This is one of Michael Pollan’s earliest books, written more than thirty years ago. By his own account, he’s always been a keen gardener, and though this is the only book that he’s written about gardening, it is (as tends to be the case with most of his writing) one of the best books about gardening you could possibly read...

This novel, set in contemporary Palestine, centers on Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Palestine after a long absence to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa and teaches at a university in Tel Aviv. While Haneen and Sonia are not estranged per se, there is a distance there, to be bridged. Haneen introduces Sonia to a close friend of hers, Mariam, a theatre director who is putting together a production of "Hamlet" in the West Bank. It is art but it is also an act of resistance...

This is a charming book. It’s warm and funny and gently satirical. It has a fairly unusual plot, and it's very entertaining. It's an easy read in the sense that the narrative carries you along, and it's so absorbing that it's hard to put the book down. This book is set in the 1930's, in a small English village called Silverstream...

This is a memoir that recounts the ten years that the author spent as a museum guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's a book about the museum and all the wonderful treasures that it holds, while also being a reflection on the importance of sometimes slowing down and taking a beat to look around us....

It is 1938, the eve of WWII. London. There is tension in the air as war seems inevitable. Stella Fry, a young Englishwoman who has recently returned to London from Vienna, finds herself jobless and heartbroken. In search of employment, she answers an advertisement from the renowned mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript typed. However, the very next day, Stella is shocked to learn of Newman's sudden and unexplained death...

Italo Calvino is a writer who constantly reinvented himself, moving from gritty realism to whimsical folk tales to some of the best non-linear experimental fiction of the 20th Century.His early work was realistic and reflective of the political climate of the day, but he gradually began to drift away from realism. Calvino spent years collecting and translating hundreds of traditional Italian folk tales. It's perhaps because of this that a lot of his stories read like modern myths...

This is a book about books, and about the best there is of this genre. It's a collection of letters written over a period of twenty years...a correspondence between a reader and a bookseller. The reader is Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and the bookseller is Frank Doel, who worked for Marks & Co, a second-hand bookshop located at 84 Charing Cross Road, London...

Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology and the effect it has on us for more than a decade. In this book he traces the development of communication technologies right from the letters that people began writing to each other millennia ago, to the development of printing and newspapers, to the telegraph and telephone, to mass media like radio and TV, all the way to the internet and social media...

Barbara Pym is one my favourite writers, someone who deserves to be better known than she is. She was born in Shropshire in 1913. Her father was a solicitor, and her mother was an organist in their local church. Her mother’s involvement in the parish and what it did to their social life had a clear impact on Pym’s novels which are full of entertaining vicars and curates...

This book is a sprawling exploration of English society in a period of tumultuous change. Set in the fictional town of Middlemarch in the early 1830s, it explores, through the lives of the inhabitants, ambition, idealism, the status of women, and the intricate web of social relations in a community on the cusp of modernity...

This book, as it says in the title, is a diary, a day-to-day record of one year in a bookshop written by the owner Shaun Bythell who runs a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown which is Scotland’s book town. His shop is called, very simply, The Bookshop...

While the Lord of the Rings is the most popular of Tolkien’s works, this is a book that he never intended to write. He was first and always a philologist, and it was languages that fascinated him. He began to make up and create languages as a teenager, and it was the urge to give these languages a people, a culture, and a history that drove him to create an entire mythology, which eventually, became The Silmarillion...