The Big Bath Read 2014 discussion

Hi -- I'm Viv Groskop, artistic director of the Independent Bath Literature Festival 2014. We're a 10-day festival in Bath, Somerset, celebrating over 150 authors and with 20,000 ticket sales, now in our 19th year.

Every year we choose a Big Bath Read to get the whole city focused on one great book.

This year I've chosen The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter. Why? Because it's a brilliantly accessible, memorable novel with themes everyone who loves fiction can relate to: identity, family, love, loss. It's a novel you can read in lots of different ways but for me it's a story about one woman, Violet, whose life is thrown into chaos when the army takes over her village during the Second World War.

Rossiter, a Salisbury-based debut novelist, has drawn on real life for this part of the story: several villages in the West Country were requisitioned by the army and the people who had lived in them all their lives were never allowed to return. Violet's forced exit has repercussions for her for the rest of her life.

The second, interwoven story here is about Violet's daughter, Alice, stranded on the southernmost tip of India, the day after her wedding, in the wake of a tsunami.

It's an extraordinary, addictive piece of writing. I loved it from start to finish. So that's why I chose it. Plus, it's £3.85 on Amazon and I really do want as many people to read it as possible...

Sounds like a goodread! And I love the idea of a whole city reading a book together! Will read and report back