Book Club

‘So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don’t know how she did it’ – Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Now with an introduction from Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love, revealing how a new generation of women can take inspiration from Nora’s sharp wit and wisdom about life.

* Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from. * If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit. * When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you. * If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you’re ahead of the game. * Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for by the age of forty-five.*

‘I give this as a present more than other book. I buy it for people so often that I’ve been known to give girlfriends two copies, one birthday after another’ – Dolly Alderton

As has become tradition now at Jaffé & Neale, December’s book club gathering on Wednesday 4th December is an invitation for regulars and new members to discuss their favourite books of the year for a couple of minutes!

Patrick has also ‘promised’ mulled wine…

We look forward to seeing you there.

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them.

Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years. ‘An amazing debut novel. You should read this book.

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe.

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull.

News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams.

So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms.

America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds.

As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, tells a powerful tale of poverty and undying hope in his moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel. ‘The Colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one spoonful left’Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive.

But on Fridays the postman comes – and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the Colonel’s ageing heart. For fifteen years he’s watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he’ll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season.

But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his wife – must somehow be fed. . .

From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, this is a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

For June 2024, the book club is meeting on Wednesday 19th June, to coincide with Jaffé & Neale taking part in the inaugural Big Book Club during Independent Bookshop Week.

Triese, 1943: an unconscious soldier is revived in hospital, but he has lost his memory and cannot even remember his own language. With no documents about his person it will be hard to identify him. The doctor who treats him is originally from Finland and, believing his patient to be a countryman, resolves to teach him Finnish.

A country house. A murder. A Belgian detective. After the Great War, life can never be the same again. Captain Arthur Hastings is invited to Styles to recuperate from injuries sustained at the Front. It is the last place he expects to encounter murder.

Fortunately he knows a former detective, a Belgian refugee, who happens to be staying nearby . . .

Here, for the first time, we meet Agatha Christie’s legendary creation: Hercule Poirot

Set in an unnamed African country, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast.

He believes The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. So he has taken the initiative; left the coast; acquired his own shop in a small, growing city in the continent’s remote interior and is selling sundries – little more than this and that, really – to the natives. This spot, this ‘bend in the river’, is a microcosm of post-colonial Africa at the time of Independence: a scene of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation and poverty.

And from this rich landscape emerges one of the author’s most potent works – a truly moving story of historical upheaval and social breakdown.