risc book club
At RISC book club we used to read and discuss one classic or groundbreaking ‘world’ novel each month. Although the book club is not currently running, you can see the list of titles we have previously discussed below.
The book club began in September 2006 and has had a fantastic group of people supporting it ever since. It is linked to the World Shop Bookshop, which stocks all of the titles that the bookclub chooses to read, and offers the public and bookclub members a discount for whichever title the bookclub has voted for that month.
The bookclub meets once a month to discuss new and classic international fiction. We aim to support the work of authors from the Majority World, that is, Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Caribbean, by reading their novels and poetry. Some of these authors do not get major press recognition and struggle to find a market for their work, so there are often titles that the Bookshop stocks and the bookclub reads that might seem obscure. We all think this is a great way to support these authors. Sometimes titles by these inspiring authors do get recognised in the mainstream bookshops, which is also fantastic, and so there is always a mix of books.
Over the last few years, we have read books from an amazing range of countries and authors, for example, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Angola, Palestine, Malaysia, Nigeria, India, China, Chile, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Sudan, Jamaica, Iran, UK, Libya, Mexico, and many many others.
upcoming books
previous books
Thu 30th April, 2020risc book club: the sound of things falling
By Juan Gabriel Vásquez – No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogotá than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a
Thu 26th March, 2020risc book club: stories from the romani world
By Janna Eliot – Spokes is made up of stories from across the Traveller world, featuring British Gypsies, settled and still travelling; Irish Travellers, East European Roma; and people whose
Thu 27th February, 2020risc book club: our women on the ground
By Zahra Hankir – Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection, with a foreword by CNN
Thu 30th January, 2020risc book club: paradise
By Toni Morrison – Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture and politics of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals
Thu 19th December, 2019risc book club: the lime tree
By César Aira – In the town square of Coronel Pringles stands a lime tree from which the author’s father used to brew a sedative tea. This Proustian infusion evokes
Thu 28th November, 2019risc book club: the death of musrat idrissi
Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision. They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that
Thu 31st October, 2019risc book club: we, the survivors
Ah Hock is an ordinary, uneducated man born in a Malaysian fishing village and now trying to make his way in a country that promises riches and security to everyone,
Thu 26th September, 2019risc book club: resistance
In the terrifying atmosphere of late 1970s Buenos Aires, a young militant couple engaged in the resistance against the military regime adopt a child. Matters had reached a nadir; people
Thu 29th August, 2019risc book club: celestial bodies
Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who
Thu 25th July, 2019risc book club: the reluctant mullah
Alone in his room in a London madrasah, Musah tries on an abaya, a hijab and a shawl: he has crossed over – to outsiders he has become a Muslim
Thu 27th June, 2019risc book club: disoriental
By Negar Djavadi (tr by Tina Kover) – Iran/France Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father
Thu 30th May, 2019risc book club: freshwater
By Akwaeke Emezi – Nigeria (hardback £10) Ada is the second child of Saul, a Nigerian doctor, and his Malaysian wife Saachi, a nurse. When Ada is still a child,
Thu 25th April, 2019risc book club: No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
by Khaled Khalifa (tr by Leri Price) – Syria Khalifa portrays his native city under the grip of the Assad regimes though the lives of one family over three generations.
Thu 28th March, 2019risc book club: pachinko
By Min Jin Lee – Korea/Japan Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The
Thu 28th February, 2019risc book club: silence is my mother tongue
By Sulaiman Addonia – Eritrea/Sudan Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have had to abandon her books as her family fled. In
Thu 31st January, 2019risc book club: musical youth
By Joanne Hillhouse – Antigua/Barbados. Zahara is a loner. She’s brilliant on the guitar but in everyday life she doesn’t really fit in. Then she meets Shaka, himself a musical
Thu 20th December, 2018risc book club: The Incomplete Manuscript
By Kamal Abdullayev – Azerbaijan. Translated from Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson, this is a novel narrating the imaginary life of medieval icons. When a young researcher accidentally comes across a
Thu 29th November, 2018risc book club: The Hundred Wells of Salaga
By Ayesha Haruna Attah – Ghana. Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer
Thu 25th October, 2018risc book club: The Museum of Innocence
By Orhan Pamuk – Turkey. The Museum of Innocence – set in Istanbul between 1975 and today – tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul’s richest
Thu 27th September, 2018risc book club: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race
By Reni Eddo-Lodge – UK. Writing on black life in Britain has long been the poor relation of its African American equivalent, not least because, in the hierarchy of suffering,
Thu 30th August, 2018risc book club: flights
By Olga Tokarczuk – Poland. Flights interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth
Thu 26th July, 2018risc book club: codename butterfly
By Ahlam Bsharat (tr Nancy Roberts) – Palestine. A young adult book. With irony and poignant teenage idealism, Butterfly draws us into her world of adult hypocrisy, sibling rivalries, girlfriends’
Thu 28th June, 2018risc book club: the ministry of utmost happiness
By Arundhati Roy – India. In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just
Thu 31st May, 2018risc book club: the investigator
By Margarita Khemlin (tr Melanie Moore) – Ukraine Set in the Ukrainian SSR, The Investigator is rooted in a specific time and place. Lilia Vorobeichik’s death is given as 18
Thu 26th April, 2018risc book club: the gurugu pledge
By Juan Tomas Avila Laurel – Melilla On Mount Gurugu, overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the North African coast, desperate migrants gather before attempting to scale the city’s
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Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan 26th January 2017 19:30 – Room 1 |
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The Angels Die by Yasmina Khadra December 2016 |
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The Swan Book by Alexis Wright November 2016 |
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The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende October 2016 |
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Princess Bari by Hwang Sok-yong September 2016 |
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The Black Coat by Neamat Imam July 2016 |
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The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami June 2016 |
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Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta May 2016 |
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Human Acts by Han Kang April 2016 |
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The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak March 2016 |
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Leaving Little Havana by Cecila M. Fernandez 2016 |
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Kafka on the Shore by Murakami 2016 |
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Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto 2015 |
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Blacks by A. Igoni Barrett 2015 |
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Arab Jazz by Karim Miske 2015 |
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The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti 2015 |
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Balthasar’s Odyssey by Amin Malouf August 2015 |
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Happiness Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta July 2015 |
