No images? Click here 2024MATILDA BOOKSHOP BOOK CLUBOUR MATILDA BOOK CLUB READS FOR 2024Hello dear book clubbers, For our final session of book club for the year in November, we discussed the atmospheric, erotic, and surprising The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. This thrilling debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and ended up being our favourite book of 2024. In postwar rural Netherlands, a young woman, Isabel, lives alone in a grand house and keeps it in running order to obsessive proportions. Her solitude/loneliness is shattered by the arrival of her brother's girlfriend, Eva, who is thrust upon a bitterly opposed Isabel for four weeks while the brother is away. The shift from repulsion between the two women to desire seems unfathomable but unfolds exquisitely. The larger interrogation of Jewish dispossession in occupied Holland is devastating. We loved this book for the slow unravelling of the truth both personal and collective, for the sensuous sentences, for the eroticism, for the sense of foreboding, for the house as character, for the writing of sibling bloodlove, and for the rich imagery. Some were frustrated by the rushed ending, the over interiority of the characters, the explicit sex-scenes, and the fact that the characters were not likeable. This prompted a probing discussion about empathy, memory, love versus a sense of being seen, and whether it's necessary to like characters to love a book. A novel about devotion in all of its forms, The Safekeep, is an exhilarating and tense read. MOLLY Follow the links to some of the articles, reviews, book titles and interview mentioned by me and book clubbers during our discussion of The Safekeep: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden review – the Dutch house by Rachel Seiffert in The Guardian 'On (Not) Reading Anne Frank' by Yael van der Wouden Books Mentioned: As 2024 draws to a close, we'd like to say a very very big thank you to all of our book club members, who've come along this year and helped to make the evenings so engaging and enjoyable. Our book club has read some blazing books this year. And just to remind you of the evocative places we've been from artmaking with scrap metal in the Appalachian mountains, to the poetic spaces of an apartment in Paris, to lovers on the run in the badlands of Idaho, to coming-of-age in Bondi, to wild awakenings in the remote Hebrides, and to stolen houses in wartime Netherlands, we've set out above 9 of the novels we've discussed in 2024 (+ The Safekeep in November). FAVOURITE BOOK CLUB BOOK(S) OF THE YEAR AS VOTED BY BOOKCLUBBERS:
Matilda Bookshop Book Club will take a break over the festive season and will resume in February 2025. We hope that you have a pleasurable summer of books. Happy Reading! Molly & all the staff at Matilda Bookshop
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