This is historical fiction, about the Vietnamese wars, told through several generations of one Vietnamese family from the 1930s up to 2012, narrated mainly by the grandmother, Dieu Lan and her grand daughter Huong (aka Guava). We agreed that the young Vietnamese author, Nguyen Phan Que Mai, writing her first novel in English, had clearly…

This book, which the group read in October, is clearly a well-researched book about the post civil war repercussions following the hunt for the last of the signatories of Charles 1st’s death warrant. It was written in an accessible style, in modern English, as it led us back and forth across the Atlantic to the…

This book was enjoyed by all of us, in different ways and to differing degrees. The pace of the writing, measured and drawn out, was deemed to be an important factor in telling the story of the creation of the garden, as well as the life stories of the main characters.  This is not a…