NHFT virtual book club meeting #24 - Ghostwritten

Following our rather tense (and sometimes painful) visit to Syria with former CIA analyst David McCloskey's spy thriller, Damascus Station, we are moving around the globe with David Mitchell's extraordinary debut novel, Ghostwritten.

“Are you what you believe yourself to be?”

Ghostwritten is a novel of nine interconnected stories, taking us to Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, St Petersburg, London, New York and Ireland.

It weaves together a host of characters including a doomsday cult member in Japan, a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree, and a late night New York DJ.

Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature, the novel was described as "an astonishing debut" by the Independent and "a dazzling piece of work" by the Washington Post.

The next meeting will be Thursday the 4th of May at 7pm via MS Teams where we will be discussing the novel. You can find the link via the Events Calendar on the Staff Room. 

Easter opening

 All the libraries will be unstaffed on Friday the 7th and Monday the 10th of April for the Easter bank holidays.

24 hour access will be available as usual to registered members over the Easter period via our swipe card system at the Richmond Library.

The Berrywood and Isebrook Libraries will be closed over the bank holiday.

We reopen as normal on Tuesday the 11th at all of our sites.

Health literacy data

Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions, and is a major issue for health care services. 

In the UK 43% of adults struggle to understand written health related information and this rises to 61% when numeric information is included (Rowlands, 2015).

Health Education England, along with the University of Southampton have created an online tool that provides estimates of low health literacy, which can be viewed at the level of local authorities. 

The tool can further be combined with low health numeracy to give an overall picture of the challenges in producing accessible health information for the local population.

As well as searching by area, the site has a clickable map that allows you to explore the data visually.

You can find the online tool here http://healthliteracy.geodata.uk/