This is a novel about siblings, Peter, 32 and Ivan, a decade younger. When the story begins, the boys have just lost their father. Peter is in charge of the service, and he can’t help being embarrassed by his kid brother Ivan - chess whiz, socially awkward, in his ugly rented suit, looking utterly lost...

Natalia Ginzburg has a way of getting into the heart of everyday life, its small rewards and stubborn obstacles. Her prose is plain and spare. In both novellas, the narrator uses a flat register - either resigned to their circumstances or detached enough to tell the tale from a remove. Any emotion you feel is therefore your own as you read.

A professor of English literature, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out in this books to share his love for reading and to gently nudge those of us who have either never experienced, or have forgotten, the act of slow and leisurely reading — the sort of reading that we probably did quite naturally when we were children...

This is the first book in the Canon Clement mystery series written by Richard Coles. It's set in the late 1980's in the village of Champton St Mary. Canon Daniel Clement is the rector of Champton. He lives there with his two boisterous dogs and his widowed mother, Audrey, who moved in with him a few years ago...

This is an insightful memoir that intertwines the author's experiences as a long-distance runner with his thoughts on writing, life, and aging, Murakami uses his passion for running, which he took up in his early thirties, as a central metaphor for his life and his craft. He explores how the dedication, perseverance, and even the pain of long-distance running mirror the challenges and rewards of writing...

Matthew Crawford is a philosophy graduate turned think-tank employee turned motorcycle mechanic. An unusual trajectory that gives him a unique insight into life on both sides of the white-and blue-collar divide. It is his contention in this book, that it’s time to rethink and perhaps upend the narrative that higher education and knowledge work offer the only path to a successful and fulfilling life...

James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979) is best known for three thematically linked novels: Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip, collectively known as the Empire Trilogy. The Siege of Krishnapur, published in 1973, won that year's Booker Prize and was later shortlisted for the Best of the Booker in 2008...

Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, was published in 2023. This was one of my favourite reads that year and it's become a permanent fixture on my bookshelf. I’ve just been re-reading it and I love it as much as I did the first time...

The Persian Boy is a work of historical fiction by Mary Renault, published in 1972. It's the second book in her trilogy about Alexander the Great, following Fire from Heaven and preceding Funeral Games. However, it works perfectly well as a standalone novel...

William Dalrymple has a marvellous ability to write history that reads like a novel. This book is a narrative adventure in which he writes about the British in India during the 18th century, the relationship that soldiers and officers of the East India Company had with the people of India, Hindu and Muslim that they lived among. This was a time when they made an effort to learn Indian languages, understand the customs and the culture, take on local ways of living and being, and assimilated in more ways than one...

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...