Tesco Book Club

This month's book

Chasing Windmills

Sebastian, at 17, has never eaten pizza, never been to school, never even hung out with other kids. He rides the subway at night to escape his father’s strict, possessive parenting.

Maria, 22 and mother to two young children, has just lost her job. Afraid to confess to her violent boyfriend, Maria resorts to riding the subway when he thinks she's at work.

And then one night, on an empty train, Sebastian and Maria make eye contact...

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Last month's book

Mister Teacher

It's 1978, and Jack Sheffield begins his second year as headmaster of a small village primary school in North Yorkshire. There are three letters on his desk - one makes him smile, one makes him sad and one is destined to change his life forever. This is from nine-year-old Sebastian, suffering from leukaemia in the local hospital, who writes a heartbreaking letter addressed to 'Mister Teacher'. Jack tries to help, and so begins a journey through the seasons of Yorkshire life in which the school is the natural centre of the community. There's a colourful cast of characters who accompany Jack through the ups and downs of the school year including Vera, the school secretary who worships Margaret Thatcher and whose greatest ambition is to become President of the Women's Institute; Ruby, the 20-stone caretaker who sings like Julie Andrews; and Dorothy, the coffee shop assistant who is desperate to be Wonder Woman. Most of all, there is the lovely Beth Henderson, a teacher from a nearby school, who with her sister Laura presents Jack with an unexpected dilemma ...

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September's book

The Master Bedroom

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate's forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother in Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair. David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks, though.His wife Suzie has moved out of their bedroom, she avoids talking to David or spending time at home with him and their children, she has made new friends who smoke dope and believe in fortune telling. David takes refuge in Firenze, where he can talk to Kate about music. David's seventeen-year-old son Jamie is also drawn to the old house full of books and history. He is more like Kate than his father is, bookish and clever: he wants to find out all about life from her. He turns up one night at Firenze, drunk and desperate. Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.

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August book

The Scandal of the Season

What would you do if you were faced with a dangerous temptation you feared you couldn't resist? The Scandal of the Season tells the story of the real-life seduction of the beautiful, clever Arabella Fermor by the charming, enigmatic nobleman Robert Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone. Arabella is in need of rich husband, but knows that girls have been ruined by risking an affair like the one she contemplates. The object of her desire is also flirting with a perilous Jacobite plot against Queen Anne. Watching the pair with a beady eye, is an outsider, a cripple, destined to become the genius of his age – the poet Alexander Pope. He arrives in London from the country, burning with ambition. If he fails, he will be left destitute. But can he find a story for his next poem powerful enough to make his reputation?

A seductive novel about risk and dangerous liaisons in a time of Jacobite plots and Popish fears, when marriage was a market, and sex was a temptation fraught with danger, The Scandal of the Season is a brilliant, witty modern love-story – set in 1711.

Sophisticated, sexy and hugely enjoyable, this dazzling debut novel is inspired by events that gave rise to the era’s most celebrated satirical entertainment, The Rape of the Lock.The story plays out against the backdrop of 18th-century London: dirty teeming street-life and glorious buildings, newly restored after the Great Fire; the River Thames, artery of England’s trade and commerce;masked balls, operas, eating houses, clandestine courtships and political intrigue.

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July's book

Diving Into Light

Diving Into Light is the perfect beach read. Set on the west coast of France and filled with suspense and romance the novel tells the story of a truly unique family and the events that come to define and divide them.

Every summer, throughout her adolescence, Florence would return to her beloved grandmother’s home, on the West coast of France, where she would be joined by her hopelessly glamorous gang of cousins. Life, as she knew it would begin, and it was a heady existence of illicit drinking, stolen kisses and the bittersweet pains of first love.

But now Florence is living completely alone, and has cut herself off from her much loved family. She is unable to let go of something in her past and is filled with a terrible guilt that prevents her from loving anyone. As she opens letters that have begun to arrive from her grandmother Mimi, the reader is transported to the greater canvas of France under German occupation during World War II. Mimi discloses her own tragic past and the fatal love she had for a German army officer. Will she and Florence ever be able to escape the guilt that is tearing them apart and has shaken their family to its very core? Will Florence ever be reconciled with her family and can the love of enigmatic New Yorker Pierre free her from her chains?

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June's book

The Woman in the Fifth

Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job, his marriage and his relationship with his only child. And when the ensuing scandal threatens to completely destroy him, he votes with his feet and flees...to Paris. He arrives in the French capital in the bleak midwinter, where a series of accidental encounters lands him in a grubby room in a grubby quarter, and a job as a nightwatchman for a sinister operation. Just when Harry begins to think that he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life. Her name is Margit - an elegant, cultivated Hungarian emigre, long resident in Paris - widowed and, like Harry, alone.But though Harry is soon smitten with her, Margit keeps her distance. She will only see him at her apartment in the fifth arrondissement for a few hours twice a week, and remains guarded about her work, her past, her life. However, Harry's frustrations with her reticence are soon overshadowed by a ever-growing preoccupation that a dark force is at work in his life - as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.

