My Wife Likes Books

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Feyre’s arrived in Prythian, and she isn’t winning Sophie over. On her first read, Soph’s finding the pace a slog and Feyre a petulant head to be stuck in — and she’s firmly on Team Tamlin, who has, after all, just lost his friend to Feyre’s arrow. Sarah reads all that hostility as trauma and finds Feyre much better company once she knows her family’s safe. Sallie’s surprised by how much she dislikes her on a reread.

Along the way we try to pin down what Tamlin actually looks like in beast mode (current best guess: the animated Beast with Mr Tumnus’s horns). Sophie makes the case that ACOTAR is a deeply camp book, and we get serious about Feyre’s illiteracy — could a heroine who struggles to read be part of why this series has pulled so many people into reading? Sarah also explains why the readalong has her thinking about capping how many books she reads a year.

We’re live at The Bookcellar on Stokes Croft, Bristol on 26 October to celebrate the new ACOTAR book. Tickets have sold out, but we’ll be streaming on Instagram and TikTok from around 9:30pm. If you run a Bristol book club, Sarah has a strong recommendation involving wine matched to whatever you’re reading.

Next week: an Offering episode. In two weeks: ACOTAR up to and including chapter 31.

⚠️ Spoilers for A Court of Thorns and Roses up to chapter 16. Some gory descriptions.

Books discussed

• A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Mist and Fury – Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Splintered Harmony – Sarah J. Maas
• Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
• Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros
• A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
• Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
• Oddbody - Rose Keating

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Sarah hates dust jackets so much she bins them the day she buys a hardback. She brings them to The Offering expecting an easy sacrifice — and faces a surprise. Sophie turns up with evidence (a hot-pink surprise under the Dungeon Crawler Carl jacket), while Sallie makes the case for the flap as a built-in bookmark that tracks your progress. Oscar chips in with the price tag on a first-edition Great Gatsby jacket, and Sarah compares the whole thing to buying suede shoes that need a protective spray.

Before that, Sarah’s halfway through The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett and seeing faces in her bathroom downlights. Sophie’s back from Keswick with a stack of discounted hardbacks — Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling and Douglas Stuart’s John of John among them. Sallie’s listening to R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis on audio, which sparks a debate about what actually makes a book romantasy.

We’re live at The Book Cellar on Stokes Croft, Bristol on 26 October to celebrate the new ACOTAR book. Tickets have sold out, but we’ll be streaming on Instagram and TikTok from around 9:30pm.

Next week: A Court of Thorns and Roses, chapters 6–16.

Full list of books mentioned:

• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels – Janice Hallett
• The Appeal – Janice Hallett
• The Difference Engine – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
• The Gallows Pole – Benjamin Myers
• Katabasis – R.F. Kuang
• Babel – R.F. Kuang
• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario – Matt Dinniman
• Dungeon Crawler Carl – Matt Dinniman
• London Falling – Patrick Radden Keefe
• Empire of Pain – Patrick Radden Keefe
• Say Nothing – Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Snakehead – Patrick Radden Keefe
• Agrippa — Robert Harris
• Conclave – Robert Harris
• John of John – Douglas Stuart
• Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart
• Any Human Heart – William Boyd
• Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver
• Oh William! – Elizabeth Strout
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
• The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
• Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle - Arthur Conan Doyle
• Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros
• A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Splintered Harmony - Sarah J. Maas

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

We read a book! There's thoughts. Some notes. Critiques! Can we say sinisterism?

Is A Court of Thorns and Roses just The Hunger Games with fae? Sophie, our first-time ACOTAR reader, can't unsee it. Sarah and Sallie are rereading and have spotted the seeds Sarah J. Maas planted for book two. In our first Season 2 readalong episode, we go through chapters 1-5: a starving hunter, a very large cat wolf with horns, and a crossing into Prythian.

Spoilers for chapters 1-5 only. We won't spoil anything from later in the series.

We also settle how to pronounce Feyre and Prythian (we think), and we disagree about whether Feyre is any fun to spend time with.

Books and authors mentioned

• A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury, Sarah J. Maas
• Throne of Glass and Crescent City, Sarah J. Maas
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros
• Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb
• A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
• A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (our Season 1 readalong)

Next readalong episode: everything up to and including chapter 16, out in two weeks. Our regular episode lands next week.

