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...

The Swerve is a book about a book, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a work of philosophy that attempts to explain the nature of the world that we live in, and tries to lay out what it is that makes for a good human life. This was a work that was well known in Ancient Greece, but was since lost. It was rediscovered six hundred years ago, at a time when most of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient word had been lost....and it became one of the many forces that inspired the renaissance...

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...

David Sedaris is one of my favourite writers. He has the rare ability to write comedy and pathos with equal skill. His writing is autobiographical and deeply personal. He writes about his family, his complicated and somewhat difficult relationship with his father, his middle-class upbringing in the American South, growing up gay in the seventies, his partner, Hugh and their life together, the years he spent living as an expat in France and England, and more...

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...

This is a memoir, a meditation on life for a single person in a couple-dominated world, the generally accepted but questionable notion that having a spouse and kids is the only path to happiness, the role of friendship, the necessity of solitude, and the importance of building a true acquaintance with oneself...

Ursula Le Guin is one of the most influential writers of the  20th century. She wrote twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, five collections of essays, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books and four works of translation. She won numerous awards and honours, including multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, the National Book Award, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters...

In this poignant and hilarious memoir, the author recalls his childhood in Northern Ireland after the death of his mother when he was just five years old. Raised by his beloved but often overwhelmed father alongside his ten siblings (divided into three classes - the Big Ones, the Middle Ones, and the Wee Ones ), O'Reilly, one of the Wee Ones, paints a vivid picture of growing up in a large, grief-stricken, eccentric, and fiercely loving family during the tail end of the Troubles...

This is a book about Ben Franklin. It’s a biography, but the writer focuses not just on what Franklin said and did in his life, but on what he thought about life, and how it should be lived, so it is philosophy as well. What makes it even better is that Eric Weiner doesn’t just write about Franklin, he engages with his ideas and tries to apply them to his own life...

This is a remarkable and very necessary book that is not so much about idleness as it is a call to examine our lives and our choices, and to do a better job of living than we currently do. Hodgkinson’s definition of idleness is not that we sit around and do nothing, but that we build enough down-time into our lives that we can make the time to think, to read, to reflect, to appreciate art, and to engage in rewarding and hands-on activities like cooking, gardening, engaging with the natural world, and having good times with friends and family, doing things that truly bring us joy...