Book 1
‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel is a 1960 memoir by based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Book 2
‘Can’t Even’ by Anne Helen Peterson is about the socio-economic and generational causes of millennial burnout. She analyses the different impact burnout has on different demographics and explores, in detail, how the millennial generation has been most affected.
Book 3
‘These Violent Delights’ by Chloe Gong is a fantasy re-imagining of Romeo and Juliet set in 1920s Shanghai. It features feuding families, political turmoil and passionate characters. This was a book I read for my book club with my friends.
Book 4
‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold is a thoroughly researched and detailed novel which recounts the lives of the five women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper in Victorian London. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane were all women who were victims of the time. Attitudes towards women were poor and this book reveals just how hard life was for them.
Book 5
‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ by Anthony Doerr weaves together stories set in the future in space, in the past in Constantinople and in present-day Idaho. An ancient tale of magic and adventure weaves these stories together in a way that provides lots of twists and turns. There are intriguing characters and reflections on Earth and life there which have got me thinking about a lot of different things.
Book 6
‘Meddling Kids’ by Edgar Cantero is a modern, thriller take on the types of stories you used to see in Scooby Doo. It’s set in the 70s/80s and follows a group of young detectives as they re-explore an old case from their youth. This isn’t my usual kind of book as it is not my genre. It was an interesting read but sadly, overall, I wasn’t very keen on it.
Books 7, 8 & 9
‘Heartstopper’ by Alice Osman is a graphic novel which tells the story of boy meets boy, and everything that follows. It has recently been turned into a live-action series on Netflix. These are a fantastic, easy, light and heartwarming read. I would highly recommend them!
“Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they’ve never met … until one day when they’re made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn’t think he has a chance. But love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realised. By Alice Oseman, winner of the YA Book Prize, Heartstopper is about love, friendship, loyalty and mental illness. It encompasses all the small stories of Nick and Charlie’s lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us.”
Book 10
‘Fifty Words for Snow’ by Nancy Campbell is a beautiful book which explores, as it says, fifty words for snow through languages used throughout the world. Each comes with a history and a story representing the diversity of culture and tradition. It also explores themes of climate change. Romance, nostalgia, faith and quaint tales are in abundance. Each chapter starts with a page showing a single, individual snowflake in all its glory. I absolutely loved this book.
Book 11
I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would! It really showed Mrs Obama staying true to herself throughout an extraordinary period of time. She talks about her passions and how she worked to share them with America and the world. She also speaks openly about her fondness for our Queen! It was also fascinating to learn more about her youth and where she grew up.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her — from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it — in her own words and on her own terms.
Book 12
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping novel about one girl’s struggle for justice.
Book 13
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
Book 14
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life – until the unthinkable happens.
Book 15
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
Book 16
Every summer Quill and his friends are put ashore on a remote sea stac to hunt birds. But this summer, no one arrives to take them home. Surely nothing but the end of the world can explain why they’ve been abandoned – cold, starving and clinging to life, in the grip of a murderous ocean. How will they survive?
Book 17
Some doors are locked for a reason… Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s crumbling country estate, The Bridge. With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband’s awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. For inside her new home lies a locked room, and beyond that door lies a two-hundred-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure – a Silent Companion – that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself…
Book 18
Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery – he has never been told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother.
But he knows that the fate of his grandfather’s brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death – a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all.
Edvard’s desperate quest to unlock the family’s tragic secrets takes him on a long journey – from Norway to the Shetlands, and to the battlefields of France – to the discovery of a very unusual inheritance. The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is about the love of wood and finding your own self, a beautifully intricate and moving tale that spans an entire century.
Book 19
In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. She posted a piece on her blog, entitled: ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’.
Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanised by this clear hunger for open discussion, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings.
Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism.
It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.
Book 20
It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring ten-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.
The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds.
Book 21
Ariadne, Princess of Crete and daughter of the fearsome King Minos, grows up hearing stories of gods and heroes. But beneath the golden palace something else stirs, the hoofbeats and bellows echoing from the Labyrinth below. Every year its captive, the Minotaur – Ariadne’s brother – demands blood.
When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne sees in him her chance to escape. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that drawing the attention of the mercurial gods may cost her everything.
In a world where women are nothing more than the pawns of powerful men, will Ariadne’s decision to risk everything for love ensure her happy ending? Or will she find herself sacrificed for her lover’s ambition?
Book 22
This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.
Visits to places such as Chernobyl, an uninhabited Scottish island and Detroit help Cal Flyn explore what happens when places are left to their own devices without human intervention or presence.
Book 23
The storm comes in like a finger snap . . .
1617. The sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a vicious storm. A young woman, Maren, watches as the men of the island, out fishing, perish in an instant.
Vardo is now a place of women.
Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet has been summoned to bring the women of the island to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In her new home, and in Maren, Ursa encounters something she has never seen before: independent women. But where Ursa finds happiness, even love, Absalom sees only a place flooded with a terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs . . .
Book 24
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story.
As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.
A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes can live without her past.
