The Book Club – Monday 24th February – ZOOM

This session of The Book Club will take place on Monday, 24th February, 7-8pm. This month, we are reading The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft – £9.99 is the price of the book and a ticket to the session. The book can be delivered directly to you (please add your shipping address and tick the box for shipping) or you can collect it in store free of charge. You can buy a book and ticket here.

If you already own a copy of the book, you can purchase a ticket only for £3. You can purchase a ticket only here.

For those unable to afford a book or ticket at present, we have a limited amount of complementary books/tickets. Please contact the bookshop via bookworms@houseofbooksandfriends.com or call 07597365380.

One of our booksellers will lead the book club, and the group will be split up into smaller groups in breakout rooms to discuss the questions. A Zoom link will be emailed to ticketholders prior to the event starting.

We always ask that you be respectful and kind whilst discussing the book and others’ opinions of it.

From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the writer Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

About the Book

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient, wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime moulds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets — and deceptions — of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.