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...

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...

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 is a poignant, and often humorous, story of the Mendes family in Bombay, about living with a family member struggling with mental illness and the profound impact this has on all their lives. The story is narrated by the unnamed son, who is trying to come to terms with his mother Imelda’s (Em) recurring battles with bipolar disorder, while his father, Augustine (‘The Big Hoom’) serves as the family’s stoic anchor amidst the chaos, of which there is plenty...

The novel is set in Vienna in the 1960’s, in a café that becomes the gathering place for a varied and initially unconnected group of people, who eventually grow into a community. The story begins when Robert Simon, a young man, who spent years working in the market stalls takes a leap of faith to open his own cafe...

Penelope Lively's novel Heat Wave offers a psychologically astute portrayal of a family grappling with the destructive cycle of infidelity, set against the backdrop of a long, hot English summer...

This is a story about time travel, and it is set in the now almost forgotten Paris of the 1950’s. Laurain indulges himself and his readers by writing about the city as it was then. He writes about the people of the day, both the famous and the perfectly ordinary, as well the places that have since disappeared or have changed so much as to be unrecognisable...

Old Herbaceous tells the story of a man and his life in the garden, surrounded by plants and flowers that he gives all his time and his love to. At the beginning of the book we meet Burt Pinnegar, a somewhat crotchety old man, the retired head-gardener at the manor house, who's looking back on his life and reliving his memories...

This is a charming book that I find myself wanting to recommend to everyone. It's a book about books and reading, but unlike other books of this kind, which tend to be non-fiction, it's a novel, and it features a very real person, Queen Elizabeth, who is the uncommon reader in the title. It's a delightful account of the journey of a once non-reader into the world of books. 

This is a story about a school-teacher, Mr Chipping, who his students fondly call Mr Chips. He's the beloved Latin teacher at a quiet boys' school in England called Brookfield. When the book opens, we meet him as an old man, living in rooms across the road from his beloved school, still organising his days by the school bell, inviting the new boys, and some of the older ones over to tea, and keeping up with the goings on at the school...

The novel tells the story of Brian, a solitary middle-aged man living a carefully ordered life in London. He works at the Camden Council, eats lunch at the same cafe every day, and returns to his quiet flat every evening. His general approach to life can be summed up as, "Keep watch. Stick to routine. Protect against surprises." However, despite his preference for solitude, he does yearn for a bit more, as he enters his forties.