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Sometimes when I select a book for my book clubs, what I’m really doing is shuffling my own TBR pile. Carys Davies is an author who has been languishing on the edge of my radar for a while now. I’ve been meaning to read her and yet, despite how slim and digestible her novels are, I still haven’t found time to slip one down. Scheduling one for book club is like putting it on a spoon and holding it out for me to swallow.
In contrast to our previous month’s read, I was looking for a non-US author and a non-US setting as my non-negotiables for September. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in terms of theme or style, I just knew it shouldn’t be a family drama and ideally not nostalgic or romantic in the way that Tom Lake was nostalgic and romantic. As usual, it proved more difficult than I expected to pick something. I am always overwhelmed by choice and then through my indecipherable weeding process (this one is too long. this one is too expensive. this one is too upsetting. this one is too popular.) I whittle it down to a choice of really not many at all.
This time I landed on The Mission House because it was a slim paperback, set in India and had a male protagonist. The author, well-established, is Welsh, but based in Scotland. That’s not a combination we’re likely to have had recently, or will stumble across again and should prove sufficiently different enough to our previous reads that my book clubs members feel they’re being exposed to a good range of books across the year. Coincidentally, this is also why I don’t tend to pick books that I’ve already read, and loved, myself. I want to read the books fresh alongside the book club so that we aren’t just reading Now That’s What Katie Calls Books! and I too, have a chance to criticize them.
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