Emma from Bookish in Crickhowell gives us an insight into what’s good to read this month.
Chris Cleave writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption. Gold is the story of Zoe and Kate, world-class athletes who have been friends and rivals since their first day of Elite training. They’ve loved, fought, betrayed, forgiven, consoled, gloried, and grown up together. Now on the eve of London 2012, their last Olympics, both women will be tested to their physical and emotional limits. They must confront each other and their own mortality to decide, when lives are at stake: What would you sacrifice for the people you love, if it meant giving up the thing that was most important to you in the world.
A strength of Cleave’s writing is in his realistic characterisation, particularly of the two women, the determined and desperately unhappy Zoe who is racing from her past and Kate, who always puts others first and thus often comes second.
Reading groups would find much here to discuss, from the demands that professional athletes place their bodies under, the rigorous training, the media scrutiny they face, and the real lives they live away from the spotlight, as well as discussing thoughts on the London 2012 Olympics themselves as they fast approach.
