Reading Group Guides

3 total works

Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

Published 2 March 2000

On a peat and heather island off the West Coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee, the land of cakes and William Wallace, where she lives in a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed, and to whom the Klingons are as real as the French and the Germans (more real than the Luxemburgers). But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog? In a brilliant comic narrative which explores the nonsensical nature of language and meaning, Kate Atkinson has created another magical masterpiece. 'A truly comic novel - achingly funny in parts - challenging and executed with wit and mischief...an hilarious and magical trip' MEERA SYAL, The Express 'Sends jolts of pleasure off the page... Atkinson's funniest foray yet... it is a work of Dickensian or even Shakespearean plenty' The Scotsman

Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

Published 1 March 1997

Written by the Whitbread prizewinner Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet is an exhilarating and witty novel which provides an audacious blend of history, Shakespeare, and a hilariously dysfunctional family of eccentrics.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

Published 9 March 1995

Twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Kate Atkinson's brilliant and unforgettable first novel, which won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Prize.

'Delivers its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens...outrageously funny...will dazzle readers for years to come' - HILARY MANTEL, author of The Mirror and the Light

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby...

Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.

'Little short of a masterpiece...Fizzing with wit and energy, Kate Atkinson's hilarious novel made me laugh and cry' Daily Mail

'An astounding book...without doubt one of the finest novels I have read for years' THE TIMES