a world-renowned artist, as he lays dying. It is a raw and oftentimes fragmented rendering of a life, from an author renowned for their unique approach to experimental narratives.

Cover image for The Imitator

The Imitator

Rebecca Starford

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