The aldeburgh bookshop Book Club
We meet on the second Monday of the month, in the shop. The Book Club is open to all - so feel free to come along. No prior book club experience necessary.
July 2025
Monday 14th July at 6 pm
Heart Lamp
Banu Mushtaq. Translated by Deepa Bhashti
Paperback, £13.99 (Special Book Club price)
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize. Winner of an English PEN Award.
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions have garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India's most prestigious literary awards.
Everyone welcome.
August 2025
Monday 11th August at 6 pm
Niall Williams
This is Happiness
Paperback £8.99
(Book Club price - reduced from £9.99
A gentle story of a rural Irish community. A reflection on the power of story telling. A coming-of-age novel and and the poignancy of old love.
Noel Crowe is seventeen. He is sent to stay with his grandparents in Faha in County Clare after dropping out of his Dublin seminary.
It had stopped raining.
When it stopped raining was the summer the electricity came to the village of Faha in the summer of 1958.
September 2025
Monday 8th September at 6 pm
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Tori has chosen this book for our September discussion.
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s twenty-four-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon.
Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.