The Dry by Jane Harper

We were going to have a seasonal read this month, but couldn't resist 'The Dry' by Jane Harper instead. It's  been described as a 'breathless page turner' by The New York Times and been featured as Thriller of the Month by Waterstones and the Sunday Times.  

The small country town of Kiewarra has been dry for two years following the worst drought to hit Australia in a century. Tensions mount, culmunating in the murder of three members of the Hadler family. The guilt falls on Luke Hadler, with the local community deciding that he committed suicide after killing his wife and six year old son.

Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town he grew up in for the funeral of his childhood best friend. Aaron Falk and Luke Hadler had shared a secret, which is disturbed by Luke's death. Aaron is reluctantly drawn into the investigation, confronting secrets from the past as he questions the truth of the crime. 

We'll be talking about 'The Dry' at our next meeting at the library on Thursday 4th January 2018

Banned Books

We were all surprised how many banned books we'd already read! It was also a revelation to discover why some books were banned.

Jack London's 'Call of the Wild' was banned in Italy and Yugoslavia, before being burned by Nazis in 1933. It's a book about being individual and fighting back, but it's more likely to have been banned for the author's socialist views than for the text.

Book Group members chose to read:

Call of the Wild by Jack London

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

The Perks of being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Here's Edith's comments on 'Forever Amber':

'Forever Amber' was banned in Boston, and regarded as being obscene in 1944. I read this book as a teenager or early twenties when I also read anything that was based on history. Now I think I am more discerning in book choice.

The novel is based on The Restoration of Charles II, and the research is impeccable. Every detail of life in that period - food, fashions, architecture, interior design and politics - is covered by the fictional tale of Amber St Clare.

Amber, beautiful and sexy, may well have been immoral but the court of Charles II is worse: bawdy, brutal, cruel, licentious and wicked. When it comes to intimate sex scenes between Amber and her many varied lovers, a great deal is left to the imagination of the reader. 

'Those critics of long ago were really reviewing the Restoration Period itself, not the story' Kathleen Winsor wrote.

Linda Darnell as Amber in the film adaptation

The book is 972 pages long, and sometimes I lost the will to live! The story of Amber kept me interested but I wasn't so keen on reading about the politics of Court life, and speed read a lot of the pages dealing with that.

Amber has no redeeming features - she is extremely selfish, greedy and grasping. She doesn't think things out before she acts and doesn't care if she hurts someone else in the process. She has two children by her first lover and, although he marries someone else, she can't let go - to the extent she follows him and his wife to America, and there the story ends.


I don't know if  a teenager or early twenties reader would enjoy this book today and I have certainly outgrown it. I would give it 4 marks out of 5 (mainly because of the excellent research of the period).

This book is quite tame compared to 'Game of Thrones' or 'Outlander'!