The Borrowed Book Club

The Language of Flowers   is Vanessa Diffenbaugh's ambitious debut, exploring the complex worlds of foster care, homelessness, marriage and communication. Victoria Jones has been in and out of foster placements her whole life, and when she is released from the care system at 18 she is left homeless, alone and without the life skills that many take for granted. One thing she does have, though, is flowers. During her longest standing placement with her last foster mother, Elizabeth, Victoria learns about the language of flowers, a covert method of communicating where each flower has a different meaning. She therefore uses flowers, rather than words, to express her emotions, meaning that her recipients have no idea what the flower truly means. Victoria’s love for flowers leads to her becoming a florist's assistant following her emancipation, and she eventually sets up her own business, using the language of flowers to cater for her clients’ needs. Meanwhile, she forms her firs...

Although A. A. Milne is indisputably best known as author of Winnie the Pooh , to disregard his other works would be foolish, as  The Red House Mystery ,  one of Milne's earliest novels,  easily proves. The novel unfolds in Mark Ablett's Red House, as his visiting brother, Robert, is shot within minutes of his arrival. Since Mark disappears immediately after the murder, all suspicion lies on his shoulders, but Tony Gillingham, a visitor to The Red House, is not satisfied with this conclusion, and takes on the role of Holmes, appointing his close friend, Bill Beverley, to be his Watson. With the help of Gillingham's photographic memory, and Beverley's occasional bumbling genius, the pair eventually discover the truth about the death of Robert  Although the plot is not dissimilar to that of many other amateur detective stories, through Milne's writing the story is transformed. One particularly notable exa...

S. J. Watson's thrilling debut Before I Go To Sleep  is gripping from beginning to end; written from the perspective of Christine Lucas, a middle-aged woman with a rare form of amnesia that prevents her from retaining new memories each night when she falls asleep. Therefore, when she wakes up each day, she believes that she is in her early twenties or younger, and has no recollection of the room she has awoken in or who the man lying next to her is. Each morning the man tells her that he is her husband, Ben, that they live together in London and that she had a serious accident which caused her amnesia. However, Christine is seeing Dr Nash, a specialist neurologist, without Ben's knowledge, and starts to keep a diary on his advice. Following on from this, it soon becomes clear that Ben is lying to her, and 'DON'T TRUST BEN' is underlined on the journal's first page, although Christine struggles to establish his motives. Keeping the diary not only helps Christi...

George Orwell's Animal Farm is a satirical allegory of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia which illustrates how well-intentioned revolutions can be the start of tyrannical dictatorships. In Animal Farm , the revolution is based on the principle of Animalism, created by the animals of Manor Farm, which declares that humans are the evil controllers of animals, and that all animals are equal. Following these principles, the animals overthrow their drunken and neglectful owner, Mr Jones, and rename the farm Animal Farm. For a while, life is good: the animals work hard, but they get more rest and more food than ever before. Shortly after the revolution, the pigs become the leaders of the animals, proposing new ideas for the running of the farm which all of the animals can vote on, but they soon start assigning themselves privileges. Two pigs in particular rise to contend for overall leadership of Animal Farm, Snowball and Napoleon; Snowball has lots of novel ideas for the ...