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 […]

It’s a slight volume but Ahmet Altan’s memoir I Will Never See the World Again packs a powerful punch. Each of its short essays was smuggled out of the prison where Altan serves – and continues to serve – a life sentence. Ahmet Altan was imprisoned by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime in Turkey, during a period in which […]

We discuss Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, a rollicking historical novel set in 18th-century New York. Its plot is full of more twists and turns than a slide at Centerparcs so we’ve split the episode into two. The first half is the safety zone where we won’t spoil the plot for you, but if you have read […]

Masterpiece from the contemporary heir to Samuel Beckett? Or demanding endurance read with not nearly enough paragraph breaks? We debate Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel Milkman – a tale of one young woman’s struggle to retain her sense of self during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Suffocating gossip, ever-present violence and a surprising amount of humour. […]

What happens when all the black people in a Southern town decide to pack their things and leave? First published in 1962, A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley had been largely forgotten until rediscovered by journalist Kathryn Schulz. Her New Yorker article put it back on the map. Laura’s book club were intrigued by […]