The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley: The spellbinding BBC Between the Covers book club pick

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The story of an 80-year-old widow, Ma, who travels across India to Pakistan in a journey that awakens many memories and wounds, both personal and historical, it’s beautiful, lyrical, fiercely feminist and often unexpectedly funny. I’d choose to give Chimpanzee Memoirs , edited by Stephen Ross and Lydia Hopper (Columbia University Press), in which fellow primatologists convey the joy and challenge of working with animals as intelligent as chimpanzees. I did enjoy some of the characters, particularly Frankie and Mrs Morley, but ultimately there were too many of them; too many side plots and it became overly confusing trying to keep it all straight. It’s a beautiful and humorous portrait of five siblings and the complexities of family relationships.

Sean Lusk - Penguin Books UK

It’s about animal perception and how there’s a whole universe of sensations that we as humans don’t get access to. Poetry captures such strong and tender emotion with full force despite its sparing use of words, making it perfect for this time of year when daylight is shorter and many of us have an increasing tendency towards deep feelings heightened by the holidays and more time spent indoors.I loved Seán Hewitt’s moving memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape), which describes growing up gay in Liverpool within a Catholic family and which gives an extraordinarily sensitive, insightful account of his love affair with someone suffering clinical depression while at the same time keeping faith with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry – the mind’s mountains scaled. Zachary hopes his troublesome gift will allow him to solve the decades-old disappearance of his father in Constantinople. Who hasn’t wished they could rewind time, enjoy a favourite holiday again, fall in love again, or cancel a tragedy. Opening in the middle of the 18 th century and moving between London, rural England and Constantinople, this novel is historical fiction laced with whimsy and magical realism.

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk - Waterstones

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley' is a stunning debut from Sean Lusk and I can't wait to read whatever he comes up with next! And yet, in this limpid translation by Jeremy Tiang, there is an observational richness to the stories that humanises them and defeats the regime’s attempt to depersonalise lived experience. Forget Dickens this Christmas and try High John the Conquerer by Tariq Goddard (Repeater Books), which embodies the best of what the avant garde Repeater stands for, blending working-class politics with experimental fiction and hauntological analysis. This marriage of exquisite, deeply emotionally resonant writing and a story so immersive that you feel, rather happily, like you are living in it and not just reading it, imbues The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudsley with a lyrical quality that carries you through some pretty intense passages when it doesn’t seem to be guaranteed that Zachary or anyone in his wondrously dysfunctional but endlessly devoted found family will ever get the happy-ever-after they want or deserve.

A group of young men and women are spending a wet summer on holiday in Switzerland, among them Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and his young wife-to-be (he was already married to another woman), Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, better known to us today as Mary Shelley.

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley - LoveReading The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley - LoveReading

This gathering together of disparate souls, which also includes Abel’s aunt-in-law, Frances, who’s a rich, feisty independently minded woman who delights in challenging convention, is what gives The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudsley its sizably moving beating heart. A good deal of the story is based on historical facts and reality, the author does a great job of pulling all of that together to weave it into a fabulous adventure.In 18th-century London, Zachary Cloudesley’s life is defined by intense visions, the consequence of a childhood accident that almost blinded him. I could read this book over and over and still be thrilled and terrified with the inventions and welcome each character back into my life again. HNS Awards have helped discover and launch the author careers of Michel Faber, Ruth Downie, Hilary Green, Martin Sutton, Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, Nikki Marmery, Margaret Skea, Warwick Cairns, Katherine Mezzacappa and Elizabeth Macneal. Zachary is a gifted, brilliant little boy, the kind of child who will read anything he can find and probably remember most of it. And whilst I felt some of the sensibilities were very 21st century, I embraced them; it’s refreshing to see such acceptance and love in a historical novel.