Since talking about Kindred Spirits at Long Stratton and Holt Libraries a couple of weeks ago, I've now done a spot at Attleborough Library and done a guest talk at the Women's Guild in my own village, Bunwell. More kindred spirits in both places!A big audience at Attleborough, partly composed of the very active Book Group based there, who asked if I'd like to join for their next meeting. So I've taken a couple of the books on their list to read - The Cleft by Doris Lessing and Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann. Different to most book groups I've been part of, they have several books on the list for each month and people can read one, some or all. I'm sure it adds to the breadth of discussion and hope I can get through at least one.
Not because I don't read voraciously - I do. But I've also joined a new village reading group for which I'm reading Julia Gregson's East of the Sun this month, and I have a new novel buzzing in my head, for which I need to read both fact and fiction to get the plot out there and clarified.
I've just become a proper library member again - with my two little girls - and we're all finding it genuinely exciting to go in each week and choose up to 15 books each, not to mention Nintendo DS games, and run them through the wonderful automatic checkout machines!
It was lovely talking to the Bunwell Women's Guild about Kindred Spirits. Because my fictional village of Haddeston is not unlike Bunwell, both in the past and the present, they were interested in how I'd portrayed the local area. And many of them were children in the 1940s, when part of the action takes place, and actually remember events I've included in the plot, like the Christmas party at Old Buckenham Airbase, hosted by the American "Fly Boys" (including James Stewart and Walter Matthau) who were posted there for the end of the war years.I'll be talking at Dereham Library next week - Wednesday 13th May - evening, I have to check the time!
