We started 2025 with a meal at The Anchor and ended it with an Icelandic custom ‘Jolabokaflodid’, a Secret Santa giving a second hand book and a chocolate. We are now back to our maximum 10 members, with one person on the waiting list, but there are other book groups in our U3A.
All the books we read this year were fiction and all except two were written in the last decade but in other ways there was quite a variety, including thrillers and historical novels. You can see how we felt about them below. I haven’t revealed how any of these books end in case anyone is interested in reading them for themselves and after the Scores shown below I have provided some more information on our two favourite books.
U3A Book Group 2 Average Voting Scores 2025
|
Title
|
Author
|
Style
|
Content
|
Good Read
|
Range
|
|
We Are All Birds of Uganda (2021)
|
Hafsa Zayyan
|
6.7
|
7.9
|
7.6
|
6-10
|
|
The Beloved Girls (2022)
|
Harriet Evans
|
6.3
|
5.8
|
5.6
|
4-9
|
|
Rites of Passage (1980)
|
William Golding
|
4.7
|
5.7
|
4.1
|
2-9
|
|
American Dirt (2019)
|
Jeanine Cummins
|
8
|
8.7
|
9.1
|
7-10
|
|
Tulip Fever (1999)
|
Deborah Moggach
|
6.9
|
6.8
|
6.6
|
4-9
|
|
Oh William! (2021)
|
Elizabeth Strout
|
7
|
6.8
|
6.8
|
5-8
|
|
Small Things Like These (2021)
|
Claire Keegan
|
8.4
|
8
|
7.6
|
2-10
|
|
Past Tense (2018)
|
Lee Child
|
6.5
|
5.9
|
5.2
|
1-9
|
|
The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020)
|
Pip Williams
|
7
|
7.2
|
6.6
|
3-10
|
|
Moving (2015)
|
Jenny Eclair
|
7.7
|
7.6
|
7.2
|
5-9
|
|
Whale Fall (2024)
|
Elizabeth O’Connor
|
4.8
|
4.8
|
3.7
|
0-7
|
The most popular book was American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, whose family includes migrants to the US. The story starts in Mexico where Lydia and her 8 year old son manage to escape when her journalist husband and all the rest of her wider family are murdered by a drug cartel because her husband had written an article exposing the leader. The account of their journey to the US, alongside other migrants escaping violence in South America, is full of gripping high adrenalin drama punctuated by quieter passages describing their former lives. The author was criticised for telling a Latino story when she is white but she spent years researching it and was keen to write from the viewpoint of the victims rather than the perpetrators and law enforcers. While she was writing, the US view of Latino immigrants increasingly saw them as resource-draining criminals rather than human beings who can contribute. This book provoked much discussion about US drug problems and attitudes towards immigrants there and in our own country.
The joint second favourite were: 'We Are All Bird of Ugandas' was also set outside England. The title refers to the view that birds can’t be confined to a particular territory if they fly. This book explores family relationships, identity and racism, not only in the context of Ugandan Asians’ reception in the UK and the often more subtle present day racism here but also the tensions between the British, the Asians they brought to Uganda to build railways and the black Africans which led to Idi Amin expelling Ugandan Asians in the 1970s. Humour brought some light relief to digesting all the facts. The other joint second favourite was 'Small Things Like These' - again based on real events. It is a short atmospheric novel set in Ireland in the 1980s exploring one man’s struggle with his conscience when he gradually realises that unmarried young mothers in the convent laundry are being treated cruelly but knows that if he speaks out he will jeopardise his business and his daughters’ chance of a good education because ‘these nuns have a finger in every pie’.
Reviewed & Updated by Anne Eagle (Group Administrator)