On the island things disappear. It can be anything, hats, birds, perfume, photographs, even limbs.. When the Memory Police have decided something is to be disappeared, it no longer has any meaning and must be disappeared by any means necessary until it is completely erased from living memory. However, there are people on the island who don't forget. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him…

A mixed bag of responses from Brunch Book Club; a number of us struggled to get into and it wasn’t until around Part 2 that we really got stuck in. As ever, it sparked a beautiful discussion with great topics and thoughts debated. So for that it gets a thumbs up!

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her — but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. (From Goodreads)…

Rainbow Milk is a tender, explicit, and beautiful intersectional story about race, sexuality, and religion.

It begins in the 1950s with Norman Alonso, a wonderful man from Jamaica. Wanting to seek out a better life, he and his wife travel to the UK. They arrive in the motherland with many other Caribbean people – now known as the Windrush generation – and settle in the Black Country in the Midlands. However, their arrival is met with racism, ostracisation, and illness…

This is a masterclass in writing; Brit Bennett is a marvel!

The Vignes twins, Stella and Desiree, are born in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana, an exclusive place established by their ancestor for light-skinned black people. Identical in every physical way but with very different personalities, the girls are inseparable growing up. However, longing to escape the restraints of living in a small town like Mallard the girls runaway to New Orleans. It is there that their paths begin to diverge. Ten years later, the twins' lives couldn't be more different: one has returned to Mallard with her young black daughter having escaped an abusive relationship, while the other is in LA, in a white neighbourhood, married to a wealthy white man and living as a white woman…

Fifteen-year-old Vanessa is a talented writer with a love of literature. She is a deep thinker and has always felt painfully different from everyone else. Feeling alone and isolated from her classmates, she immediately takes to her English teacher, 42-year-old Jacob Strane. Like a diary entry, Vanessa describes in intricate detail every way she is attracted to him, weaving the tale of her first love. Slowly, he begins to indulge her teenage fantasies. It begins small — a touch of the knee, long hours spent in the classroom alone together — but evolves into something much bigger and more sinister…

We all know that we live in patriarchal societies, but to what degree is the world built for men? This is a question Caroline Criado Perez answers in Invisible Women and let’s just say that the answer should make us all angry.

Data is used in the modern world to dictate decisions related to every aspect of our lives – education, healthcare, infrastructure and so on and because so much data fails to account for gender, much of our systems are biased towards men. Gender biases cost women money, time, and often their lives…

Dare to Lead is the seventh book written by researcher Brené Brown. This time, we are invited to take a deeper look into the world of leadership. 

Firstly, Brené is an amazing storyteller who knows how to present the topic in an interesting way. It is clear she doesn’t shy away from her own mistakes as she uses them to help the reader understand what it means to lead a team of people and how can it be done better. The reader will find a bunch of useful tips on how to deal with miscommunication, negative feedback, and overall frustration in the workplace…

When Zachery stumbles upon a book detailing his own life, right down to the very moment he is reading that very book, little does he know that it is his first step into a world of hidden histories, secret clubs and an ancient library hidden beneath the Earth that must be protected at all costs.

To review this book fairly and do the initial idea justice, I will have to separate it into two parts: the first three quarters and then the final quarter…

Circe is the divine daughter of the titan Helios and naiad Perse. Deemed unattractive and powerless from birth, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology. 

But there is danger for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love…

Karen is an Ivy League university student. Her boyfriend is part of the notorious GBC (Gang Bang Central – I’m not kidding ) fraternity, she regularly attends parties at the infamously raucous and dangerous frat house. Witnessing fellow female partygoers disappear into the basement and bedrooms she is acutely aware of the threat that beats throughout the house. Feeling somewhat protected from this danger by the status of ‘girlfriend’ to one of their members, Karen turns a blind eye to the known rapists preying on drunk women…

Susan Green is the cactus, she’s prickly, obtuse, and entirely herself whether you like it or not. If you don’t understand her or her ways… well that’s simply your problem. She has crafted the perfect life for herself, “perfect” being entirely defined by her of course. Her life is turned irrevocably upside down when she is told her mother has died and she’s pregnant. Faced with her mother’s will that favours her seemingly incapable brother, she embarks on a mission to prove that her brother schemed his way as beneficiary but as her due date draws ever closer, she discovers life is much more complicated than she ever thought and to get through it she might just have to shed some of her spikes.  

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo came out to what seemed like universal praise and as such, it was hard to get into the book with the right level of expectation. It was also marketed as the book on female sexuality, which is perhaps why it felt like such a disappointment. In reality, the book follows three women and their sex lives. And that’s it. There’s nothing wrong with that being the focus of the story, but if you come in expecting more, you will feel frustrated.

Queenie is the story of a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living and working in London. After a messy break up from her long-term boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places, including the company of several hazardous men who do nothing for her sense of self-worth. She does this whilst managing her ‘far from nuclear’ family, mental health, trauma, a job at a newspaper surrounded by white middle class microaggression-harbouring colleagues, friendships, singledom and sexuality.