The Book Club Review

It’s the end of summer, so Kate and Laura are looking back over their holiday reading, the books they loved, the ones that disappointed them, and the unexpected discoveries that made their reading lists longer rather than shorter.

We talk about Alex E. Harrow’s huge fantasy novel The Everlasting, and why it turned out to be a surprisingly divisive read. Kate reports back on her pick from the Booker longlist, The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley. She's also recently completed The Power Broker, Robert Caro's iconic book on New York master-builder Robert Moses, but was it worth the read? She's also discussing The Silver Book, Olivia Laing's most recent work of fiction. In Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, Laura found an interesting book club choice, while Kate's flagging up Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, and while on the campus novel theme she also read Joanna Miller’s The Eights, set in 1920s Oxford. Laura wraps things up with the wonderfully atmospheric The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo.

But there’s more as pod-regular Phil Chaffee joins us with two of his favourite summer reads, Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards.

As summer comes to an end, we’re also looking ahead to Booker season, with the shortlist just around the corner and plenty more reading on the horizon.

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Complete booklist

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow

The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

Starling House by Alex E. Harrow

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley

Famesick by Lena Dunham

My Phantoms by Gwendolyn Riley

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Crudo by Olivia Laing

The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon

Fathers & Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do (Anton Hur)

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinnerman

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

The Chair (Netflix)

Monsters by Claire Dederer

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

The Eights by Joanna Miller

The Night Tiger and The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online (Houman Barekat, Robert Barry and David Winters, eds.)

When We Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

Timecodes for the time-poor

00:00 — Welcome & summer reading

02:00 — What did we actually read this summer?

Holiday reading plans, library books and the perennial problem of taking too many books away with you.

04:00 — The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow

Time loops, quests and a very divided reaction.

15:30 — The End of the Power Broker by Robert Caro

Kate tackles another Booker longlist book and asks: why is this on the longlist?

20:00 — The Booker longlist pick

A frank discussion of Gwendolyn Riley's The Palm House and the pleasures (and pains) of reading for the Booker.

22:20 — The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

A surprise for Kate after her mixed reaction to Laing’s Crudo.

27:30 — An accidental book-club adventure

Laura's brilliant idea: abandon the overheated book-club meeting and send everyone into Foyles to choose books.

28:40 — The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra

A chance discovery — and a Hilary Mantel endorsement that seals the deal.

35:50 — Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Sex, power, academia and the deliciously murky moral territory of a campus novel.

40:00 — The Eights by Joanna Miller

Women in academia, 1920s Oxford and coming-of-age just after World War I

42:40 — The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

Mystery, folklore, tigers and colonial Malaysia, Laura's perfect summer read

50:45 — Phil’s summer reading

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux and The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

54:20 — Booker season begins

The shortlist is coming, and summer reading gives way to required reading.

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Looking for the perfect summer read? Kate is joined by Laura Potter and returning guest Phil Chaffee to compare recent reads before putting this year's biggest summer books to the test. Inspired by reading lists from The New York Times, The Times, Lit Hub and The Booker Prize, they decide which books are beach reads, suitcase books, and which they'd happily leave behind at the airport. Plus, they reveal the books they're packing for their own holidays.

Books discussed

Recently read

• The Golden Mean — Annabel Lyon
• Plato and the Tyrant — James Romm
• Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon
• The Game of Kings — Dorothy Dunnett
• The House of Niccolò series — Dorothy Dunnett
• We Are Green and Trembling — Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (trans. Robin Myers)

Evaluating the picks from the summer reading lists

• Hot Milk — Deborah Levy
• The Eighth Life — Nino Haratischwili
• A Month in the Country — J. L. Carr
• Whistler — Ann Patchett
• The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout
• Land — Maggie O'Farrell
• Instructions for a Heatwave — Maggie O'Farrell
• John of John — Douglas Stuart
• I Want You to Be Happy — Jem Calder
• The Director — Daniel Kehlmann
• Villa Coco — Andrew Sean Greer

Our holiday recommendations

• The Feast — Margaret Kennedy
• Free Food for Millionaires — Min Jin Lee
• Famesick — Lena Dunham
• Swimming Home — Deborah Levy
• Radiant Star — Ann Leckie
• The Balkan Trilogy — Olivia Manning
• Wait for Me — Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire
• The Pursuit of Love — Nancy Mitford

Also mentioned

• Pachinko — Min Jin Lee
• Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo — Douglas Stuart
• Less — Andrew Sean Greer
• Transcription — Ben Lerner
• Reading Lolita in Tehran — Azar Nafisi

