Book Club

We have a thriving book club here at Jaffé & Neale, which meets at 6.30pm on the first Wednesday of every month in Chipping Norton. There’s no membership, no charge, and no obligation to come every month, so if you like the sound of a particular book, and would like to informally discuss it over a glass of wine, we’d love to see you. Do check this page for our current book titles. We also offer 10% off our book club choice in store.

We all have our own particular reading tastes, be it classical fiction, historical literature or gripping thrillers, but being a part of a book club allows us to step outside our reading comfort zone and explore other genres. Love it or hate it, there is always a discussion to be had. You never know, there may be a new favourite read among the chosen books…

If you would like to join the mailing list for our book club so you can be kept informed of dates and monthly book choices, please email info@jaffeandneale.co.uk to be added.

6th November 2024

Open Water

By Caleb Azumah Nelson

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them.

Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years. ‘An amazing debut novel. You should read this book.

2nd October 2024

Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe.

Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull.

News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams.

So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

4th September 2024

The Deluge

By Stephen Markley

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms.

America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds.

As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

3rd July 2024

No One Writes to the Colonel

By Gabriel García Márquez

Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, tells a powerful tale of poverty and undying hope in his moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel. ‘The Colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one spoonful left’Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive.

But on Fridays the postman comes – and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the Colonel’s ageing heart. For fifteen years he’s watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he’ll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season.

But until then the bird – like the Colonel and his wife – must somehow be fed. . .

19th June 2024

The Wager

By David Grann

From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, this is a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

For June 2024, the book club is meeting on Wednesday 19th June, to coincide with Jaffé & Neale taking part in the inaugural Big Book Club during Independent Bookshop Week.

1st May 2024

New Finnish Grammar

By Diego Marani

Triese, 1943: an unconscious soldier is revived in hospital, but he has lost his memory and cannot even remember his own language. With no documents about his person it will be hard to identify him. The doctor who treats him is originally from Finland and, believing his patient to be a countryman, resolves to teach him Finnish.

3rd April 2024

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

By Agatha Christie

A country house. A murder. A Belgian detective. After the Great War, life can never be the same again. Captain Arthur Hastings is invited to Styles to recuperate from injuries sustained at the Front. It is the last place he expects to encounter murder.

Fortunately he knows a former detective, a Belgian refugee, who happens to be staying nearby . . .

Here, for the first time, we meet Agatha Christie’s legendary creation: Hercule Poirot

6th March 2024

A Bend in the River

By V S Naipaul

Set in an unnamed African country, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast.

He believes The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. So he has taken the initiative; left the coast; acquired his own shop in a small, growing city in the continent’s remote interior and is selling sundries – little more than this and that, really – to the natives. This spot, this ‘bend in the river’, is a microcosm of post-colonial Africa at the time of Independence: a scene of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation and poverty.

And from this rich landscape emerges one of the author’s most potent works – a truly moving story of historical upheaval and social breakdown.

7th February 2024

A Shining

By Jon Fosse

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity.

10th January 2024

Damascus Station

By David McCloskey

A CIA officer and his recruit arrive in Damascus to hunt for a killer. CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad’s recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy. But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard.

Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.

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