Richard and Judy Spring 2011 Book Club

Richard and Judy Autumn 2010 Book Club

RICHARD AND JUDY SPRING BOOK CLUB 2012

Exclusive to WHSmith, Richard and Judy are delighted to announce a new set of great reads for Spring 2012. Richard and Judy will review one of the eight books selected every fortnight, and we will feature live interviews with each author. Be part of Britain's biggest book club, join the discussion, post reviews and vote for the winner.
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Introducing the Richard & Judy Spring Book Club 2012 Titles

"Hi everybody! Well, here we are, it's well into 2012 now, and this is the second year of the Richard and Judy Book Club. We have got eight fantastic new titles for you, and of course it's all exclusively with WHSmith. Over the last year or so we're delighted to say that our selected titles have sold over three and a half million copies, which is great, but we're confident that the spring 2012 Book Club, which as Richard said has got some really great books on it, will probably do even better."

This Week's Featured Book Club Title Is...

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (Exclusive WHSmith Edition)
By Louisa Young
Only £3.99 Saving £4.00 (50%)

'Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU is a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight.'
Read Sample Chapter | Read more about this book and author |

WHSmith Edition now contains Exclusive Bonus material including...

Authors note on the inspiration behind writing My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You

Louisa Young Talks to Richard and Judy About 'My Dear I Wanted To Tell You'

"Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU is a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight. While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home..."

Richard & Judy's Review

Judy

There is much tenderness in this beautiful, romantic story, and some wonderfully crafted surprises. When Riley (a physically beautiful young man, which in the latter part of the book becomes significant) is rejected by the Waveneys, he reacts by doing something completely unexpected and out of character. It’s one of the reasons he almost immediately enlists. I won’t give it away here, but it’s a strange, pivotal moment.

Of course Riley’s desire for Nadine – and hers for him - doesn’t end with him going to war: the enforced separation intensifies their relationship. But the horrors he must endure in France (events written in unsparing detail, so be warned) fall so far outside normal human experience that Riley finds it impossible to describe them to Nadine. This stands between them, as it does for other couples in the story. Even intelligent, articulate men like Riley simply lacked the language to explain the things they had seen and done.
You may be puzzled by the book’s title: have patience. Those seven words will come into their own, I promise. And when they do, you will enter the most moving part of Riley and Nadine’s story. As Richard says, this is a novel that buries itself deep in your consciousness: once read, never forgotten.
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Richard

This is a book that stayed with me long after I had read the last page. Louisa Young writes with an extraordinary blend of delicacy and brutality about the Great War: she manages to immerse us, along with her characters, in the mud and blood of what was, in 1914, a wholly new and catastrophic human experience: trench warfare.

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is probably the finest novel about World War One since Sebastian Faulke’s ‘Birdsong’, and a captivating romance. At the heart of the story is Riley Purefoy. Born into a working-class family, Riley scales the social ladder by working as an artist’s assistant in a grand London house. The wealthy, cultured family semi-adopt him and he falls in love with beautiful, wilful Nadine, daughter of his mentor, Sir Arthur Waveney. But when Nadine’s parents realise the pair are becoming dangerously close, Riley is ruthlessly frozen out of the family. Almost at once, he volunteers to fight on the Western Front.
Young hauntingly describes the violent and almost schizophrenic world into which young men like Riley were suddenly tossed. After months in northern France, helplessly caught up in the human mincing machine of the trenches, they might find themselves on leave back in London, just a short train and boat journey from hell. A man could be splattered in a mate’s brains on a Friday, and walking in a peaceful London park on a Saturday. If the wind was in the right direction, the rumble of the guns could be heard at the front, while in the park, children fed pigeons.
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