Timecodes

00:00 Welcome

02:44 Phil on The Golden Mean

07:39 Laura on Dorothy Dunnett

11:55 Kate on Green and Trembling

16:54 Beach read game rules

18:20 Booker picks: Hot Milk

19:40 Doorstop epic The Eighth Life

21:46 Classic: A Month Country

23:07 NYT Beach Reads, Whistler by Ann. Patchett

25:33 Elizabeth Strout and American vibes

28:22 Switching to the (UK) Times list

28:29 Times list features

29:03 Maggie O'Farrell debate

30:51 Douglas Stuart pick John of John

33:05 New paperback picks

35:03 Kehlmann masterpiece The Director

38:28 The LitHub list of lists

38:55 Villa Coco verdict

41:44 Get more from the pod on Patreon

43:26 Our personal holiday reads

44:03 Phil recommends The Feast

46:01 Min Jin Lee deep dive

48:18 Lena Dunham Famesick

51:44 Laura's summer stack

53:56 Mitfords and Tana French

01:02:20 Final wrap and farewell

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What makes secondhand books so irresistible? Kate and Laura celebrate the joy of used bookshops, their favourite places to shop, literary finds and the thrill of unexpected discoveries. There's also an interview with W. B. Gooderham, author of Dedicated To, a book that explores the touching, funny and sometimes heartbreaking messages that can be found in the handwritten dedications tucked inside secondhand books. Whether you're a devoted secondhand book hunter or simply love hearing readers talk about books, this episode is a celebration of literary serendipity, book collecting, and the enduring pleasure of finding exactly the right book when you least expect it.

Book list and links

Bookshopaholics: The Paperhound • Episode #139

‘Owner of Vancouver's eclectic MacLeod’s Books marks 50 years of serving bibliophiles’,John Mackie for the Vancouver Sun

The Second Shelf bookshop (now in online form)

Aphrodisiacs in your Garden by Charles Connell

The Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Things I Learned on the 6.28 by Stig Abell

Griffin Bay Bookstore, San Juan island

Episode #51: Barnabees Bookshop

Skoob books

Dedicated to, compiled by W.G. Gooderham

The Diary of a Nobody by George and Wheedon Grossmith

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend

Wise Children by Angela Carter

Arabella by Georgette Heyer

House of Niccolo and Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett

Judd Books, Bloomsbury

Timecodes

00:00 Welcome and a pod milestone

00:48 Secondhand book-hunting

03:01 Browsing vs. buying

07:58 Secondhand treasures

11:52 Kate's love of books about books

16:23 Dream bookshops

17:18 Our favourite places to buy secondhand

20:42 Patreon Break

21:50 Kate meets W.B. Gooderham

23:43 Skoob books and inscribed editions

27:22 How Wayne's collecting began

28:41 Dedicated To: The forgotten friendships hidden stories and lost loves found in secondhand books

30:50 Releasing Books Back

32:09 To inscribe or not to inscribe

33:07 Diary Of A Nobody by George and Wheedon Grossmith

37:32 Adrian Mole Editions

38:39 Wise Children

39:51 Pnin – a collection that took Wayne years to assemble

41:28 Bookshelves and Umberto Eco's library

44:04 Laura shares some of her favourite used-book haunts

47:54 Why secondhand books matter

49:08 Episode wrap

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When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.

Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email [email protected], or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?

Check out the Patreon for all kinds of extras, from our monthly book club to extra shows and Kate's reading diaries. Find it at patreon.com/thebookclubreview

The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.

*underlined – the ones Kate has read

1. Middlemarch
2. Beloved
3. Ulysses
4. To the Lighthouse
5. In Search of Lost Time
6. Anna Karenina
7. War and Peace
8. Jane Eyre
9. Pride and Prejudice
10. Madame Bovary
11. The Great Gatsby
12. Bleak House
13. Emma
14. Mrs Dalloway
15. Moby-Dick
16. Nineteen Eighty-Four
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude
18. Persuasion
19. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
20. Wuthering Heights
21. The Portrait of a Lady
22. Things Fall Apart
23. Midnight’s Children
24. The Remains of the Day
25. Lolita
26. Don Quixote
27. The Trial
28. The Brothers Karamazov
29. Pale Fire
30. Frankenstein
31. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
32. The God of Small Things
33. David Copperfield
34. Wolf Hall
35. Great Expectations
36. The Handmaid’s Tale
37. Invisible Man
38. The Age of Innocence
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God
40. Song of Solomon
41. Heart of Darkness
42. The Magic Mountain
43. Housekeeping
44. Giovanni’s Room
45. The Golden Notebook
46. The Leopard
47. Vanity Fair
48. The Metamorphosis
49. A Fine Balance
50. Wide Sargasso Sea
51. My Brilliant Friend
52. The Golden Bowl
53. The Transit of Venus
54. Orlando
55. The Waves
56. Mansfield Park
57. The Sound and the Fury
58. Disgrace
59. Never Let Me Go
60. Howards End
61. The Rings of Saturn
62. Half of a Yellow Sun
63. White Teeth
64. The Good Soldier
65. The Color Purple
66. The Master and Margarita
67. The Man Without Qualities
68. Blood Meridian
69. Crime and Punishment
70. Jude the Obscure
71. Kindred
72. Our Mutual Friend
73. Austerlitz
74. Nervous Conditions
75. The Bluest Eye
76. Dracula
77. The Rainbow
78. A House for Mr Biswas
79. Go Tell It on the Mountain
80. Rebecca
81. Buddenbrooks
82. The End of the Affair
83. A Farewell to Arms
84. The Talented Mr Ripley
85. The Vegetarian
86. The Turn of the Screw
87. The Line of Beauty
88. Ragtime
89. The Left Hand of Darkness
90. Jacob’s Room
91. Life and Fate
92. Sentimental Education
93. Invisible Cities
94. The Known World
95. The Return of the Native
96. Pedro Páramo
97. Catch-22
98. The Road
99. The Go-Between
100. My Ántonia

