1. You loved When Breath Becomes Air and other tearjerkers…
Let’s Hope for the Best by Carolina Settwerwall is a bereavement memoir presented as an autobiographical novel by a Swedish writer who discovered her thirty-something partner dead in bed one morning, leaving her alone with their eight-month-old son. Weaving back and forth in time, it’s relentless and brilliant – an emotional battering ram of a book.
2. For poetic types who love pale and interesting…
The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson is a beautifully-written account by one of our best writers about the intimate lives of Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and the poems they produced. Set mostly in 1797 in the West Country, the book is enhanced by Tom Hammick’s bold, colourful illustrations.
3. You can’t resist a dystopian tale with a literary twist…
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is set in an alternative Britain where Margaret Thatcher has lost the Falklands War, Tony Benn is Prime Minister and Alan Turing is a whiz inventor of AI. Don’t worry, there’s a powerful love triangle too, involving a man, a woman and a bot.
4. You think no book or film has ever quite lived up to One Day…
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls is his latest tragicomedy about first love. When 16-year-old Charlie meets Fran, his world is turned upside down in more ways than one. Nicholls says he wants us to read it and whisper, ‘Yes, I remember what that felt like’. As if!
5. The book everyone’s talking about…
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo tells the true stories of three American women’s erotic lives, in microscopically intense detail. Lina is married with two children and has a husband who won’t touch her; Maggie has an affair with her teacher but ends up taking him to court, while Sloane discovers she’s become a sex object.
6. A perfect lightness of touch brought to serious issues…
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, which has just won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a perfectly judged examination of inbuilt racism in the US. Set in Atlanta Georgia, a black yuppie couple’s lives are torn apart when husband Roy is wrongly accused of rape and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Oprah loves it.
7. You want a seriously lolz beach read…
Reader, I Married Me! by Sophie Tanner is a hilariously funny romcom about a woman who decides to tie the knot with herself after a string of failed relationships with men. Full of witty one-liners, it’s based on the author’s own ‘sologamist’ wedding. Yes, she really did marry herself!
8. You’re looking for a serious blockbuster…
Stalingrad: A Novel by Vasily Grossman is a tale of families, love and war, set in 1942, as Hitler and Mussolini are planning their offensive on the Eastern front. This is the first English translation of the prequel to his great masterpiece, Life and Fate, which has been called a 20th century War and Peace.
9. How to sound smarter…
Factfulness by Hans Rosling is the runaway bestseller that explains why we are so ignorant about global trends and how the world is in much better shape than we imagine, in lots of ways, like education and poverty. The trouble is we love to gobble up bad news and our instincts predispose us to the negative. This will set you straight.
10. You’re a Midult…
I’m Absolutely Fine: A Manual for Imperfect Women by er, US, has just come out in paperback, hurrah! A wry, edgy, heartfelt look at what it is to be a grown-up woman. Any way this is embarrassing so we will just leave you with what Claudia Winkleman said about it: “I have been waiting for this book my entire life. It’s brilliant.”
