For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. … Continue reading May 7th – A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (George Saunders)

The venomous lumpsucker is the most intelligent fish on the planet. Or maybe it was the most intelligent fish on the planet. Because it might have just gone extinct. Nobody knows. And nobody really cares, either. Except for two people. Mining executive Mark Halyard has a prison cell waiting for him if that fish is gone for … Continue reading April 2nd – Venomous Lumpsucker (Ned Beauman)

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother’s wedding. Through a perilous skylight we … Continue reading March 5th – The Member of the Wedding (Carson McCullers)

What is the devastating effect on your life when, through no fault of your own, you lose everything – home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, money, credit cards, mobile phone – and you can never get them back? This is what happens to a young man called Adam Kindred, one May evening in Chelsea, London, … Continue reading February 6th – Ordinary Thunderstorms (William Boyd)

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. At the heart of this glittering world is … Continue reading January 2nd – Shrines of Gaiety (Kate Atkinson)

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 … Continue reading December 5th – The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

From her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, from the rugged shores of New Zealand to a lonely iceshelf in Antarctica, Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger. Determined to live an independent life, she resists the pull of her childhood … Continue reading November 7th – Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead)

Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits a random act of violence. His lack of emotion and failure to show remorse only serve to increase his guilt in the eyes of the law, and challenges the fundamental values of society – a set of rules so binding that any person … Continue reading October 3rd – The Outsider (Albert Camus)

Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a disgraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age.Not only is it the epic love story of two people … Continue reading September 5th – The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)

Imagine you could travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see, and hear, and smell? Where would you stay? What are you going to eat? And how are you going to test to see if you are going down with the plague? In The Time Traveller’s Guide Ian Mortimer’s turns our entire understanding of history … Continue reading August 1st – The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer)

England, 1643. Parliament is battling the King; the war between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers rages. Puritanical fervour has gripped the nation, and the hot terror of damnation burns black in every shadow. In Manningtree, depleted of men since the wars began, the women are left to their own devices. At the margins of this … Continue reading July 4th – The Manningtree Witches (A.K. Blakemore)

1944, Italy. As bombs fall around them, two strangers meet in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner a 64-year-old art historian living life on her own terms. She has come to salvage paintings from the wreckage of war and … Continue reading June 6th – Still Life (Sarah Winman)