Sapna talks about The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. This is a book about books that is a charming fictional account of Queen Elizabeth who takes to reading in her 80's thanks to a mobile library on the palace grounds that she stumbles upon. Among the various books about books that we've read, this one stands out for its wonderfully drawn characters, and the way it describes the delightful journey of a once non-reader into the world of books.

Shilpa talks about All The Beauty in The World, a memoir by Patrick Bringley. Reeling from the loss of his brother, Patrick felt he needed to drop out of the world for a bit, by taking in his own words "the most straightforward job he could think of in the most beautiful place he knew" As a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is an account of his decade at the Met and all that it changed within him.

Sapna talks about A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan. This is one of his earliest books, published in 1997. It's a book about building and architecture, a wonderful account of him learning and acquiring the skills he needed to build himself a writing room - a place of his own.

Join Shilpa as she talks about one of her favourite writers, Barbara Pym, who made a remarkable comeback after being inexplicably dropped by publishers in the 1960s who believed there was no longer a market for her gentle social comedies focused on the lives of ordinary women. How wrong they were.