Particular books we touch on in the show

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
• The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
• A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
• The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
• The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
• The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
• The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
• The New Life by Tom Crewe
• Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
• The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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George Saunders is back with Vigil, his first novel since Lincoln in the Bardo. In this episode, Kate is joined by fellow book podcasters Jenny King and Sarah Kemp from The Bookcast Club to discuss it

Given his back catalogue, does Vigil live up to the high expectations we have Saunders, one of America's most admired contemporary writers? Why is he so fond of writing about ghosts? Do death, redemption, capitalism and climate change make for an enjoyable read? Do we want novels to be enjoyable? Or do we want them to make a point?

We're also exploring Leo Tolstoy's classic novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, cited by Saunders as a key influence on Vigil, and asks what both books reveal about how we live, how we die, and whether it's ever too late to change.

Along the way, Kate, Jenny and Sarah share recent reads, their love of a Kobo e-reader, and recommend books (and one film) following on from our book club read.

Books discussed

Vigil by George Saunders

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Transcription by Ben Lerner

Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Storyland by Catherine McKinnon

Plus a recommendation for the film Palm Springs.

Patreon

Access extra episodes, join the pod book club and support the show at Patreon.com/bookclubreview

Follow on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast

email [email protected]

Timestamps

1:26 Recent Reads & Kobos – Bookshelf chat, Kobo e-reader enthusiasm, and current reads including Ben Lerner's Transcription and Kiran Millwood Hargrave's Almost Life.

11:54 About The Bookcast Club

14:41 Patreon Break

16:17 What Is Vigil? – Spiritual guide Jill escorts a remorseless fossil fuel tycoon toward death. Audiobook excerpt included.

22:16 Discussing Jill

28:22 Climate & KJ Boon

31:21 A Christmas Carol Parallels

34:16 Broader Reflections – Kate wonders if great writers can no longer make moral judgments in today's climate; Transcription raises similar questions.

35:54 Verdict on Vigil

38:30 The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Tolstoy's novella discussed as Saunders' cited influence.

43:00 Tolstoy the Man

48:36 Recommendations

52:42 Wrap-up

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In this episode Kate is joined by Amanda Moulson, co-host of Curious Readers, to consider the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Ahead of the prize ceremony next week, which one do we think will win?

Perhaps like Amanda you have read them all, but if, like Kate, you're going to struggle to get to all six, which ones should you focus on? Which are the standout reads? Which are the books most likely to delight, surprise, and stay with you long after you've turned the final page?

We're covering all six books, and you’ll also find out what Amanda has on her TBR, the books she most loves recommending, and how a busy book podcaster organises her bookshelves.

Timestamps for the time-poor

00:00 Welcome and Prize Preview

01:31 Meet Amanda Molson

01:44 Quickfire Reading Habits

03:18 Bookshelf Organization

04:06 Favorite Recs and Current Reads

06:20 Kate’s Power Broker Detour

08:54 Patreon Readalong and Book Club

10:12 Women’s Prize Context and History

15:09 Shortlist Book 1 Flashlight

20:51 Shortlist Book 2 Dominion

25:23 Shortlist Book 3 The Correspondent

26:31 Sybil’s Dark Past

27:07 Audiobook Clip Letters

29:15 Cozy Yet Dark

30:22 Famous Author Replies

31:14 Sybil Effect Debate

32:49 Craft and Book Clubs

33:28 The Mercy Step Setup

34:40 Mercy Step Clip

36:35 Child Narrator Power

37:12 Small Press Spotlight

38:01 Kingfisher Obsessive Love

38:50 Kingfisher Clip Warning

40:40 Kingfisher Reactions

41:35 Heart the Lover Clip

44:07 Two Halves Romance

45:36 Illness and Mortality

47:33 Marketing and Triggers

49:04 Winner Predictions

51:23 Wrap Up and Patreon

52:25 Kate’s Recent Reads and Outro

Books mentioned

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate

Open Book by Jessica Simpson

A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

We Are Green and Trembling Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

The Director by Daniel Kehlman

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

You'll find all the titles we mentioned in our Bookshop.org list. Buying books there helps support independent bookshops, and also supports The Book Club Review.

