Whitcoulls Recommends: The Truth About Ruby Cooper and The Secret Society of Librarians

The Truth About Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent. Liz Nugent is particularly good at writing about dysfunctional families - I first loved Lying in Wait and the more recently, Strange Sally Diamond. In this new one, Ruby and her sister Erin live a sheltered life in Boston, but when Ruby’s 16, something awful happens which sends shockwaves through the family and tears them all apart. Ruby builds a new life in Dublin where she spends decades trying to outrun the past, but it’s never far away and someday, somehow, there just might be a reckoning.

The Secret Society of Librarians by Kate Thompson. Historical fiction, based during WW2 with much of the story being recreated from actual events. It’s about a group of librarians from various places in England and Poland, who trained together and became very good friends - in particular, two of them - Joyce in London and Dorotha who’s incarcerated in a Polish ghetto, Despite everything which is going on around them, they’re determined to keep getting books into the hands of readers as a means of escapism and of comfort. 

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks AB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Book manager at Wickles Joan McKenzie is with us. Now,
good morning, Good morning, and we've got a book by
Liz Nugent. It's called The Truth About Ruby Cooper.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Have you read this Nugent before?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I don't think I have, Ah, you should.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
She's an author with a number of books, actually, I
think this might be fifth or sixth. I first fell
in love with her with Lying in Wait a few
years ago, and then recently she did something called Strange
Sally Diamond that a lot of people really loved. Anyway,
In this one, Ruby Cooper is sixteen years old and
she lives in Boston with her oldest sister, Erin, and
their parents. They live quite conservatively. Their dad's a financier,

(00:48):
but he's also the pastor of a church which he founded.
And then one day something happens in their home which
has a traumatic effect on all of them, and as
a result, they all take sides and decide where their
allegiances really lie. And the really clever and I found
quite unsettling thing about this book is the moral ambiguity
that you have to navigate your way through. Ruby's mum

(01:10):
is Irish and she picks up Ruby and they head
off to Dublin, while Erin and her dad stay back
to try and pick up the pieces after what's happened.
But everyone's really damaged. And if you couple that with
some truly unreliable narrators, it makes for some really good
shocking twists and turns, which are always great in a
book like this. And you see Ruby's living in Ireland
over the next twenty five years, where the event that

(01:32):
took her there traumatizes her well into her adult life.
She has addictions and bad relationships and generally dysfunctional adult life,
and meantime, back home, there's still disbelief at what happened,
and then suddenly, after all of those years, there's the
possibility of a reckoning. It's really cleverly done. The author's
made it quite hard to like Ruby, okay, but she's

(01:55):
woven her through the story in such a clever way
that you keep thinking you know what's happened, and then
it changes all.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Right, then okay, sounds interesting.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
It's good.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
I love the title of Kate Thompson's new book, The
Secret Society of librarians.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah. Well, she obviously has a thing about books and
libraries because previously she did The Little Wartime Library, Yes,
and the Wartime Book Club Yes obviously, yes, Yeah, fond
of those books. Oh great, aren't they? This one, obviously
is also historical fiction, starting in nineteen thirty nine, when
a group of librarians who've met through training and conferences

(02:29):
become determined to keep libraries open during the war. Joyce
is one of them. She's based in London, and she
gets the idea for a mobile library, which was a
newfangled concept back then, to take books to people who
can't visit the library anymore. But she has to overcome
some mad bureaucracy before that's able to be able to happen.
And then her friend Derota, also a librarian who lives

(02:50):
in Poland, has been caught in the Nazi roundup of
Jews into a Polish ghetto, and she's determined there to
also find ways to keep a library alive. Kate Thompson,
the authors included quite a long piece at the end
of this book about her reasons for writing it and
the research which she did it, and it's really interesting
that the events and the stories that she's put in
it are all based on actual events which we're told

(03:13):
to her by women involved at the time, and she
used that to write this fictional story of the lives
of these really courageous women. And I was thinking about
it in these what we refer to as interesting times,
and it made me wonder how brave i'd be if
push came to shove these days and the availability of
books was somehow threatened, and you always hope you'd do

(03:33):
your bit, but you just don't know, do you.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
No, you don't. Okay, sounds great. The Secret Society of
Liberians by Kate Thompson was the last book that Joan
spoke about, and The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz
Nugent was the first book. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
See you next week.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to news Talks They'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.