The Borrowed Book Club

Quebecker Jacques Godbout's 1967 novel Salut Galarneau!  is semi-autobiographical, produced as the diary of François Galarneau, a young Quebecker man who owns a hot dog stand but is striving to become a writer. Unfortunately, his father dies and his mother leaves for America, leaving him without any parental guidance, and his love life is a series of seemingly promisingly relationships that end badly. What follows is something of an existential crisis for François as he literally builds a wall around himself, debating the seeming incompatibility of living and writing. His solution is 'vécrire', a made-up verb which is a mix of the French verbs for to write (écrire) and to live (vivre), suggesting a hopeful and more positive future for François. The structure of the novel itself is rather bizarre, with no particular sense of chronology, as François recounts events from various points in his life in a sporadic manner, seemingly as they occur to him. Therefore, th...

Having heard so many good things about Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist , I consciously lowered my expectations before I started reading, so that my judgement was not clouded by what I thought the novel ought to be. Fortunately, such preparation was unnecessary, as I was completely blown away. The Alchemist follows Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd who abandons his sheep and everything he knows in order to pursue his destiny after dreaming of finding treasure at the pyramids in Egypt. Once in Egypt, he endures theft, beatings, war and the desert but finds more love and knowledge than he could ever have imagined. Understandably dubbed by some as more of a self-help book than a novel, the uplifting, inspirational nature of the novel is integral to its being and message. The edition that I read included an illuminating introduction by Coelho on the subject of people pursuing their calling in life, in which he reveals how much it saddens him to see people ignoring what they tr...

Following over a decade of only writing novels for one of his series, Ian Rankin produced  Doors Open,  a stand alone novel based on the concept of the 'perfect' art heist: replacing some of the thousands of paintings that are kept in warehouses with fake copies so that nothing is reported missing.  Doors Open starts off  with the heist thrown around as a dream between three art enthusiasts, Mike Mackenzie, the protagonist millionaire, Professor Robert Gissing, an art professor at Edinburgh University who is the brains behind the initial operation, and Allan Cruikshank, banker, art enthusiast and simultaneous sceptic and admirer of the friends' fanciful scheme. However, what starts as a dream quickly turns into a reality, and from that point onwards, it takes the trio in directions they could never have imagined and reveals new, darker parts of each of their personalities. The novel was originally published as a serialised novel for  The New York Times...

Widely renowned as one of the greatest Hispanic authors of all time, Gabriel García Márquez is most famous for bring magical realism into mainstream fiction through 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. However, in News of a Kidnapping  García turns to non-fiction as he gives a voice to those kidnapped in Bógota in the early 1990s by Pablo Escobar, who was the world's wealthiest criminal, and his band of 'Extraditables' in order to gain leverage against the government's plans to extradite criminals to the US. The book came about as a result of a direct request from one of the abductees, Maruja Pachon, for García to recount her experiences to the world. Part-way through his first draft, García realised that focusing on just one of the ten people who were kidnapped during this period would not do the horrors of the events justice or provide his readership (many of whom would not be Colombian) with a broad enough scope of the situation. Therefore, he wi...