Welcome to this group for keen readers! Prizes to be won

News24

25-07-2025

Welcome to the book club where no one has to cook.
It's all about sharing views on the titles we love or loathe – from the hottest bestsellers to the steal-up-on-you sleepers; from the stories that made our hearts beat faster to the ones we slung on the charity shop pile.
So, come join me as we swoon, sigh, argue or agree about the pages we step inside, hoping to be swept away to other worlds.
We'll have book giveaways galore – a pack of the latest top international fiction titles will go to the best comment. (They are The Bombshell, Aftertaste, Julie Chan Is Dead, and The Wildelings – see below.)
Tell us what you're reading and why it's grabbing you, or tell us about what your book club is interested in, or just add your thoughts about these books, and you could win the book package.
Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press)
After American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins' widely fêted, roundly attacked, blockbuster novel about undocumented Mexican migration, I couldn't wait to get my hands on her follow up.
Until around page 50, which is when I started to think I probably could have waited.
Speak to Me of Home revolves around the lives and loves of three generations of women with Puerto Rican roots living in the US, which run variously shallow, deep, and painfully twisted.
Barely a family breakfast goes by without a tortured conversation about racial identity – who is brown enough, who is white enough, who's three parts this and four parts that. At a critical point in the story, there is even a DNA test.
As far as the plot goes (which is not very far), there is a car accident, a divorce, a wrenching move from Puerto Rico to America and back again, but little of it adds up to irresistible drama because Cummins is too busy proving her authorial authenticity and explaining her own mixed-heritage identity - which, she told The Guardian, is 'Irish and Puerto Rican. White and Latina'.
The upshot is that Speak to Me of Home reads like an overwrought apologia in response to accusations that, in American Dirt, Cummins exploited a race or ethnicity that was not hers to describe and appropriated a story that was not hers to tell.
It's not that Cummins has written a bad book, and there are plenty of licks when she lets herself forget for a few pages that she's on a mission to restore her good name, it's just that the shine is missing, the confidence of the author's invisible hand.
Sorry Jeanine, but wearing your wounded writer's heart on your sleeve just doesn't make for an immersive reading experience.
I stand ready to be egg-bombed by her gazillion fans.
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A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar (Saqui Books)
Among the many eye-catching books that landed on my desk this month, this one jumped out.
Sudanese author Reem Gaafar's fiction debut, A Mouth Full of Salt, won her The Island Prize in 2023, but what really pricked my interest was that I'd never come across any novel set in Sudan, a divided land we hear about mostly in the context of war, famine, and when George Clooney has a soundbite on the subject.
Reading A Mouth Full of Salt, I learned more than I ever knew about this ruptured country, variously warped by the bitter aftertaste of colonialism, group oppression and a centuries old culture clash between the majority Arab population and the African minority of what is now South Sudan.
In a novel that switchbacks across 30-odd years – between the end of colonisation in the 1950s and 1989, where the story begins – Gaafar shines a harsh light on all these things, but she never lets them override the human-size tale she sets out to tell, which opens with the tragic drowning of a village child in the mighty Nile River. And that's just the start of the village's bad luck.
Here we have a bumper cast of intriguing characters – good, bad, and a little bit of both – but our protagonists-in-chief are three women, all outsiders in their own way and cornered by the fate of having been born female, who boldly step out of the shadows to make risky choices that drive the action forward.
With A Mouth Full of Salt, Reem Gaafar (a doctor by profession) has created a wonderfully readable, intensely atmospheric story, suffused with fiercely enduring love and a river of tears.
I cried, I learned, I loved it.
***
Here's a quick-look at more new titles I've just added to the to-be-read tower on my bedside table.
The Bombshell by Darrow Farr (Atlantic Books)
Corsica, 1993: a teenager girl with big ambitions is kidnapped while idling on her motorbike smoking a cigarette. Soon her face will be plastered all over TV, but not for the reasons you might think. Sex! Violence! Revolution! Promises promises!
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle (Bloomsbury)
A lonely boy discovers he can communicate with the dead through his cooking. Nigella Lawson called this foodie-ghost-love story a 'hauntingly evocative journey through the realms of pain, pleasure and the power of food'. Well, she should know.
Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang (Raven Books)
When a glamorous super-influencer is found dead in her apartment, her down-at-heel identical twin decides to steal her dead sister's identity and step into her perfect life. Sound like a copycat version of Rebecca F Kaung's Yellowface? Zhang has big Louboutins to fill.
The Trad Wife's Secret by Liane Child (HQ)
Madison March spends her days baking, popping out adorable children and making sure dinner is on the table when her husband comes home. But, oops, is her life really the dream her Insta followers believe? I can't wait to see how the deeply weird Trad Wives trend is explored in fiction.
The Wildelings by Lisa Harding (Bloomsbury)
When childhood friends Jessica and Linda arrive at university in Dublin, they're inseparable – until they meet Mark, an older student who exerts a strange magnetic power over the girls and plunges their friendship into a darker place. Twenty pages in and it's got me by the throat. Fingers crossed.
Charlotte Bauer is the author of How To Get Over Being Young. Read an extract here.