Lucca English Book Club

Our book for March 2025 will be The Fraud by Zadie Smith. From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.  Description from Goodreads . Our meeting will be on March 27th.   Check us out on Facebook for more details https://www.facebook.com/groups/116095441736716/ Enjoy your reading!

Dear Readers,  Samantha Harvey's "Orbital"  is an account of a day in the life of six astronauts of different nationalities, four men and two women, in the International Space Station as it completes 16 orbits of the Earth. There is no plot to speak of, and we learn little of their individual personalities and backgrounds. The mundanity of their tasks and routines in their contained micro world contrasts with the awesomeness of the real world visible through their windows and the extraordinary beauty of the constantly changing Earth viewed from space, where national boundaries have no significance and wars are invisible. Samantha Harvey has said that her objective was to write "a kind of space pastoral", a meditation on our precious planet, and that the six humans are simply "part of the image, not the lens". The book (novel?) combines luminous descriptions with impressive research, and we thought she just a...

Our book for February 2025 is Orbital by Samantha Harvey:  A team of astronauts in the International Space Station observes the planet Earth and each other. Their communications dwell on the fragility of human life and of the planet itself. Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. The Sunday Times described is as “Stunning, an uplifting book.” Reviews range from "Ravishingly Beautiful" to "Mind-numbingly Boring", so it will be sure to lead to some interesting discussion when we meet on Wednesday February 26th. Check us out on Facebook for more details  https://www.facebook.com/groups/116095441736716/

Dear Readers, our bookclub does not shrink from a challenge. Our choice was to  boldly go  into 2025 with Italo Calvino's experimental novel "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller", published in 1979 and now considered a classic. Our votes varied widely, before settling on an average score of 7, Recommended.  The book examines what it is to write a novel, or read it or interpret it, through a series of episodes based on a journey through different loosely connected stories. . The reader has just time to absorb a new set of characters and a new plot when it ends in suspense and leads to another title. Inevitably one tries to find a logic binding the various episodes together when perhaps simply going with the flow would be a better option. Too many beginnings, not enough conclusions? A tiresome behind the scenes documentary of interest only to other writers? But through it all runs Calvino's masterful writing, his sense of fun and remarkable narrative...