Past Events
Those Goldster members who have been with us since 2020, will remember that one of our earliest Book Club discussions was about Amor Towles’s novel A Gentleman in Moscow. Four years on we are returning to discussing the work of this masterful modern writer.
Rules of Civility was Towles’s debut novel, set in New York City in 1938. It follows the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year-old, who has the fabulous name of Katey Kontent. The Daily Telegraph reviewer commented “A cross between Dorothy Parker and Holly Golightly, Katey Kontent is a priceless narrator in her own right – the brains of a bluestocking with the legs of a flapper and the mores of Carrie Bradshaw”.
The story begins at New Year in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her roommate Eve meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with vivid blue eyes and a winning smile. This chance encounter barrels both young women into a dramatic, rollercoaster of a year, encountering changes neither of them could have imagined just a few weeks earlier. Katey, who is one of Towles’s most endearing characters, embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.
Goldster Magazine Book Club events are open to all, whether you’ve had the chance to read the book or not. These events are not recorded, everyone is unmuted and everyone gets the chance to meet other Goldster members. Join Lucinda and fellow Goldster members at 1pm on Tuesday 29 October.
“My son’s death will never make sense to me. But it has taught me that it’s possible to find meaning, collectively and individually, in the loss of what we love.” Liz Jensen
On 3 September, Lucinda Hawksley will be joined by Liz Jensen, the best-selling author of eight novels including The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, which was adapted by Hollywood into a box-office feature film starring Jamie Dornan. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Liz Jensen was a print and radio journalist in Hong Kong and Taiwan. She then spent four years as a freelance writer, translator and sculptor in France, and ten years as a BBC producer.
Liz, who lives in Copenhagen, has been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Award, nominated three times for the Women’s Fiction prize, and has had her work adapted for theatre and radio, and translated into twenty languages. Much of her work revolves around the environment and impact of climate change. She is a founder member of Extinction Rebellion’s Writers Rebel, a literary movement which includes writers such as Margaret Drabble, Ben Okri, Amitav Ghosh and Zadie Smith.
Four years ago, Liz’s life changed in an instant, with the devastating loss of her son, Raph. Known to many by the name of Iggy Fox, Raph was a leading figure of Extinction Rebellion. Following his unexpected death while filming an environmental campaign in South Africa, Liz abandoned the novel she was working on and wrote a book about grief. She will be discussing Your Wild and Precious Life: on grief, hope and rebellion on Goldster.
Join Liz and Lucinda Hawksley to find out how, after Raph’s death, Liz rebuilt herself, reoriented her life and rediscovered the enchantment of the living world. Your Wild and Precious Life is set against the backdrop of climate and ecological catastrophe, it’s an argument for agency, legacy and the wild possibility of hope after devastation.
What happens to a community when it attempts to deal with a local tragedy and the repercussions for a griefstricken family? After sixteen-year-old Lydia goes missing and her body turns up in the lake, the police rule it as a suicide, but Lydia’s family are determined to search for clues about what really happened.
Everything I Never Told You was Celeste Ng’s debut novel. It became an instant bestseller, when it was published in 2014, and has been described as a modern classic. One critic called it “A blistering study in grief and belonging that doubles as a gripping mystery of secrets buried in plain sight, [it] … ripples with emotion and insight. A novel of difference, the immigrant experience and the changing face of American society; an exquisitely realised work.”
Join me on 27 August at 1pm to chat about Everything I Never Told You and about books in general. Our Magazine Show Book Club events are open to all, whether you’ve had the chance to read the book or not. These events are not recorded, everyone is unmuted and everyone gets the chance to meet other Goldster members. Come and be a part of the Book Club community.
Fred Finn earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records for being the world’s most travelled man – fifteen million miles (and still counting), with 718 flights of the supersonic Concorde airliner. Fred, now 83, boarded his first commercial flight in 1958 from the United Kingdom to America. The journey took nineteen hours with four stops. Thirty-eight years later he made the same flight on board Concorde in less than three hours. His work as an international businessman has taken him to 150 countries.
To push through one deal, he had to fly between New York and London three times in a single day to get a contract signed. Fred has now written Sonic Boom a riveting account of his champagne-swilling, Rolls Royce-riding, jet-setting days of travelling 60,000 feet up at twice the speed of sound. He was such a Concorde frequent flyer that he was always given seat 9A and would find a bottle of Dom Perignon waiting for him. Fred’s expertise remains in demand from airlines seeking advice on improving seating, flights and service. Find out Fred’s secrets of fine travelling. How does he cheat jet-lag? What happened when he met Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton on Concorde and many other stories.
