Cricklereaders December 2022 – Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The book chosen for the last Cricklereaders of the year is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

Demon Copperhead is a once-in-a-generation novel that breaks and mends your heart in the way only the best fiction can.

Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

If you’d like to join the group, email cricklereaders@cricklewoodlibrary.org.uk for more details.

Next meeting: Sunday 11 December, 1030-1130

Cricklereaders October 2022 – Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

‘The most exquisite kind of literature… I’ve put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. ‘
OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

‘Could not be more timely… It’s funny and absurd, but it’s also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home… A writer of great warmth as well as skill
GUARDIAN

‘In equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it’
CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs

‘A genrebusting novel of ideas… Gospodinov’s vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination with the book’s own merits, may just have created a classic’
THE TIMES

‘Gospodinov is one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book’
DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle

The September group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 30 October. Do join in.