Book Club in Sheffield

You can choose to read the book beforehand or just come along for tea and listen to the discussion! It's up to you. This is a relaxed group and you don’t have to have read the book to be able to come to the events. Just be mindful that you will hear all about the book. That may be a good thing. It may be a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Please come prepared to pay at least £2 on the night for Book Aid International.

Book Club is on the first Thursday of the month, meeting at 5:30pm for tea (bring something to eat) and the book discussions start at 6:30pm. This is not a Spice exclusive event: there are usually around ten of us taking part, but new readers are most welcome!

Upcoming books are below. All prices are at Amazon and correct at 8 December 2025.

January

Night Swimmers by Roisin Macguire

Grace lives alone in a coastal village in Northern Ireland, filling her days with wild swimming, fishing, quilting and baiting the tourists who blow in from the city.One of the visitors is Evan, on an enforced holiday from his family in Belfast as he grieves the death of his infant daughter. But before a week is out, he is trapped there by lockdown. When Grace grudgingly saves Evan from drowning, and his reserved young son arrives unexpectedly, all three are startled into a reckoning with their past and a reconnection with the outside world.

Kindle: £5.99; Paperback: £9.16

February

Two books this month - choose to read one or both!

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Kindle: £5.99; Paperback: £10.11

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

"Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck is a poignant and humorous novel set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression. Through vivid characters and rich storytelling, Steinbeck paints a vivid portrait of a community on the margins of society.

At the heart of the story is Cannery Row itself, a bustling street lined with sardine canneries, cheap flophouses, and colorful characters. Here, amidst the clang of machinery and the stench of fish, a diverse cast of misfits and outcasts eke out a living, forging unexpected bonds of friendship and camaraderie.

Kindle: £0.74; Paperback: £6.69

March

Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse

Björn has been given an ultimatum: repair his work-life balance, or his wife Katharina will leave him - and take their daughter.

He reluctantly starts a mindfulness class and to his surprise, it's a revelation. He becomes calmer, more focused, and he's starting to understand what's really important in life. So when his client and brutal crime boss Dragan Sergowicz tries to interfere with his precious family time, Björn remembers his new-found goal to find serenity - and kills him.

Now Björn can deepen his practice and seek inner peace - violently.

Kindle: £7.49; Paperback: £9.19

April

Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka

A field of strawberries in Kent...

And sitting in it are two caravans - one for the men and one for the women. The residents are from all over: miner's son Andriy is from the old Ukraine, while sexy young Irina is from the new: they each other warily. There are the Poles, Tomasz and Yola; two Chinese girls; and Emauel from Malawi. They're all here to pick strawberries in England's green and pleasant land.

But these days England's not so pleasant for immigrants. Not with Russian gangster-wannabes like Vulk, who's taken a shine to Irina and thinks kidnapping is a wooing strategy. And so Andriy - who really doesn't fancy Irina, honest - must set off in search of that girl he's not in love with.

Now Björn can deepen his practice and seek inner peace - violently.

Kindle: £2.99; Paperback: £9.99

May

Behind The Scenes At The Museum by Kate Atkinson

Whitbread book of the year.

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married.

Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with her children - sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby...

In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, young Ruby tells the story of ‘The Family’, from the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.

Kindle: £5.99; Paperback: £9.19

June

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?

Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner.

Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.

Kindle: £4.99; Paperback: £7.49

July

The Children of Hiroshima by Sadako Teiko Okuda

The True Story Of How I Searched For My Family In The Ruins Of The City

Sadako Teiko Okuda was living in Osaki-shimo, an island off the mainland of Japan, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. Even sixty kilometers from the city, it was clear something horrific had happened. There was a blinding flash and the window next to Sadako smashed, a shard of glass leaving a painful burn on her neck. Soon, news came that her niece and nephew who lived in Hiroshima were missing. There was only one thing she could do - leave the relative safety of the island and set off into the city to find them.

Kindle: £4.99; Paperback: £8.15

August

Human Remains by Jo Callaghan

Fresh from successfully closing their first live case, the Future Policing Unit are called in to investigate when a headless, handless body is found on a Warwickshire farm. But as they work to identify the victim and their killer, the discovery of a second body begins to spark fears that The Aston Strangler is back.

When DCS Kat Frank is accused of putting the wrong man behind bars all those years ago, AIDE Lock – the world's first AI detective – pursues the truth with relentless logic. But Kat is determined to keep the past buried, and when she becomes the target of a shadowy figure looking for revenge, Lock is torn between his evidence-based algorithms and the judgement of his partner, with explosive results.

Kindle: £9.99; Paperback: £9.19

September

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.

When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever – writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.

Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .

Kindle: £5.99; Paperback: £9.19

October

Two books this month - choose to read one or both!

Sonita: Daughters for Sale by Sonita Alizada

At just 10 years old, Sonita Alizada was nearly sold into marriage. By the time she turned 16, her price was set at $9,000 – a sum meant to buy her future for someone else’s benefit. In a world where nearly 15 million girls are forced into marriage each year, Sonita’s story is a heartbreaking but all-too-common reality. Yet, she refused to let her fate be sealed.

In her eponymous memoir, Sonita shares her powerful journey from the streets of Afghanistan to international stages as a rap artist and activist. Breaking through oppressive traditions and laws, she escaped her destiny as a child bride and transformed her pain into music that resonated across the globe.

This book is not just her story, it’s a call to action. Sonita’s message is clear: Dreams have the power to change lives. Weaving together her family’s harrowing escape from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, her rise as a human rights advocate, and her belief in the transformative power of hope, Sonita's story will leave readers galvanised to fight for a world where every girl’s voice is heard.

Kindle: £12.99; Hardcover: £16.92

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they discover fantastic wildlife and dazzling beaches, learning to survive; at night, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, it isn't long before their innocent childhood games devolve into a savage, murderous hunt ...

Kindle: £5.99; Paperback: £8.95

November

The Traitors Circle by Jonathan Freedland

Berlin, 1943. A group of high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo - revealing their secret to the Nazis' most ruthless detective.

They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering headmistress. Meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule, what unites them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance. Or so they believe.

How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? And who betrayed them?

Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruellest men, they showed a heroism that raises a question with new urgency for our time: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?

Kindle: £9.99; Hardcover: £11.23

December

The Long Shoe by Bob Mortimer

Bathroom salesman Matt is at a crossroads. He has lost his job, he is about to be made homeless and his girlfriend has left him. He wants his luck to change and he wants things to go back to how they were. Out of the blue he is offered a job that comes with a free luxury apartment. He hopes this might be enough to tempt her back. But, as events unfold, it starts to dawn on him that perhaps she didn't leave of her own accord after all...​

Kindle: £11.99; Paperback: £9.99