The One Monday a Month Book Club  pictured at our Tenth Anniversary Dinner
We are (from left) Jean, Susan, Patrice, Madeline, Gillian, Binnie, Sonia, Jan, Vicki and
Josephine. Also members but not present were Margaret, Jana and Kati.

The One Monday a Month Book Club was formed in September 1995. Its
members are all professional women (some of whom are retired) and membership has been restricted to 12 members at any one time. All but one of the members live in North Cheshire.

Since September 1995 we have read 110 books which have been a mixture
of novels, travel writing and biography.  Meetings are held once a month at the homes of
members and the hostess of the evening puts forward books for consideration
from which the choice for the next month is made.

Soon after our formation we were invited to meet Dava Sobell on Radio
4's Book Club which we greatly enjoyed.  Since then we have attended a number of talks
given by authors - the most notable being an evening with the late Carol Shields in
Manchester. Once a year we go out to dinner to celebrate the fact that we're still together and still so fond of each other. 
Two of our members have moved out of the area for family reasons but we keep in touch.

This month we have enjoyed reading The Sea House by Esther Freud

This was a book we looked forward to reading.  We had earlier read Gaglow by the same author which all of us liked (and one or two of us loved!) Like Gaglow Esther Freud plaits together two stories within two time scales. Whilst the narratives in  no way are parallels, it is Freud's particular, and beguiling, skill to point out similarities in the two. Lily, the main character, buries herself in a Suffolk coastal village and also in the correspondence between Klaus Lehmann, a german architect and his wife, Elsa. Like Elsa, Lily has an absent lover and, again like Elsa, finds an erotic relationship in the seaside village. Indeed, much of the strength of this novel lies in descriptions of the East Anglian landscape. There is a lovely, affectionate but not
sentimental, sense of place in this novel. There are also subtle characterisations to enjoy. In Lily, Freud has created a very sympathetic character and it is in the interplay between the two parallel narratives that her strengths are emphasised to the detriment of the vapid Elsa. The interweaving of the two narratives makes the early chapters of the novel rather difficult reading, but once overcome, this is a very rewarding read.