Each week we have a book group on Tuesdays. There are two slots: 10 am and 7 pm (GMT) and you’re very welcome to either, wherever you are in the world and however much you’d like to participate. Don’t forget to sign up here or here
I’ve started adding some links with the books to bookshop where US based participators can get paperback versions and support local bookshops. Disclosure: I’ve added Amazon affiliate links to kindle editions for the US and England. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
5th October
This week we’re delving into the world of the British Library ‘Tales of the Weird’ series. This weekend we’ll be joined by Joan Passey the editor of this collection. We’ll be reading a collection of Cornish Gothic tales. Strap in for some windswept moors and rocky coastlines!
We’ll be discussing the following stories in more detail:
Colonel Benyon’s Entanglement – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The Coming of Abel Behenna – Bram Stoker
The Haunted Spinney – Elliott O’Donnell
The Screaming Skull – F. Marion Crawford
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot – Arthur Conan Doyle
Amazon UK link
Amazon US link
13th October
This is the fifth of our authors from the ‘Queering Heyer’ panel although, in this case, it’s more apt to say Queering Bronte! This is a queer retelling of Jane Eyre with a Jewish protagonist. Rose Lerner will be joining us for the evening session.
Amazon UK link
Amazon US link
19th October
A Gothic Romance in graphic novel form… or is it? What awaits is perhaps not what you expect.
One dark and stormy night, Haley sees a stranger drowning in the river. Since her greatest passion is Gothic romance novels, she knows her moment has come. But when Haley leaps into the water to rescue the stranger, she awakens in Willowweep. It certainly looks like the setting of one of her favorite books: A stately manor. A sinister housekeeper. Three brooding brothers. There’s even a ghost.
Except Willowweep is not what it seems. Its romantic exterior hides the workings of a pocket universe—the only protection our world has against a great force of penultimate evil, and its defenses are crumbling. Could cruel fate make Haley the heroine that Willowweep needs?
Amazon UK link
Amazon US link
26th October
This week we will be reading a small selection of supernatural tales by Rabindranath Tagore. The exact stories will be announced nearer to the time (dependent upon the choice of speaker Nilanjana Ray who is joining us this week on Saturday for a class on Tagore)
2nd November
This week we’re trying something a little different and reading/playing along with a visual novel! We’ll be reading the sapphic horror romance ‘Rituals in the Dark’ set in Yorkshire’s very own Scarborough!
You can buy and play here
9th November
This week we are reading ‘Silence is a Sense’ by Lalya Alammar who has kindly agreed to join us for an author visit.
A young woman sits in her apartment in an unnamed English city, absorbed in watching the small dramas of her assorted neighbors through their windows across the way. Traumatized into muteness after a long, devastating trip from war-torn Syria to the UK, she believes that she wants to sink deeper into isolation, moving between memories of her absent boyfriend and family and her homeland, dreams, and reality. At the same time, she begins writing for a magazine under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” trying to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself.
Gradually, as the boundaries of her world expand—as she ventures to the neighborhood corner store, to a gathering at a nearby mosque, and to the bookstore and laundromat, and as an anti-Muslim hate crime shatters the members of a nearby mosque—she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in her own life and in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?
Amazon UK link
Amazon US link