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Is Fourth Wing worth the hype? Sallie says it's the most fun you can have with a war college and a dragon. Sophie thinks it never lets up. Sarah likes that the dragons talk. We put Rebecca Yarros's romantasy juggernaut on the altar for The Offering, and we're doing it on the day her Fourth Wing short story collection, Threshing Day, is published.

Season 2 starts with a proper catch-up. Sophie read 13 books in August, Sallie got told to read a horror and a romance, and Sarah had a five-star read she never wants to think about again.Books and authors mentioned

• Fourth Wing and Threshing Day, Rebecca Yarros
• A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas (our Season 2 readalong)
• The Poppy War and Yellowface, R.F. Kuang
• Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao
• Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb
• The Correspondent, Virginia Evans
• Greta & Valdin, Rebecca K. Reilly
• Lean Fall Stand, Jon McGregor
• Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason
• Really Good, Actually, Monica Heisey
• Green Dot, Madeleine Gray
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
• Wool, Hugh Howey
• Nevermoor, Jessica Townsend

Come and hang out with us Tell us your Fourth Wing verdict by DM on Instagram or TikTok (@mywifelikesbooks). Send a voice note and we might play it on the show.

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Produced by Oscar Rogers. Show music adapted from "What a Wonderful Day" by Shane Ivers (silvermansound.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Artwork by Keith Kilpin

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

One more bonus before Season 2 lands — and this time we're grading our own homework. Back before summer, each of us picked a book for the other two: something we were sure they'd love, or at least survive. Today we're finding out which picks were hits, which one was a genuine flop, and whether this experiment has finally turned Sarah into a fantasy reader.

What we've been reading: Before the verdicts, a quick round-up of current reads — Sophie's revisiting a half-remembered classic from school, Sallie's fighting through some steampunk terminology, and Sarah's 80% into an ARC sequel to one of her all-time favourite books with absolutely no idea where it's going.

The book swap: Six books, three readers, and at least one certified regret. We cover an oral-history rock novel, a body-horror grief story that maybe moved too fast, a horror pick that taught Sallie something important about her own limits, a 900-page vampire epic with the best final sentence any of us has read this year, a Sarah J. Maas series that isn't the one you'd expect, and the fantasy book that finally cracked Sophie's "why has no one made me read this yet" list.

Books mentioned:

• Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
• The Difference Engine – William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
• Untitled Time Traveler's Wife sequel – Audrey Niffenegger
• Daisy Jones & The Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Shark Heart – Emily Habeck
• Horrorstör – Grady Hendrix
• The Passage – Justin Cronin
• Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas
• Assassin's Apprentice – Robin Hobb

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Scalpel. Suture. TBR pile. In this bonus episode, Sarah, Sophie and Sallie put down their own books for a minute to diagnose the reading lives of Grey's Anatomy's most iconic characters — because if they're real (and we've decided they are), they definitely read.

For each character, the hosts debate three things: their ultimate favourite book, their unexpected guilty-pleasure genre, and the one thing that makes them DNF a book on the spot. Expect fierce disagreement, a genuinely unhinged Miranda Bailey romantasy theory, and Derek Shepherd getting exactly the level of scrutiny he deserves.

Books mentioned:

• Black Sun – Rebecca Roanhorse
• The Difference Engine – William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
• I'm Glad My Mom Died – Jennette McCurdy
• Ripe – Sarah Rose Etter
• Notorious RBG – Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik
• Normal People – Sally Rooney
• When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
• Becoming – Michelle Obama
• It Ends With Us – Colleen Hoover
• The New Life - Tom Crewe

This is our second summer bonus episode — the main show returns in September with a new readalong: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

Find every book we discuss on our Bookshop.org store support the show on Buy Me a Coffee, and join the conversation on Fable.

☕ Buy Me a Coffee 📚 Fable

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Welcome to the first of our summer bonus episodes! While we're on our break between seasons, we're catching up on everything happening in the book world — the awards drama, the TBR-worthy new releases, and the book-to-film adaptations you need on your radar before autumn.

What We've Been Reading Sarah's deep in Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore (climate horror meets romance meets thriller — a lot going on), Soph's comparing notes on Jane Harper's Exiles, and Sallie's 40 pages into the delightfully weird Earthlings by Sayaka Murata.

Your Summer Reading List, Sorted We round up the biggest prize winners so far this year, including the Indie Book Awards (fiction winner: The Names by Florence Knapp) and the British Book Awards — which introduced brand-new categories this year for graphic novels, romantic fiction, and sci-fi/fantasy. Plus: the Booker Prize longlist is about to drop, so we tell you when to watch for it.