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The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura June 2015 |
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A Candle or the Sun by Gopal Bartham May 2015 |
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A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie April 2015 |
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The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto March 2015 |
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Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela February 2015 |
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Silent House by Orhan Pamuk January 2015 |
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Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok December 2014 |
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The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez November 2014 |
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No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer October 2014 |
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Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam September 2014 |
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Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai July 2014 |
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Vauxhall by Gabriel Gbadamosi June 2014 |
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How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (A novel) by Tabish Khair May 2014 |
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The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri April 2014 |
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Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa July 2013 |
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Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese June 2013 |
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Pao by Kerry Young 2013 |
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God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi 2013 |
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The Long Song by Andrea Levy 2013 |
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The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad 2013 |
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The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah 2013 |
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The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya 2013 |
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A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi 2013 |
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A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe 2013 |
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An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah 2013 |
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Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri 2013 |
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The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “I really liked this book. I don’t normally read short stories, but each story seemed like another little piece of her personality, or her story, told in such a beautiful way. She is an expert story teller, and even though you don’t necessarily identify personally with every tale, there’s something to grips you, or lingers with you, or moves you in every single story. I am looking forward to what this author produces next…” Bookclub member May 2010 |
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Lajja by Taslima Nasrin “This tale of Hindu oppression in post-independence Bangladesh is urgent, political, message-based fiction. As a piece of fiction it compares very badly to other novels with analogous social content like Half of a Yellow Sun (Biafra), Mornings in Jenin (Palestine) or Shalimar the Clown (Kashmir) which manage to illuminate issues and have literary quality. However to be fair these books were all written from the diaspora with the safety of distance and the perspective of time and to finish Lajja I had to set aside its crudity as a novel and read it as a different kind of work. Lajja deals with the journey of Suranjan from a fierce commitment to remaining in Bangladesh as a minority in spite of rising turmoil, to his hopelessness and flight to India. Initially eschewing identity labels, Suranjan is gradually forced into an externally-imposed Hindu identity despite his atheism. Competing layers of identity are wrestled with in the young state: cultural or linguistic communities; perceived ethnicity; religion; state. Of these, Nasreen privileges ethnicity, claiming Bengali-ness perceived as ‘race’ as the best basis for the state. What she does not make explicit is why choosing any one of these layers as the basis for harmony or belonging is any less spurious than all of the others. Where in Nigeria the evils of communalism would refer to race, and in Pakistan religion would be seen as a unifying force in a multi-nation, multilingual state, Nasreen derides religious identity without interrogating whether race is any more moral. She also ignores the role of class in the conflict almost entirely, mentioning briefly at the very end that Hindus have owned the majority of the agricultural land despite most farmers being Muslim. The potentially exploitative role of a land-owning class is treated as irrelevant in the tensions. As a character Suranjan also leaves an impression of a spoilt bourgeois who is mostly mourning his loss of affluence and the country mansion. While I found this crude, shrill, partisan and containing no intelligent defence for race-based nationalism, it held my interest and gave a glimpse of the tone of inter-community relations in Bangladesh.” Bookclub member April 2010 |
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She’s Gone by Kwame Dawes “I’m sorry but I really didn’t enjoy this book. I had to force myself to finish it, and most of it just made me cross! I found most of the characters incredibly stereotypical, and the plot was dull and lifeless. A really superficial, irritating read!” Bookclub member November 2009 |
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Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi “This is a fascinating read, I’ve never learnt so much about a place from a book as I did from this. The history lesson is cleverly disguised in what can only be described as one of the most amazing women in the world’s story. Ebadi, winner of the nobel peace prize, has fought against the kind of adversity that most of us can never really imagine, and seems to be winning, bit by bit. A genuinely interesting, powerful and empowering read. I would recommend this to anyone, and suggest to everyone that we find out about other countries, through the eyes of their people.” Bookclub Member Feb 2009 |
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The Immigrant by Manju Kapur “Sheltered, obedient dentist Ananda migrates from small town India to Canada after the sudden death of his parents. Living initially with his uncle while he requalifies, Ananda is unwillingly coaxed into a frugal and timid independence. Despite the will to integrate he fails to take risks, find a girlfriend or confront an unexplored sexual dysfunction, eventually opting for the safer alternative of a transnational arranged marriage. Nina is 30, works as a lecturer in Delhi, supports her mother and is best friends with a free-thinking 40-something divorcee. Despite her independence, the weight of expectation to marry and have children before it is too late eats away at her until she succumbs gratefully to marriage and a new life with Ananda. What might end the tale is merely the start of this detailed and often painful dissection of an ill-fated marriage between people who have sought a spouse to compensate for other shortcomings. A compelling read, not without sympathy or hope.” Bookclub Member, Nov 2008 |
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The Translator by Leila Aboulela “I enjoyed the vivid simplicity of the writing and found the two protagonists and their love across religious lines beautifully drawn, but part of what appears through this clarity of writing is the author’s failure to ascribe humanity or depth to those outside her own camp. Her exile in Scotland is peopled with shadowy half-figures with whom we are offered no connection and in whom she takes little interest. I suppose I would recommend it as an exercise in understanding a world view you may not agree with and liking the person while not liking their views.” Bookclub Member, Feb 2008 |