The Sisterhood
By Jacqson Diego Story Emporium
The Sisterhood
By Jacqson Diego Story Emporium
The Sisterhood Book Club is our book club for adults discovering and rediscovering female protagonists in classic, modern classic and contemporary world fiction, written by women.
We meet monthly to informally discuss a book read in advance, over refreshments at the Emporium.
These are some of the titles we have shared
Edgware Road
Yasmin Cordery Khan
£9.99 £9.49Khalid Quraishi feels like one of the lucky ones. Working in the glitzy West End by night and spending time with his beautiful wife and daughter by day, he's a world away from the life he left behind in Karachi. But Khalid likes to gamble - twenty pounds on the fruit machine here, a thousand on a sure-thing investment there.
The Attic Child: A powerful and heartfelt historical novel, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023
Lola Jaye
£8.99 £8.54Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a secret. 1907: Twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of his time locked in an attic room of a large house by the sea. Taken from his homeland and treated as an unpaid servant, he dreams of his family in Africa even if, as the years pass, he struggles to remember his mother's face, and sometimes his real name. Decades later, Lowra, a young orphan girl born into wealth and privilege, will find herself banished to the same attic.
Winter in the Air: 'Masterpieces: hand yourself over to be enchanted.' (Guardian)
Sylvia Townsend Warner
£9.99 £9.49A murder raises fears of blackmail. A woman waits anxiously in a cafe before eloping to Paris. Another steals a friend's kitchen knife.
The Woman Next Door
Yewande Omotoso
£9.99 £9.49Both are successful women with impressive careers behind them. Both have recently been widowed. Both are in their eighties. And both are sworn enemies, sharing hedge and hostility pruned with zeal. But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. Could long-held mutual loathing transform into friendship? Love thy neighbour? Easier said than done.
Scabby Queen
Kirstin Innes
£9.99 £9.49Now that she's gone, those who loved her, those who hated her and those who felt both ways at the same time are forced to ask one question: Who was Clio Campbell? Three days before her fifty-first birthday, Clio Campbell - one-hit-wonder, political activist, life-long-love and one-night-stand - kills herself in her friend Ruth's spare bedroom.
The End of the World is a Cul de Sac
Louise Kennedy
£9.99 £9.49A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Announcing a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century, these sharp shocks of stories offer flashes of beauty, and even humour, amidst the harshest of truths.
Lemon
Kwon Yeo-sun
£8.99 £8.54In the summer of 2002, Kim Hae-on was killed in what became known as the High School Beauty Murder. There were two suspects: Shin Jeongjun, who had a rock-solid alibi, and Han Manu, to whom no evidence could be pinned. The case went cold.
This One Sky Day: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2022
Leone Ross
£8.99 £8.54Dawn breaks across the archipelago of Popisho. The world is stirring awake again, each resident with their own list of things to do: A wedding feast to conjure and cook, an infidelity to investigate, a lost soul to set free, as the sun rises two star-crossed lovers try to find their way back to one another across this single day. When night falls, all have been given a gift, and many are no longer the same.
The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
£9.99 £9.49Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows. In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree.
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
£7.99 £7.59Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women.
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
£9.99 £9.49This book immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.
Convenience Store Woman
SAYAKA MURATA
£9.99 £9.49Meet Keiko. Keiko is 36 years old. She's never had a boyfriend, and she's been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years. Keiko's family wishes she'd get a proper job. Her friends wonder why she won't get married. But Keiko knows what makes her happy, and she's not going to let anyone come between her and her convenience store...
Small Pleasures: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
Clare Chambers
£9.99 £9.49Jean Swinney is a journalist on a local paper, trapped in a life of duty and disappointment from which there is no likelihood of escape. When a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. As the investigation turns her quiet life inside out, Jean is suddenly given an unexpected chance at friendship, love and - possibly - happiness.
Of Women and Salt
Gabriela Garcia
£9.99 £9.49Maria begins to see marriage and motherhood as her only options, the sounds of war are approaching. 1959, Cuba: Dolores watches her husband make for the mountains in answer to Fidel Castro's call to arms. What Dolores knows, though, is that to survive, she must win her own war, and commit an act of violence that threatens to destroy her daughter Carmen's world.