the am Virtual Book Club
Sarah Skelton
The theme for this edition is ‘Party’ but one of the books I am recommending is not about a party at all. However, there was a party to celebrate the author being the first ever to win a double award at Bloody Scotland recently!
A Bad, Bad Place by Frances Crawford
A Bad, Bad Place is a debut novel by Frances Crawford which won both the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. Frances also won the Val McDermid Crime Debut Award for this novel with Val saying it was a “Clever, honest, heart-rending and funny” book.
A Bad, Bad Place is set in Glasgow in 1979. Twelve-year-old Janey won’t take her dog, Sid Vicious, for a walk. Not anymore. It’s Sid’s fault she found the murdered woman. Janey claims she can’t remember what she saw at the abandoned railway, but the police think she’s hiding something. And they’re not the only ones interested. Fear and rumour rip through the tight-knit community of Possilpark.
Janey and her nana, Maggie, are dragged into the hunt for a murderer. And Maggie’s struggle to keep her beloved granddaughter safe becomes ever more desperate. Because Janey’s memories can’t stay hidden forever. And neither can the killer…
I loved this book for its atmosphere, and sense of place and time. Janey and Maggie’s voices are so authentic that you feel drawn into their world, sharing their troubles and fears.
Exit Party by Emily St John Mantel
I think this is Emily St John Mantel’s best piece of work yet and the reviews show I’m not alone. This is a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon.
An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
I find I am reading more future-set dystopian or sci-fi books at present, perhaps in an effort to make sense of the times we are living in and to see other people’s ideas of possible futures.
Remember, you can get free shipping when you order these books online using the special discount code AMVBC at
www.booknookstewarton.co.uk/shop/ayrshire-magazine-virtual-book-club. And don’t forget to leave your thoughts on our Facebook page!
