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Simon Haisell's avatar

I sort of accidentally started a book club three years ago.

I told friends online that I was going to re-read one of my favourite books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, over a year. 'Would anyone like to join me?' I expected maybe half a dozen to be interested in the idea. But the post went viral, and hundreds of people got involved. By 1 Jan 2023, there were over a thousand of us from all over the world! I had never been part of a book club, and now I was running this enormous international group – it was a forbidding prospect, and exciting!

Our first year was extraordinary. We read a chapter a day and discussed it online. Our reading group became this place of calm, while individual readers faced personal challenges and the outside world felt more turbulent than ever. We had these wonderful connections across continents, with everyone reading the same page and immersed in the story. Towards the end of the year, people shared what the slow reading group had meant to them – it was incredibly moving.

In 2024, I decided to do the same with Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books. The first two (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) won the Booker Prize, and the third (The Mirror and the Light) is one of my all-time favourites. The discussions we had about these three books were such a profound pleasure, and the re-readers amongst us saw all kinds of things we had never noticed before.

We're now in our third year, and the book club has taken over my life. It has its own newsletter and website (Footnotes & Tangents), and I work full-time on creating material for it and hosting the discussions. Looking towards the future and some other Booker Prize-winning novels I'm keen to do: A S Byatt's Possession, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Pat Barker's The Ghost Road.

As normally such a solitary reader, I never knew I would get so much satisfaction and fulfilment from reading together. This book club is certainly the best accident I've ever had!

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Back Cover's avatar

We’re 60 readers - parents, nurses, librarians, teachers, care workers, accountants, retirees and more - bound together by stories. We’ve welcomed babies , seen members move towns, and watched quiet coffees bloom into lifelong friendships. People come and go, but what anchors us? The revelation of seeing a story through sixty pairs of eyes.

And Booker novels? They’ve been our companions. We’ve lived inside Bernadine Evaristo’s kaleidoscopic Girl, Woman, Other, argued fiercely over Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and sat quietly with Damon Galgut’s haunting The Promise. We grappled with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar. And just this year, we let Yael van der Wouden’s The Safe Keep settle into our bones.

What binds us isn’t just the reading. It’s showing up, month after month, year after year. Turning pages together, we’ve built a quiet kind of family.

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