A word-of-mouth sleeper hit, Where The Crawdads Sing stunned the publishing world when sales took off and the book shot onto bestseller lists. It was all the more surprising as the author was a 70-year-old scientist new to writing fiction. Barkley Cove is a quiet town surrounded by marshland on the coast of North Carolina. When a […]

Part novel, part poem, Lanny evokes a typical English village whose residents are observed by an ancient spirit of nature – who in turn is taking a particular interest in one child. The Guardian called it ‘a fable, a collage, a dramatic chorus, a joyously stirred cauldron of words’, but what did Kate’s book club make of […]

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang clocked in at number 80 on The Guardian’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. And Barack Obama’s a fan too. But what about Laura’s book club? What did they make of this collection of eight sci-fi short stories, one of which formed the basis for […]

Fleishman is in Trouble tells the story of Toby, a successful NYC doctor whose almost ex-wife Rachel has vanished, leaving him alone with their two children. But is she the selfish, self-absorbed, neglectful mother he portrays? Finally free from his nightmare marriage, Toby Fleishman is ready for a life of online dating and weekend-only parental […]

Pat Barker’s retelling of Homer’s Iliad from a female perspective proves a surprisingly marmite read. The Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize and received widespread critical praise but what did Kate’s book club think? Our narrator is Briseis, a Trojan queen who witnesses the destruction of her city at the hands of […]

We delve into the whirlwind story of Elizabeth Holmes and her biotech company Theranos. At its height it was valued at 9 billion dollars. At its heart was a product that didn’t work. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup […]

A sweeping and evocative portrait of an Egyptian family at a time of great social change, from Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz. The novel follows one family over the course of the years 1917–19, a time of great change in Egypt that culminated in the overthrow of the British Protectorate. We meet al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd […]

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s superbly titled debut novel, has been one of the literary sensations of 2019 – nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and long listed for the Booker. But what did both our book clubs make of it? Does it merit all the acclaim? Listen in to find out. Heads up: this […]