I hope everyone was able to read the book and can send in their comments on the book. The Book Group List gives Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons an average rating of 6. By Ben Macintyre Behind the Scenes at the Museum By Kate Atkinson. St. Martin's Press. Yorkshire has an established and self-nurtured reputation as a place of heroic complaint.
Nothing is ever quite so bad as it is in Yorkshire.
The weather is worse, life is harder, the coal mines are deeper and darker and the scenery harsher, you will be told, than in other, softer lands. The sheer bloody awfulness of life is a badge of honor, to be worn with grim humor in the knowledge that while existence may be easier elsewhere, it could not be better. Behind the Scenes at the Museum'' is a multigenerational tale of a spectacularly dysfunctional Yorkshire family and one of the funniest works of fiction to come out of Britain in years. The book has already, and deservedly, won the prestigious Whitbread Prize. The chronicle then dives back to the previous century, when Bunty's grandmother, the racked, beautiful Alice Barker, is fighting to bring up her vast brood in hopeless rural poverty but decides to go off with an itinerant French photographer instead, as, frankly, anyone would.