Kirkdale Bookshop Open Book Club

Weds 21 March, 7.30pm, Kirkdale Bookshop, 272 Kirkdale SE26 4RS; 020 8778 4701
This month the Open Book club will be discussing Andrew Miller’s Pure. This title recently won the Costa Best Novel Award and the Costa Best Book of the Year! Plus a future date for your calendar is World Book Night on Monday 23 April (this is now a different day to World Book Day in March). It was so exciting last year and this year it will be happening in America and Europe as well.

Andrew Miller  won the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year Award for his novel Pure, set in a Parisian cemetery in the run up to the French revolution.Chair of the judges, London Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig, praised the book’s “vivid rendition” of the era.

Mr Miller beat the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Moira Young, Christie Watson and Matthew Hollis to the prize.

He said winning was “unsettling” but “deeply pleasurable”.

Pure is the story of a young engineer sent to Paris on the orders of the king to demolish an ancient cemetery that is over-flowing with the dead.

Mr Greig said the novel was “a morality tale that engrosses with its vivid rendition of pre-revolutionary France”.