As Britain’s best-known headmaster, Sir Anthony Seldon famously introduced happiness, or well-being, lessons at his school, Wellington College. In 2011, he co-founded Action for Happiness, a body to raise awareness of the discovery of happiness and reduction of depression, whose influence is growing rapidly in Britain and across the world. He is the author of Beyond Happiness: How to find lasting meaning and joy in all that you have where lays out the difference between pleasure, happiness and joy, and offers an original 8-step approach on how to make our lives far more meaningful and rewarding. The pursuit of happiness can all too easily become a trap which seduces us into thinking there is no more to life than being happy. But in this special Goldster conversation, Sir Anthony will also talk about his widely-praised political writings, notably The Impossible Office: The History of the British Prime Minister. Who do you think has been our best and worst prime ministers?
Meet Sir Anthony and tell him your choice – the Goldster Magazine Show 1pm Tuesday July 9th 2024.
We are thrilled this month to have a Book Club book written by one of our Goldster members! A huge well done to ‘Annem’ (she even has a Goldster-inspired pseudonym). We will be chatting about Croitearan Crofters from 1pm on Tuesday 25 June, as part of the Goldster Magazine show. As a bonus, the author will be there and is happy to answer questions about her writing and her self-publishing journey.
Croitearan Crofters is a novel about the impact the twentieth century has on a crofting family, the McLeans, who live on a Hebridean island. Kate is born at the beginning of the century into a family of four brothers. The Great War awaits which devastates the family. Afterwards only Kate and her father, Hugh, remain on the croft.
These stories are not sentimental nor nostalgic. They are about birth and death and love. There is hope and despair, deprivation and humour, some sex, rather a lot of religion, a little politics. There are no villains, just people trying to live in a beautiful but harsh environment who sometimes make mistakes and all the time the world is changing, a way of life is disappearing and a language, with its unique way of looking at the world and describing it, is heading for extinction.
Our Book Club events are open to all, whether you’ve had the chance to read the book or not. These events are not recorded, everyone is unmuted and everyone gets the chance to meet other Goldster members. Come along and be a part of the Goldster community.
Jane Corry is a writer and journalist who has spent time working as the writer in residence of a high security prison for men – an experience that helped inspire her Sunday Times bestselling novels. Before taking up the post, Jane had never been inside a prison and says that the experience “really opened up my eyes. Initially I was terrified about doing the job but as soon as I started, I was hooked. Here was another world. I’d always thought that prisoners were simply “born bad,” but I soon found that some had committed crimes because of messed-up childhoods, wrong decisions combined with alcohol and drugs. My job was to encourage inmates to write about their lives to help release feelings and turn over a new leaf. Many of my men had mental health issues; some heard voices in their heads. This was scary for me to witness, but the writer side of me was fascinated.”
Jane is now a judge for the life story section of the Koestler Awards, which are given to men and women in prison and mental institutions. She will be talking to Lucinda about the importance of writing for mental health and about the vital importance of exercise to mental clarity. Many of her own writing ideas strike during morning dog-jogs along the beach followed by a dip in the sea.
Join Jane Corry with Lucinda Hawksley on The Goldster Magazine Show at 1pm on Tuesday 4 June 2024.
On an Autumn day in 1929, a three-year-old girl went missing from a beach in Lincolnshire. For a few moments, her mother had perhaps looked away, and in that time the child was kidnapped. A few days later the little girl was found, but the mystery of who took her and why she was abducted was never resolved. That stolen child was the mother of author Laura Cumming.
When Cumming learnt the story she was bemused by what seemed to be an extraordinary silence about her mother’s childhood abduction, so she set about trying to find out what had happened. In doing so, she uncovered several other secrets.
This beautifully written family memoir, follows Laura Cumming’s journey as the art historian turned detective – via police reports and newspaper reporting. Read it and venture back to an England between the wars, following the author’s efforts to determine what happened really during the days of the disappearance.
Join Lucinda Hawksley at 1pm on Tuesday 28 May for the Goldster Magazine Book Club, to chat about On Chapel Sands and all things book related.
Excite your tastebuds as well as your mind with this book about the sensuality of food and its preparation. A modern retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, the story revolves around Laura, an American exchange student in Rome; a handsome waiter named Tomasso, who allows Laura to believe he’s the restaurant’s chef; and the actual chef, Tomasso’s shy friend Bruno.
The Food of Love was Anthony Capella’s first novel. He is a fabulous writer and has gone on to write several more books, usually with a culinary element, including The Wedding Officer, The Empress of Ice-Cream, The Various Flavours of Coffee and Love and Other Chemicals. He has also written a novella, entitled Undressing.
Take time to savour The Food of Love, with its delectable descriptions of life in Italy, as well as its seductive recipes, and then come along on 30 April to discuss the book and its characters with Lucinda.
Our Book Club events are open to all, whether you’ve had the chance to read the book or not. These events are not recorded, everyone is unmuted and everyone gets the chance to meet other Goldster members.