Fred. Olsen Book Club
With ample time and space to relax, many of our guests make the most of the opportunity to get stuck in to a good book during a cruise holiday on board one of Fred. Olsen’s smaller, friendlier ships. This is why to enhance reading enrichment further, we have introduced the Fred. Olsen Book Club on selected sailings, a chance to talk all things ‘bookish’ with like-minded people.
Hosted by the Cruise Directors and their Team, the Book Club provides a welcoming, social space in which you can openly and informally discuss thoughts and views on bestselling lighter reads, crime-thrillers and traditional or contemporary classics.[ReadMoreMob] Specific categories and titles to discuss at the Book Club on each cruise are chosen in advance and listed below, allowing you time to purchase the books or download them to your kindle, and read them before you set sail.
So, if you love a good book while discovering the world with Fred. Olsen, what better way to indulge your passion than joining your friends and fellow guests at the Book Club?
To enhance your Book Club experience even further, why not enjoy a delicious speciality coffee as you immerse yourself in your book with our Bookmark Bestseller card with 7 hot drinks (teas, coffees, or hot chocolates) for you to enjoy and a bag of milk or mixed truffles priced at just £25?
We look forward to welcoming you!
Once upon a River - As recommended by our Guest Experience Director, Doug Glenwright
Doug said: “This book was pure escapism for me – a real page turner from start to finish, which I sped through (even though it is a larger novel) as I never wanted to put it down”.
Book Title: Once upon a River
Author: Diane Setterfield
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 500
Some say the river drowned her... Some say it brought her back to life
On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the Thames, the regulars are entertaining themselves by telling stories when the door bursts open and in steps an injured stranger. In his arms is the drowned corpse of a child. Hours later, the dead girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? And who does the little girl belong to?
An exquisitely crafted historical mystery brimming with folklore, suspense and romance, as well as with the urgent scientific curiosity of the Victorian age.
Doug Glenwright, Guest Experience Director
You are Here
Book Title: You are Here
Author: David Nicholls
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 368
Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it's passing her by. Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife's departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?
A new love story by beloved bestseller David Nicholls, You Are Here is a novel of first encounters, second chances, and finding the way home.
The Woman in Cabin 10
Book Title: The Woman in Cabin 10
Author: Ruth Ware
Genre: Fiction. Soon to feature as a major Netflix series, starring Keira Knightley
Pages: 368
A PASSENGER IS MISSING...BUT WAS SHE EVER ON BOARD AT ALL?
This was meant to be the perfect trip. The Northern Lights. A luxury press launch on a boutique cruise ship. A chance for travel journalist Lo Blacklock to recover from a traumatic break-in that has left her on the verge of collapse. Except things don't go as planned. Woken in the night by screams, Lo rushes to her window to see a body thrown overboard from the next door cabin. But the records show that no-one ever checked into that cabin, and no passengers are missing from the boat.
Exhausted and emotional, Lo has to face the fact that she may have made a mistake - either that, or she is now trapped on a boat with a murderer...
Cruises departing from January 2026
The Place of Tides
Book Title: The Place of Tides
Author: James Rebanks
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 304
One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.[ReadMore]
Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.
This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for gathering, like feathered gold.
Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not what he had previously thought. What began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.
The Air Raid Book Club
Book Title: The Air Raid Book Club
Author: Annie Lyons
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 340
London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the bookshop she and Harry opened together, Gertie is preparing to sell up and move away when she is asked if she would be willing to take in a young Jewish refugee from Germany. Gertie is unsure and when sullen teenager Hedy Fischer arrives, Gertie fears she has nothing left to give the troubled girl.[ReadMore]
But when the German bombers come and the lights go out over London, Gertie and Hedy realise that joining forces will make them stronger, and that books have the power to bring young and old together and unite a community in need in its darkest hour...
The Dinner Guest
Book Title: The Dinner Guest
Author: B P Walter
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 416
Four people walked into the dining room that night. One would never leave.[ReadMore]
Matthew: the perfect husband.
Titus: the perfect son.
Charlie: the perfect illusion.
Rachel: the perfect stranger.
Charlie didn’t want her at the book club. Matthew wouldn’t listen.
And that’s how Charlie finds himself slumped beside his husband’s body, their son sitting silently at the dinner table, while Rachel calls 999, the bloody knife still gripped in her hand.
Classic crime meets Donna Tartt in this nerve-shredding domestic noir thriller that weaves a sprawling web of secrets around an opulent West London world and the dinner that ends in death.
The Book Club will run on cruises with more than four sea days.