Turning Up the Heat with Young @ Heart Book Group

03 July 2026

Even one book gets you in to win! It’s Turn Up The Heat time, and if you’re having trouble choosing books to fit the challenge categories, read on…. Young @ Heart Book Group have some absolute bangers to recommend.

Explore a New Genre (Science Fiction) - Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Twenty-four hours, 16 sunrises and sunsets seen from space as we travel at 17,000mph with six astronauts aboard a space station mission. From America, Russa, Italy, Britain and Japan we glimpse moments of their earthly lives as well as experiencing the routines of life in space and the formation of the bonds that keep them functioning together. 

One Word Title – Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
When a self-driving minivan collides with an oncoming car, who can be held morally responsible? The teen in the driver’s seat? The distracted parent? The designers and manufacturers of the vehicle? Stakes are raised and investigation becomes difficult when each person involved is harbouring secrets that could implicate them. Explore a world of chatbots, drones, AI and ethical dilemmas in an all too human family.

A Book You Already Own but Haven’t Read – The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
One of historical fiction’s best writers brings us a story where the walls can speak. A women’s boarding house in 1950s Washington is a melting pot of different nationalities, backgrounds and aspirations brought together by supper and a love for life. You will be immersed in the atmosphere of the times, with its suspicion, morals, emancipation, and one nasty murder.

A Number in the Title - I’ll Take That One by Kitty Baxter
As a nine-year-old living in London during the 1940s, Kitty was one of thousands to be evacuated to the countryside. Rehomed three times over the course of the war she was cut off from her parents and four siblings and lived with strangers in places radically different to her working-class roots. Dealing with struggle and loss but always finding joyful moments in her very unusual childhood, Kitty is an irrepressible voice.

A Book you have Spotted as a Movie – The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman
Tom and his wife Isabel are the long-term lighthouse keepers on a tiny, isolated island off Australia where shore leave is every other year at best.  After years of loss, when a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a living baby, the couple make the morally dubious decision to raise the child as their own. Two years later they return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world and that their long deception has devastated one of them. Are there any good choices, justice or happiness left? It’s not a new book, but certainly worth a look.

Young @ Heart book group meet at Havelock North Library on the first Thursday of the month at 10.30am. 

Posted by Elizabeth

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