This year’s challenge is simple, just pick an author that was born in that month and read a piece of their work. I told you, easy!
Obviously there are hundreds of books and authors to choose from so we’ve just listed a few for May in case you’re in need of inspiration.
Jodi Picoult – A Spark Of Light
The Center for women’s reproductive health offers a last chance at hope – but nobody ends up there by choice. Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder. Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.
J.M. Barrie – Peter Pan
Desperate to hear bedtime stories, Peter Pan waits outside the nursery window of Wendy, John and Michael Darling. When Peter asks Wendy to fly with him to Neverland, the Darling children are whisked away to a world of adventure – of daring fairies, wondrous mermaids and The Lost Boys.
Sara Pascoe – Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body
Reader, here is everything I’ve learned from science about love, sexuality, infidelity, boobs, periods, pubes, broodiness, and clever old fat. Merry Christmas and Hallelujah, suddenly being a woman doesn’t look like such a minefield after all.
Daphne du Maurier – Jamaica Inn
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.
Armistead Maupin – Tales of the City
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.
Muriel Barbary – Elegance of the Hedgehog
Rene is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building. She maintains a carefully constructed persona as someone uncultivated but reliable, in keeping with what she feels a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Rene: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives.
John Connolly – He
With he, John Connolly recreates the golden age of Hollywood for an intensely compassionate study of the tension between commercial demands and artistic integrity, the human frailties behind even the greatest of artists, and one of the most enduring and beloved partnerships in cinema history: Laurel & Hardy.
Tana French – The Wych Elm
One night changes everything for Toby. He’s always led a charmed life – until a brutal attack leaves him damaged and traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at his family’s ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.
Sharon Bolton – Daisy in Chains
Hamish Wolfe is charming, magnetic and very persuasive. Famed for his good looks, he receives adoring letters every day from his countless admirers. He’s also a convicted murderer, facing life in prison. Maggie Rosie is a successful lawyer and true-crime author. Reclusive and enigmatic, she only takes on cases she can win. Hamish is convinced that Maggie can change his fate. Maggie is determined not to get involved. She thinks she’s immune to the charms of such a man. But maybe not this time
Arthur Conan Doyle – Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes, together with his faithful sidekick Doctor John H. Watson pit their extraordinary wits and courage against foreign spies, blackmailers, cultists, petty thieves, murderers, swindlers, policemen (both stupid and clever), and arch-nemesis Moriarty.
Other suggestions from Cwts Club Discussion Group include Maeve Binchey, Katherine Anne Porter, L Frank Baum, Jeffrey Deaver, Herman Wouk, Ian Fleming, Robin Cook, Nellie Bly and Robert Ludlum.
Pick a book from our list, pop along to your local book shop or library or pick something that’s already in your TBR pile. What ever you decide, don’t forget to let us know what you’re reading over on Cwts Club Discussion Group.