Dear Great Book Guru, Sea Cliff Civic Association’s Cider Social will be this Sunday, October 28 from 3 to 4pm.  Heidi Hunt is the founder of the feast so it will surely be a costumed, crafty, culinary delight! As always, I’d like a good book to read earlier in the  day.  Cider Socialite

Dear Cider Socialite, This past weekend, I read a most anticipated novel by a favorite author of mine -Kate Atkinson. TRANSCRIPTION tells the story of Juliet Armstrong in three time periods.  It opens in 1981 as she lies dying after a car accident in Canada.  The rest of the novel shifts back and forth between 1940 and 1950. As a naïve, orphaned eighteen-year-old, she is recruited by MI5- the British intelligence agency- to transcribe wartime conversations but she soon finds herself entangled in a bizarre world of spying, murder and mayhem.  We meet a multitude of colorful characters none of whom are as they seem.  By 1950, Juliet has left MI5 to work for the BBC as a producer of children’s educational shows only to discover “once a spy, always a spy.” There are so many ambiguous relationships throughout, that the reader is as confused as Juliet about who are the heroes and who are the villains. Only at the very end do we realize there are no villains and certainly no heroes.  An extraordinarily clever book- highly recommended!