Out On An Island & Bendy Book Club – Book Club & Pop Up Café @ Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight

Bendy Book Club will be meeting at Quay Arts in Newport from 11am to discuss Orlando by Virginia Woolf and A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi. They will be discussing the books for the first hour followed by a relaxed social meeting. Come along even if you haven’t read the books but would like to socialise and meet friendly folk!

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Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf’s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth’s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

A coming of age memoir about growing up queer in a strict Muslim household. Like Educated with a modern British context.

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of east London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life.

As he grew up life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor, brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

However Mohsin had incredible drive and he used education as a way out of his home life and to throw himself into a new kind of life. He became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University and there he found the freedom to come out to his friends.

But Oxford was a whole different world with its own huge challenges and Mohsin found himself increasingly conflicted. It came to a head when Mohsin went back to visit his parents only to be confronted by his father and a witchdoctor he’d invited to ‘cure’ Mohsin.

Although Mohsin’s story takes harrowing turns it is full of life and humour, and it ends inspiringly. Through his irrepressible spirit Mohsin breaks through emotional and social barriers and in the end he even finds acceptance from his family.

Now Mohsin is a top criminal barrister who fights large-scale cases on a daily basis. Having faced battles growing up, he truly understands the importance of justice as a way of life.

Date: Saturday 24 September
Time: 11 am
Location: Quay Arts, Newport, Isle of Wight
Price: Free
September’s Book Selection: Orlando by Virginia Woolf and A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi