The Borrowed Book Club

Robert Harris' Archangel  is a cut above the rest of his novels, following dried-up English historian, Christopher Kelso. After chancing across Papu Rapava, who claims to have been one of Lavrentiy Beria 's guards and was the only person to witness him stealing Joseph Stalin 's most secret documents whilst he lay dying, Kelso feels compelled to investigate his allegations in a desperate attempt to re-establish himself in his field. However, Russia is not a safe place to be investigating Stalin's secrets, even more than forty years after his death. After establishing contact with Rapava's daughter, Zinaida , Kelso finds that the document is not Stalin's diary, as he'd hoped, but that of one of his maids. Intrigued as to why Stalin had kept this diary so carefully hidden, Kelso heads north to the maid's village, Archangel. However, he is not alone, as American journalist, R. J. O'Brian has been keeping an eye on Kelso from the beginning, so the pair...

By comparison with Ian McEwan's other novels ( Atonement and On Chesil Beach spring to mind), Sweet Tooth fails to reach the same lofty heights, making it something of a disappointment. However, regarding the novel outside of the expectations that come with McEwan's authorship, it lies comfortably within the band of good contemporary fiction. Sweet Tooth follows Serena Frome from her time at Oxford as a failing maths undergraduate in the late 1960s to her dismissal from the MI5 following a scandalous exposé in the national press. The mission which results in such public furore is rather low key, as she covertly sponsors a young writer with an anti-Communist stance so as to fight against the propaganda of the Cold War. The scandal is however intensified by the fact that Serena, following on with her horrendous track record with men (she was the mistress of a don at Oxford, then went out with her boss, who ended their relationship by her by proposing to someone...

Adele Parks is the author of fifteen best-selling novels, all centring around relationships and their fundamental role in our lives. About Last Night is no exception, centring around three women: Steph, Pip ad Kirsten. Steph has three boys, and lives in a large, tastefully decorated house with her husband, Julian, a hedge fund manager. Pip, on the other hand, lives in a small, rather run-down apartment with her daughter. Nonetheless, the pair have been best friends for thirty years, helping each other through every trial that life has thrown at them, more so Pip, whose love life has consisted of one catastrophe after another. Kirsten is a beautiful, shallow PA, who, desperate after Daddy stops giving everything she wants, starts sleeping with older men in order to maintain her frivolous lifestyle. One of her many boyfriends is Julian, Steph's husband. In time-honoured fictional tradition, Steph finds out, Pip fails to step up, and then tragedy brings them all back toget...

Following four unsuccessful romantic comedies under the pseudonym Amy Silver, Paula Hawkins was under huge pressure to produce a successful novel. The Girl on The Train  most certainly provided that success, as Hawkins broke Dan Brown's record for the longest consecutive run as the number one best-selling hardback novel in the UK. Rachel Watson is 'the girl on the train', who is struggling to get over her inability to have a baby and her husband leaving her for another woman. She is also an alcoholic, which caused her to lose her job, but she continues to commute into work everyday in order to keep up the pretence to her flatmate. From the 8:04 to Euston, Rachel frequently sees a young couple in their house, and creates the perfect life for them in her head. One day she sees something unexpected , and the following day the woman, Megan, goes missing. The night of the disappearance, Rachel knows that she got off the train just down the road from the coup...

Sandi Toksvig is a women of many talents: she has been an actress, an author, a radio show host, a journalist, a stand up comedienne, a presenter, and a feminist political figure. Toksvig's feminist ideologies are strongly reflected in Valentine Grey , in which the autonomous protagonist moves to London from India in the late 19th century, and cannot bear the restraints, so goes off to fight in the Boer War in the place of her cousin, Reggie. The other central element of the plot is also dear to Toksvig's heart as she explores Reggie's homosexuality, a crime at the time, and his relationship with actor, Frank. The fact that both of these issues are so meaningful to Toksvig is evident in the earnest and forthright manner in which she portrays these three central characters, with equal weighting given to both aspects of the plot, alternating between Valentine's experiences as a volunteer in the Army and the issues that Reggie and Frank are facing home in London. ...

Even after getting over my initial confusion as to which way round Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were, Robert Louis Stevenson still struggled to win me over. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , despite centring on a duality that the majority are familiar with, proved to be rather more difficult to follow than anticipated and, since the world knows about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the  other characters' realisation that their dear friend Dr Jekyll was morphing into the detestable Mr Hyde came agonisingly late in the novel.  As the narrative is from the rather emotionless perspective of Mr Utterson, a lawyer and friend to Dr Jekyll, it seems that the dramatic and emotional impact of the novella are significantly reduced, losing much of the potential tension and not allowing the reader to develop sympathy for Dr Jekyll until the final chapter. However, this external perspective does allow a more objective view of the situation, and makes the narrative far more reliable than it w...

Inspired by a trip to America, where Aldous Huxley was outraged by the widespread promiscuity and overly cheerful commercial attitude of its people, Brave New World  offers a view of life in 2540 when close relationships, including familial ones, are deemed to be highly unnatural and damaging to society. In Huxley's world children are created by machines in factories, each with a pre-designated station in life, from the lowly epsilons to the alpha pluses. Each of the epsilon embryos is split up to 96 times and has its  growth and intelligence deliberately stunted, allowing them to feel incredibly fulfilled in their collective lives as unskilled labourers, with  batches of identical twins working on identical jobs in an identical manner. Alphas, on the other hand, are in no way stunted or replicated, but they feel equally as fulfilled as the epsilons in their highly-esteemed managerial roles. The secret to the universal fulfillment of all of the inhabitants of this soci...