Our next book club discussion will revolve around mystery fiction, where we will dive into the world’s created by our authors and explore the secrets they hide. Our next chat will be hosted on 28 October from 4pm onwards.
We will be joined by EUPL 2020 winning author Nathalie Skowronek for our next discussion. Join in by sending us your questions on our social channels by using #EUPLbookclub or through our Book Club group on Facebook. Please note this month's discussion will be in French.
Listen in live:
As usual, we are spotlighting three EUPL winning novels – to be able to participate in the book club, you only need to read one:
La carte des regrets by Nathalie Skowronek
Suicide, murder, accident? The circumstances of Véronique Verbruggen’s death on a trail in the Cévennes would not have occupied more than a few lines in the press if the victim had not been a well-known publisher. Questioning and sharing the same grief are two men: Daniel Meyer, her ophthalmologist husband, and Titus Séguier, her lover and a filmmaker, forever doomed to wait for Véronique to finally leave her husband. To Daniel, nothing has ever disturbed the 20 years of living together with his wife, whom he loves unfailingly. The lovesick Titus hesitates between remaining silent or addressing a cinematographic love letter to Véronique by finishing the project they started together before she disappeared. Beyond varnished appearances lurks an upsetting portrait of a woman who could not choose. Nathalie Skowronek explores with great subtlety the different facets of love and how, even if times are changing, the drawing and quartering of the heart remains.
All the birds, singing by Evie Wyld
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaving it in rags. It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colours and sounds, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.
Hμερολóγιο μιασ απιστίασ (the diary of an infidelity) by Emilios Solomou
Yiorgos Doukarelis, an archaeologist and professor at the University of Athens, returns to an island in the Small Cyclades, Koufonisi, 20 years after the excavation that made him famous and changed his life forever. At that excavation, he discovered the prehistoric remains of a young pregnant woman murdered 5000 years ago. They gave her the name Kassiopi. During this trip, he had an affair with one of his students, Antigoni. They got married after Yiorgos’ divorce from his former wife Maria. He returns to the island, six months after Antigoni disappeared mysteriously. The order and the routine of his daily life are destroyed. He is left with his memories and the only person close to him, his daughter Ismini. Going around the island, passing by the places he lived during the time of the excavation and meeting people from the past, he also wanders amongst his memories, exploring the secret ties that connect him with the three women of his life, moving from the present to the past. This is a second excavation for him, an excavation into the deepest places of his soul. He tries to remember and put in order all that happened during that summer which had a decisive impact on his life. In his fantasy, Doukarelis goes back to the prehistoric times of Kassiopi, recreating the story of the murdered pregnant young woman. At the end, he learns that his wife Antigoni was found murdered, after being raped and kept for some time as a prisoner by a man. Doukarelis immediately leaves the island that connected him with the destiny of the three women who played such decisive roles in his life: Kassiopi, the mortal remains of the prehistoric past, Maria, the woman from the past, and Antigoni from the present. This diary of an infidelity is also a novel about time, destruction, memory and love, which balances the present and the past.
