Kokoro -- Natsume Soseki

A major Japanese writer - whom none of us had read before .

A good read- Japan starting to modernise , traditional honour , shame . All paced calmly and steadily but moves along all the same.

An unusual structure to the story adds interest .

We liked it

Hans Keilson -- Comedy in a Minor Key

Nice and short.Just the slice of the action the participants know not the wider story annoyed some who wanted more but agreed that is the point of it.

Just a sense that people did suffer natural unremarkable deaths unheroically and unfairly, often alone and helpless, while monstrous events occurred around them. But I also got a horrifying sense of how lives could change so utterly and completely after a stupid oversight and how easy it was for me to imagine how the couple felt – numb, terrified hysterical, finished all at the same time.

Readable and unusual

Hare with Amber Eyes -- Edmund de Waal

A non-fiction work tracing a family's fortunes and losses in Europe . The story of a collection of Netsuke is used to tell the story.

Several members did not get past the first section - but the rest felt it repaid doing so.

What did the author want to write- an aesthetic meditation, a family story or a history of anti-Semitism ?

Some great parts but a Curate's egg ( written by a Parson's son!!)

The Good Earth -- Pearl Buck

An epic tale of peasant life in pre-Cultural Revolution China tracing one family's rise from subsistence farming to great wealth. It's all there: concubines, opium, bandits, floods, riches, love and war. Moving and solemn, it is a novel of great beauty told with simplicity and resonance. One feels for Wang through his struggles but in the end, he brings a lot of misfortune upon himself, never seeming to be able to master himself ... But who would have chosen to be a woman in those times?!

The Mystic Masseur -- VS Naipaul

A curate's egg; most liked the beginning but lost interest towards the end. One got the impression that the great man did not really like his colourful characters. Even the 'two books for the price of one' format got the thumbs down. An interesting first novel by a man who didn't sound comfortable either in his native or adopted lands.

The Road Back -- Erich Maria Remarque

Excellent read and very moving; captured a lot of the intangibles about becoming a man and what violence teaches a young man. PTSD , social class . Exceptional.

Thomas Paine -- Common Sense

This short political pamphlet of 1774 - the lead in to the American Declaration of Independence led to a long discussion of politics, rights and history.

A hero in USA , I suspect not studied much in school history here