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May's book

Redemption Falls

It's the year 1865 and the American Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the famine ship Star of the Sea docked at New York, the daughter of two of her passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a walk across a devastated America. Eliza Duane Mooney is searching for a young boy she has not seen in four years, one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war. His fate has been mysterious and will prove extraordinary. It's a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a haunted Latina poetess, rebel guerrilla Cole McLaurenson, runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet and the mercurial revolutionary James Con O'Keeffe, who commanded a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army and is now Governor of a western wilderness where nothing is as it seems. Redemption Falls is a tale of war and forgiveness, of strangers in a strange land, of love put to the ultimate test. Packed with music, balladry, poetry and storytelling, this is a riveting historical novel of urgent contemporary resonance, from the author of the internationally bestselling Star of the Sea .

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April's book

Before I Die

Before I Die is an intensely moving and uncompromisingly honest story told in the words of a sixteen-year-old girl, Tessa, who is dying of leukaemia..

Tessa has just a few months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, she compiles a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. Released from the constraints of ‘normal’ life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa’s feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, are all painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before her time finally runs out.

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March book

Suffer The Litttle Children

The wonderful new Brunetti mystery, from the Silver Dagger winner Donna Leon.

When Commissario Brunetti is summoned to the hospital bedside of a senior paediatrician whose skull has been brutally fractured, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men burst into the doctor’s apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and took his 18-month-old son - but why? As he investigates, Brunetti finds infertility, desperation, and babies for sale. Meanwhile, Inspector Vianello uncovers a scam between pharmacists and doctors in the city. And certain information about one's neighbours can lead to all kinds of corruption and all sorts of pain…

Donna Leon’s new novel is as subtle and gripping as ever, set in a beautifully realised Venice, seething with small-town malice.

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February book

Random Acts of Heroic Love

Random Acts Of Heroic Love is a heartbreaking and epic story of two lives sustained by the memory of love...

1917: Moritz Daniecki is a fugitive from a Siberian POW camp. Seven thousand kilometres over the Russian Steppes separate him from his village and his sweetheart, whose memory has kept him alive through carnage and captivity. The Great War may be over, but Moritz now faces a perilous journey across a continent riven by civil war. When Moritz finally limps back into his village to claim the hand of the woman he left behind, will she still be waiting?

1992: Leo Deakin wakes up in a hospital somewhere in South America, his girlfriend Eleni is dead and Leo doesn't know where he is or how Eleni died. He blames himself for the tragedy and is sucked into a spiral of despair. But Leo is about to discover something which will change his life forever.

Cinematic and brimming with raw emotions, it is the magnificent and emotive debut from a remarkable new writer.

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January's book

The Book Thief

The Book Thief is the story of Liesel, a young German girl...

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. By her brother's graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, her world is both opened up, and closed down.

This is a story about the power of words and the ability of books to feed the soul. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

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December's book

The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis

‘English society beauty, Genevieve Shelby King parties to the utmost with the Anglo-American artists and writers of Montparnasse. She has a rich husband, a glamorous apartment and an enormous shoe collection. But there is something hollow at the centre of Genevieve's charmed life.

When she spots a pair of unique and exquisite shoes on the feet of an arch rival one night, her whole collection - indeed everything she has - seems suddenly worthless. The exclusive designer Paolo Zachari, renowned for his fabulous shoes and eccentric behaviour, hand-picks his clients according to whim. And he has determined to say no to Genevieve.

As her desire for the pair of unobtainable shoes develops into an obsession with their creator, Genevieve's elaborately designed life comes under threat, and she is forced to confront the emptiness at its heart.’

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November's book

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

‘Harry Hole, drunkard, loner and brilliant detective is reassigned to surveillance after a high profile mistake. Then a former soldier is found with his throat cut. Next Harry’s former partner is murdered. Why had she been trying to reach Harry on the night her head was smashed in?

The investigation leads Harry to suspect that the crimes have their roots in the battlefields of Eastern Front during WWII.

The Redbreast. He’s your judge, jury and executioner…

And he must be stopped.’

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October's book

Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert

To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. She is a nurse, he a painter and decorator; both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden..

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September's book

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen

The New York Times Number One bestseller- a superb new novel from the acclaimed author of Blessings.

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August's book

The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson

An explosive, intelligent and suspenseful debut thriller from a brand new talent.

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July's book

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson’s brilliant new novel, bringing back Jackson Brodie from the bestselling Case Histories.

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June's book

Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

An outstanding debut novel from one of Britain’s most successful popular historians.

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