The North recommends: Hexham Book Group

Hexham Book Group has been running for seven years and we have recently re-located to the convivial setting of Bin 21 on the Market Place in Hexham, where members are welcome to enjoy a glass of wine during our meetings. We meet on the first Tuesday of each month (with some exceptions). The group is free to join and members are sent a monthly email to keep them informed of book choices and events. About once a year we join up with the Wide Skies programme at the Forum Cinema, Hexham to schedule a book to film event, most recently Remains of the Day, Kasuo Ishiguro.

We read a wide range of books both fiction and non-fiction and always find fruit for discussion in our choices. Our most recent choice was Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, a rare crowd pleaser with not a dissenting voice among the twelve of us present. Barry’s rich and quirky narrative makes American History – more precisely the Civil War- unforgettable and surprisingly relevant. Told through the eyes of an Irish boy fleeing the famine of 1840’s Ireland; battlefields, atrocities and treks across the American Plains circle the central love story of what is, in the end, an unlikely family of two young men and an Indian girl.

Every year as part of the annual Hexham Book festival we encourage all the book groups across the North East to join us and an invited author as part of special event for our May read. This provides a rare opportunity to meet the author of the book we are reading. This year Elizabeth Day will be joining us at the Queen’s Hall on Wednesday 2 May to talk about her most recent novel – The Party. Described as ‘Brideshead Revisited meets the Talented Mr Ripley’, we are looking forward to this unmissable event when the region’s book groups can come together and ‘ask the Author ‘.

Hexham Book festival runs from 26 April to 6 May, full details are available at www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk.