Our book group choice for October 2026 is The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits. Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the book offers a wry, observant subversion of the great American road novel.
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Our book choice for September 2026 is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This 1952 masterpiece stands as a landmark of modernist literature — an incisive bildungsroman that interrogates identity, power, and the existential struggle for individual agency in mid-twentieth-century America.
Our book group choice for July 2026 is The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. It is a potent techno-gothic critique of patriarchal anxiety, consumer capitalism, and the violent backlash against second-wave feminism.
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Our book group choice for June 2026 is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Strout’s novel is a formally innovative composite novel that utilises a mosaic structure to interrogate the complexities of human isolation, provincial insularity and the fraught nature of empathy.
Our book group choice for May 2026 is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. The novel is a haunting allegorical exploration of state-enforced amnesia, totalitarian surveillance, and the gradual dissolution of the human psyche.
Our book group choice for April 2026 is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. The novel serves as a devastating critique of the commodification of human relationships within the gilded cage of New York’s turn-of-the-century elite.
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Our book group choice for March 2026 is TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker. In a dimly lit Canterbury jazz club, trumpeter Sasha Keyes is deep in a fearless improvisational solo when the unthinkable happens: a middle-aged man stands up and politely asks, “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?”
Our book group choice for February 2026 is The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in 1959 in the damp, windswept Suffolk coastal town of Hardborough, The Bookshop is a clinical, unsentimental examination of how a small, entrenched community reacts to an outsider’s modest ambition. The outsider is Florence Green, a middle-aged widow with a small inheritance and a quiet resolve.
Our book group choice for January 2026 is Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Exhalation is a collection of nine speculative fiction stories; rather than a single novel, this book functions as an anthology of distinct narratives, each exploring profound philosophical questions through the lens of science fiction and fantasy.
Our book group choice for December 2025 is Village Christmas by Laurie Lee. For many readers, Laurie Lee is synonymous with the sun-drenched, cider-hazed memories of the Slad Valley immortalised in his classic, Cider with Rosie. But if Cider with Rosie is the golden heat of high summer, Village Christmas is the crisp, woodsmoke-scented chill of midwinter.
