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JUNE BOOK CHOICES - YOU DECIDE!

Which books would you like to be read in June? All you have to do is vote for one of the books below. Read the blurbs and see if there is anything that looks interesting and the book with the most votes by 21st May will be chosen to be read from 1st June.

There is also another poll running so please take a look at that one too as there may be something on that list. There will be two books chosen but you don't have to read both if you don't want to.

The polls end midnight 21st May!

1. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie 416 pages

Los Angeles, 1991. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is murdered in broad daylight on his illegitimate daughter India's doorstep, slaughtered by a knife wielded by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown. The dead man is a charismatic World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability, a former US ambassador to India and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal.

2. The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly 512 pages

'Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother !'As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves and monsters, his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things.

3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood 545 pages

This tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery is wound around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s. Was Grace Marks a female fiend? A femme fatale? Or a weak and unwilling victim? The accusation of murderess follows her "like a taffeta skirt along the floor".

4. Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter 416 pages

The sleepy town of Heartsdale is jolted into panic when Sara Linton, pediatrician and medical examiner, finds Sibyl Adams, a young college professor, horribly murdered in the local diner. Police chief Jeffrey Tolliver then finds a second victim crucified and recognises the work of a serial killer.

5. Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey 528 pages

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent — a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms — could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

6. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde 384 pages

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

7. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 448 pages

With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo's beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents' world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father's business; and Kainene's English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place.

8. The Constant Princess by Phillipa Gregory 528 pages

Set in the rich beauty of Moorish Spain and the glamour of the Tudor court, The Constant Princess presents a woman whose constancy helps her endure betrayal, poverty, and despair, until the inevitable moment when she steps into the role she has prepared for all her life: Henry VIII's Queen, Regent, and commander of the English army in their greatest victory against Scotland.

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nicnic · Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 7:51 am Post subject:

I've read Shalimar the Clown and Alias Grace - they are both excellent books

. Alias Grace is one of my favourite books ever.

Voted for The Book of Lost Things as its on Mt TBR

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Currently reading: Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

dingsy · Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 9:26 am Post subject:

"Book of lost things" for me too, nicnic.

Ruth · Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 6:42 am Post subject:

I've gone for The Eyre Affair, as it is on my tbr. Have read Blindsighted already - great book!
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"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

blueflower · Posted: Sat May 19, 2007 6:59 pm Post subject:

I would like to read most of these but have gone for Book of Lost things.. Hard choice though.

sparkledpixie · Posted: Sat May 19, 2007 7:42 pm Post subject:

Half of a Yellow Sun because it is on my TBR!!

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