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.

October 2025

Monday 13th October at 6 pm

Melvyn Bragg

Grace and Mary

Paperback £8.99

(Book Club price - reduced from £9.99

Reaching from late 19th-century Cumbria to the present, this elegiac novel celebrates two spirited women: Grace, a farm labourer's daughter who fatefully followed her heart, and Mary, the child she was forced to give up. Unsung heroines according to Mary's son who, as his elderly mother's mind begins to fail, lovingly recreates their lives and the vanished country of their pasts, linking three generations in a chain of enduring love, loss and courage.

Thank you to Peter Roberts, who will be leading the discussion.

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.

Thank you to Tori Walker, who will be leading the discussion.

August 2025 This is Happiness by Niall Williams

July 2025 Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

June 2025 The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

May 2025 James by Percival Everett

April 2025 The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

March 2025 The Last House Before The Mountain by Monika Helfer

February 2025 The Past by Tessa Hadley

January 2025 Orbital by Samantha Harvey