Thursday 20 February 2014

Last Orders by Graham Swift

An exciting meeting at Susie's newly renovated house (it's gorgeous), it's a shame the book didn't excite us more.

This book won the booker prize in 1996 so personally I was expecting grand things.  It's quite a quiet book, small and understated.  It tells a simple story of a group of friends, one of whom dies, it goes into their past and then skips to the present.  There is no great twist, no earth-shattering ending, just more and more reveals about these people.

We found it quite hard to distinguish between the characters at first, all are introduced at the same time and most are old men with families so it took a while for us to learn their names and remember what we know about them already.

Concept: 4
Plot: 3
Page Turner: 3
Ending: 3
Cover: 5
Who to slap?  The author or Vince
Would we recommend? 0/5
Better as ... ashes

Total: 3/10

I got to choose our next book (again!) hope it will be better than this one.  It's 'Half Bad' by Sally Green (available on kindle and paperback from 3rd March).

Our next meeting will be at Jen's house on Wed 12th March.