Books Becoming Films (Get Ahead of Everyone Else) From Christopher Nolan's star-studded The Odyssey to Verity, Sense and Sensibility, and The Love Hypothesis, we run through the book-to-screen adaptations landing this year — so you can read the book before your friends even know there's a film.

Autumn's Biggest Releases We preview the new releases we're most excited about, including new books from Naomi Alderman, Madeline Miller, and Becky Chambers — and yes, we talk about that Sarah J. Maas announcement.

Coming Next Season We're back in September with a new readalong: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. Grab your copy now so you're ready to start with us.

Correction: Sarah get's Naomi Alderman's book title wrong, it's actually called "Don't burn anyone at the stake today."

Find us on Instagram and TikTok @mywifelikesbooks · Join our Fable book club · Buy us a coffee. · Buy a book mentioned in the episode.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Season one ends where it began: with A Little Life. Spoilers ahead — we're finishing our readalong with the big questions. Did Hanya Yanagihara always intend for Jude to die by suicide, or did Willem's death push the story there? Is this book a masterpiece or trauma porn, and does it matter that readers can't agree? We talk favourite and least favourite characters (sorry, Caleb), what Harold and Malcolm's quiet forms of love taught us, and whether this book should ever come with a "don't read this" warning from the person who loves it most.

Before that: it's our last episode before the summer break, so we've swapped books with each other to read while we're off air — Throne of Glass, The Passage, Daisy Jones & The Six, Assassin's Apprentice, Shark Heart, and Horrorstor all make an appearance. Plus a mid-year check-in on our reading goals (spoiler: Sarah is not on track).

We're back after the summer with A Court of Thorns and Roses as our next readalong — follow us on Instagram and TikTok @mywifelikesbooks for updates on where to start reading.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

If you've ever argued with a friend about whether a book prize actually reflects what real people read — or felt personally attacked when someone sacrifices your favourite Emily Henry — this episode is for you.

We discuss: whether the Booker Prize is for readers or for people who want to be seen reading; the International Booker vs the Women's Prize and which one actually has the best track record; the Hay Festival's 2026 pleasure reading list and why it's everything the Guardian's "best novels" list isn't; and what it means when a book wins an award but nobody enjoys reading it.

Plus: The Offering. Sophie sacrifices Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) — bleak, monotonous, and full of Russians called the same name. Sallie attempts to sacrifice Happy Place (Emily Henry) and Sarah absolutely will not have it. Sarah venerates Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer — the book that'll give you a framework for JK Rowling, Michael Jackson, and every other artist you love and shouldn't.

Then we reach the end of A Little Life. Sections 6 and 7: Dear Comrade and Lispenard Street. Full spoilers for these sections only.

Content warnings for the readalong segment: suicide, self-harm, death, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, eating disorders.

Books discussed: Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) · Happy Place (Emily Henry) · Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma (Claire Dederer) · Orbital (Samantha Harvey) · Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders) · Hamnet (Maggie O'Farrell) · Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) · Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) · A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)

Find us on Instagram and TikTok @mywifelikesbooks · Join our Fable book club · Buy us a coffee · Buy a book mentioned in the episode

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

If you've ever DNF'd a book on Kindle that you loved in print, or fallen in love with a story only because of its narrator, this episode is for you.

We discuss: whether audiobooks, physical copies, or Kindle actually help you connect with a book; why Babel by RF Kuang might be the worst possible novel to read on an e-reader; tandem reading and Spotify's new page-sync feature; reading speed, narration quality, and why fantasy is notoriously hard on audio.

Plus: The Offering returns. Sophie venerates Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Sallie brings Philip Pullman's underrated Sally Lockhart series. Sarah makes the case for Babel (RF Kuang) — but will Sallie ever actually finish it?

Then we get into Section 5 of A Little Life — The Happy Years. Full spoilers for this section only. Content warnings: sexual assault, child sexual assault, sex work, physical abuse, domestic violence, death, injury detail.

This episode features voice notes from real listeners — including one who DNF'd A Little Life on audio, switched to print, and then DNF'd that too.

Books discussed: Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker) · The Sally Lockhart Series (Philip Pullman) · Babel (RF Kuang) · The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern) · Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) · Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer) · Private Peaceful (Michael Morpurgo) · Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) · A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)

Find us on Instagram and TikTok @mywifelikesbooks · Join our Fable book club · Buy us a coffee. · Buy a book mentioned in the episode.