Announcements

Top tip - using the Genes Reunited community

Welcome to the Genes Reunited community boards!

  • The Genes Reunited community is made up of millions of people with similar interests. Discover your family history and make life long friends along the way.
  • You will find a close knit but welcoming group of keen genealogists all prepared to offer advice and help to new members.
  • And it's not all serious business. The boards are often a place to relax and be entertained by all kinds of subjects.
  • The Genes community will go out of their way to help you, so don’t be shy about asking for help.

Quick Search

Single word search

Icons

  • New posts
  • No new posts
  • Thread closed
  • Stickied, new posts
  • Stickied, no new posts

Book Club - Book 20 Announcement: Man at the Helm

ProfilePosted byOptionsPost Date

GenesBookClub

GenesBookClub Advisor 9 Jun 2015 11:40

Hi everyone,

You can now apply to be part of the June book club, as posted in Hobbies and Crafts: http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/hobbies_crafts/thread/1352449.

The new title will be Man at the Helm, by Nina Stibbe.

"Man at the Helm, the debut novel from Nina Stibbe - the much-loved author of Love, Nina - is a wildly comic, brilliantly sharp-eyed novel about the horrors of being an attractive divorcée in an English village in the 1970s, and a family's fall from grace . . .

'My sister and I and our little brother were born (in that order) into a very good situation and apart from the odd new thing life was humdrum and comfortable until an evening in 1970 when my mother listened in to my father's phone call and ended up blowing her nose on a tea towel - a thing she'd only have done in an absolute emergency.'

Not long after her parents' separation, heralded by an awkward scene involving a wet Daily Telegraph and a pan of cold eggs, nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel, her sister and little brother and their now divorcée mother are packed off to a small, slightly hostile village in the English countryside. Their mother is all alone, only thirty-one years of age, with three young children and a Labrador. It is no wonder, when you put it like that, that she becomes a menace and a drunk. And a playwright.

Worried about the bad playwriting - though more about becoming wards of court and being sent to the infamous Crescent Home for Children - Lizzie and her sister decide to contact, by letter, suitable men in the area. In order to stave off the local social worker they urgently need to find a new Man at the Helm."

If you would like to be part of the book club please send us a message within the next 7 days (we've extended this by a few days to allow for people who don't read the Hobbies and Crafts board) by clicking directly on the ’Send Message’ button to the left which can be seen if you hover your mouse over the ‘Genes Book Club’ profile.

Please include your name and address (including post/zip code).

After 7 days requests will close and 50 recipients will be selected at random to receive a copy of the book. Copies will be sent after 19th June – please allow extra time for international delivery.

Happy reading!

Book Club