The Trees was first published in 2021 and subsequently shortlisted for 2022’s Booker Prize as well as winning the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize that same year. So, depth and humour. Everett’s 22nd novel is set in the modern day during the first Trump administration, in Money, Mississippi. Whilst the outer world is circa 2016-2020, Money, […]
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Published in 2024, The List of Suspicious Things is the wonderful debut novel from Jennie Godfrey. It’s a story uncovering a mystery, filled with heartwarming characters, but also violence against women; hearing the story through Miv, a teenage girl, allows you to follow the story through innocent yet inquisitive eyes. The story is set
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Fundamentally is Younis’ debut, published in February this year. The work is already attracting a heap of positive attention: Younis has been selected as part of this year’s line-up of debut authors to watch by the Guardian and Fundamentally is currently shortlisted for 2025’s Women’s Prize. A brilliantly sharp and moving work, Fundamentally follows Nadia,
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The Color Purple was first published in 1982 and won critical acclaim with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film with the same name in 1985 and 2023 and has been regularly debated due to the themes of violence and domestic abuse, and
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The 50th anniversary edition of The Peregrine (first published in 1967) is a truly magnificent piece of nature writing. Written in diary form over the course of a single Winter, Baker takes the reader through his almost daily pursuit of peregrines around the Essex coast and nearby woodlands. Through the diary style, Baker encourages us
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I’d heard so many great things about this book. Quite simply, it is fantastic. The very many awards and shortlists support that feeling and include (but not limited to): Waterstones Debut Prize 2024, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2024, Authors Club prize for debut fiction, shortlisted in the Nero awards for debut fiction, shortlisted for the
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Published this year (2025), Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures is Farrer’s second book after the award winning Cold Fish Soup. Broken Biscuits is a series of essays (but this reads excitingly like short stories) based around his life with the subject being musing on his failures to meet the assumed cultural ideals of manliness.
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Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones was first published in 2006 and is a fictional tale based on the 1980s Bougainville Island civil war. It follows the life of Matilda, a teenage girl living with her mother, and her journey through life, in tension and under threat, with heroism and betrayal, love and loyalty all woven
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A Winter Book is a collection of short stories from the creator of the Moomins, Tove Jansson. I’d started this book when it was much colder, truly Winter. But having finished it on a March Sunday, Spring is on its way; the sky is clear and the sounds of grass cutting seem to form a
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Black butterflies is a truly gripping turmoiled tale of hope, love and heart-wrenching grief. Based in 1992, the book is set during the first year Sarajevo (a city in then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina) was under siege and closed off from the world. The story is told through Zora, a landscape artist and university
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