Our literary pick for the month of October for Kat’s Books & Wine Club comes straight for the librarian herself. Last month, Kat posted a video to her Instagram showcasing the Louisa May Alcott section of her library. As she read the description for A Long Fatal Love Chase, she jested about starting a book club… Are we a joke to you?

“I’d gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom,” cries Rosamond Vivian to her callous grandfather. A brooding stranger seduces her from the remote island onto his yacht. Trapped in a web of intrigue, cruelty, and deceit, she flees to Italy, France, Germany, from Paris garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau – stalked by obsessed Phillip Tempest.

Two years before Little Women, serialized in a magazine under the alias A.M. Barnard in 1866, this was buried among the author’s papers over a century. 

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Our literary pick for the month of September for Kat’s Books & Wine Club is Silent Snow, Secret Snow, one of Kat’s OG favourites back from the time she blogged, author Conrad Aiken’s best-known short story.

The story tells of a boy named Paul Hasleman, who finds it increasingly difficult to pay attention to his classwork, and grows more distant from his family. He is, instead, becoming more and more entranced by daydreaming about snow. This began when he was lying in bed one morning, awaiting the approach of the postman. Unable to hear the expected footfalls, the boy imagines that they have been muffled by newly fallen snow, and is surprised when he looks out the window and discovers that there is no snow on the ground.

Paul’s increasing distance and indifference to the world around him alarms his parents. He has to struggle to get dressed and converse with others, because of the allure of his daydream about snow. They eventually call in a physician, who makes a house call to examine Paul. After revealing that he likes to think about snow, Paul tears himself away from the meeting with the physician and retires to his room. When his mother pursues him, he tells her “Go away… I hate you!”, and is lost in the dreamworld of the snow.

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In anticipation of the upcoming second instalment of Audible’s The Sandman featuring Kat as Death of the Endless, our August pick for Kat’s Books & Wine Club is the first three volumes in Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy graphic novel. These volumes were adapted into the first instalment of the audio series; the second act, dropping in September, should focus on volumes four and five.

The Sandman is a comic book series written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC Comics. It tells the story of Dream, also known as Morpheus and other names, who is one of the seven Endless. The other Endless are Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (formerly Delight), and Destruction. The series is famous for Gaiman’s trademark use of anthropomorphic personification of various metaphysical entities, while also blending mythology and history in its horror setting within the DC Universe.

We invite you to enter the Dreaming in whatever form you please. If you go with Audible’s adaptation, you can listen to Kat in episodes eight (“The Sound of Her Wings”), ten (“Men of Good Fortune”) and nineteen (“Façade”).

Additionally, if you are in the USA, you can listen to the audiobook completely for free only at Audible!

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