June Reading : The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw

A brilliant novel from a genuinely exciting new voice in British fiction. A novel for anyone who enjoyed The English Patient. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.

May Reading : Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson, the acclaimed author of such bestsellers as "The Mother Tongue" and "Made in America", decided it was time to move back to the United States for a while. This was partly to let his wife and kids experience life in Bryson's homeland - and partly because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another. It was thus clear to him that his people needed him. But before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of modern-day Britain, and to analyze what he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite, zebra crossings, and place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey, and Shellow Bowells. With wit and irreverence, Bill Bryson presents the ludicrous and the endearing in equal measure. The result is a social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain.

April Reading : The Persimmon Tree by Bryce Courtenay

The Persimmon Tree is unashamedly a love story. The story is set in the Pacific, although not in the paradise we've always been led to believe exists there. It is 1942 in Java and the Japanese are invading the islands like a swarm of locusts. In Bryce Courtenay's own words "I have tried to capture the essence of love - how in a world gone mad with malice and hate, it has the ability to forgive and to heal. As it is in this story, love is always hard earned but, in the end, a most wonderful and necessary emotion. Without love, life for most of us would lack true meaning."

January Reading:The Spice Island Voyage by Tim Severin

This remarkable account of Tim Severin's voyage to the Indonesian Archipelago in search of the island paradise that naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had explored 140 years before him offers both the thrills of exotic adventure and the marvels of scientific discovery. In a replica of the boat that Wallace himself sailed to the Spice Islands and with Wallace's The Malay Archipelago as his guide, Severin travels to remote shores that still harbor such rare but fast-disappearing creatures as red birds of paradise, flying foxes, and bird-winged butterflies. Not only does he discover the now-endangered flora and fauna that Wallace recorded in his expeditions, he also pays due homage to his intrepid predecessor, the man who provided Darwin with the ideas and principles that changed forever the way we view nature and with him co-authored the theory of evolution.

December Reading:Wildride, The rise and fall of Cobb & Co.

In 1853, a young American arrived in the new colony of Victoria hoping to make his fortune from the world's greatest gold rush. He soon realised that the real money was to be made from the miners' need to travel from the fields where they found their gold to the towns where they spent it, and established a coach company that would literally carry his name into every household in the land: Cobb & Co. But Freeman Cobb himself was long gone by the time the company bearing his name became an Australian legend. Wild Ride is the story of the two extraordinary men, James Rutherford and Frank Whitney, who along with their business partners took Cobb's humble company and made it into the Qantas of its day. These were pioneers, carving a path through otherwise impassable terrain, settling unsettled land, enduring bushrangers and terrible accidents, and making their fortunes. The Rutherford and Whitney families became two of the most significant of their era, unrivalled in their influence and, finally, vicious in their falling out.

November Reading:The Shipping News by Anne Proulx

A darkly comic portrait of human life and possibility. Quoyle is a hopeless hack journalist working in New York. When his two-timing wife dies in a road accident, he retreats to his ancestral home on the coast of Newfoundland where he must confront the unpredictable forces of nature and society.National Book Award for Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

October Reading

Crime Scene Jerusalem by Alton Gansky

When cynical American investigator Maxwell Odom travels to Jerusalem, he leaves his hotel to discover that he's been transported back into ancient history. Allowed to return to his own time only if he can solve a crime that begins in the upper room, will he be able to unearth--and believe--the real truth?