Book Group

Love books? Join our book group!

Who doesn't love a good read and who doesn't love a good chat about a good read?

Camberley Theatre Book Group launched September 2012 and we'd love you to join us. We meet here at the theatre on the first Thursday of every month at 7.30pm and what's more, it's free to join! It's a relaxed, informal and fun meeting with the bar open for a drink and a natter about all things literary.

Forthcoming meetings:

Thursday 2 May

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's first novel takes the reader under the streets of London there's a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, and pale girls in black velvet.

Richard Mayhew is a young businessman who is about to find out more than he bargained for about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his safe and predictable life and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and yet utterly bizarre.

There's a girl named Door, an Angel called Islington, an Earl who holds Court on the carriage of a Tube train, a Beast in a labyrinth, and dangers and delights beyond imagining... And Richard, who only wants to go home, is to find a strange destiny waiting for him below the streets of his native city.

Thursday 6 June

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

From the bestselling author of Room comes a delicious tale of secrets, betrayal and forbidden love. After a separation of many years, Emily 'Fido' Faithfull bumps into her old friend Helen Codrington on the streets of Victorian London. Much has changed: Helen is unhappy in her marriage to the older Vice-Admiral Codrington, while Fido has become a successful woman of business and a pioneer in the British Women's Movement. But, for all her independence of mind, Fido is too trusting of her once-dear companion and finds herself drawn into aiding Helen's obsessive affair with a young army officer.

Based on blow-by-blow newspaper reports of the 1864 Codrington Divorce, The Sealed Letter, full of sparkling characters and wicked dialogue, is a thought-provoking mystery and gripping drama of friends, lovers and marriage.

Thursday 4 July

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend

One day Eva, a wife and mother, bolts the front door and goes to bed in the middle of the day. She is not ill. She is not tired. And most definitely she is not having an affair. She's simply had as much as she can take.

When her husband Brian gets home he's furious. He can't get in for starters. And after he is forced to break into his own house he demands to know where his dinner is. Eva shrugs - that's his problem. His wife, Brian decides, is having a nervous breakdown. He rings his mum.

But neither Brian's nor Eva's mother are any help. Eva won't budge. She even refuses to speak to her children, who have just left home for college. She's happy sitting in bed chatting to the window cleaner and Alexander, the handyman she's instructed to refit the bedroom around her.

Why has Eva gone to bed? What's keeping her there? How will her family get her out of it? And what really happens when the person we love most in the world refuses to be the person we expect them to be?

Sue Townsend's brilliant novel hilariously deconstructs modern family life.

August

There will be no meeting in August

Thursday 5 September

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.

A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Other books will be chosen by the group so bring along your suggestion of what books you think the group should read and discuss.

Advance booking is necessary please call Box Office on 01276 707600