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What if the antidote to our increasingly frantic world isn't a grand gesture, but simply the act of paying attention?

This week, Kate and Laura are joined by actor, podcaster, and author Miranda Keeling – returning to the pod to talk about her wonderful new book, The Place I'm In, a collection of the small, luminous moments she's gathered from daily life. After her debut The Year I Stopped to Notice, Miranda is back with more of her 'noticings': fragments from parks, supermarket queues, and streets that remind us how much magic is hiding in the everyday.

Their book club read is the perfect complement: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Şavas – a soulful, quietly funny novel following Asya and Manu as they hunt for an apartment, trying on different futures for size in a city far from home. Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days in the park gathering footage – an anthropologist of the ordinary – and her project rhymes beautifully with Miranda's own.

Plus recommendations inspired by the art of the everyday.

You can find out more about Miranda and her work at mirandakeeling.com, and her podcast Stopping to Notice – over 200 five-minute episodes of binaural location recording – is the perfect companion listen.

Find all the books mentioned at our bookshop.org shop. And if you'd like to join Kate's monthly book club and reading community, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

Booklist

Ashes and Stones by Alison Shaw – a journey through Scotland in search of the women killed in the witch trials

Open Book by Jessica Simpson – Laura takes a nostalgic trip back through her twenties

No Such Thing as Monday by Sîan Hughes – a brilliantly written novel from the author of Pearl; up there with Eimear McBride ( A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) and Maggie O'Farrell

The Anthropologists by Aysgul Savas

The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman's newsletter

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Flesh by David Szalay

The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler

Memories of Distant Mountains (illustrated notebooks) by Orhan Pamuk

A Nobel Laureate's journals offer much colour but little drama, by Dwight Garner for the NYT (gift link)

Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading by Robert Douglas Fairhurst

The Place I'm In by Miranda Keeling

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A new local literary festival provided the perfect opportunity to record the very first Book Club Review live. Kate is joined by author and broadcaster Bee Rowlatt, whose books include the best-selling Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, which went on to be dramatised by the BBC, and In Search of Mary inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft. Bee also runs the Wollstonecraft Society, a human rights charity. Her debut novel, One Woman Crime Wave, is a novel that explores the realities of wealth, influence, and inequality in present-day London and offers plenty of talking points for book club discussion and debate. Join our festival audience to hear more about Bee's life and work and why Mary Wollstonecraft and her writing has never been more relevant.

Books mentioned

Find all the titles below in The Book Club Review's bookshop on Bookshop.org

Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

One Woman Crime Wave by Bee Rowlatt

An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly

Uprising by Tahmima Anam

Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter

Notes

Find out more about The Mary Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture (The Guardian)

Follow the Barnsbury Book Festival for news and updates

Patreon

Discover what's on offer over on The Book Club Review Patreon. In becoming a member you'll get extra shows and become part of a warm community swapping book recommendations and connecting over our shared love of books and reading. At the book club tier you can join our monthly book club and come and talk books with Kate in person every month. And as a paying member you're supporting Kate in making this independent podcast.

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The Book of Love vs The Dud Avocado: Fantasy, Paris & Book Club Verdicts

In this episode of The Book Club Review, we return to our book club roots with two wildly different novels: The Book of Love by Kelly Link and The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.

The Book of Love is the first novel from acclaimed American short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link. In a seemingly ordinary coastal town three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle. Vulture magazine named it ‘the escapist masterpiece of the year’ but what did Laura’s book club think?

Our second book-club pick is Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado – a fizzing, exuberant novel from 1958 about a young American woman let loose in Paris, determined to live life on her own terms. It gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living, a book that feels bracingly modern despite being nearly seventy years old. But did it make for a good book club read?

We've also got some listener feedback on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, we're catching up on recent reads, and the books we’re excited about next.

Get more from the pod on Patreon

Come behind the scenes and enjoy extra episodes, book club membership, community chat threads, readalongs, Kate's reading diaries and more, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview

Booklist

You'll find all the books mentioned in the pod's Bookshop.org bookshop

Bookshop.org list

Slow Days Fast Company by Eve Babitz

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

Other links of note

One Grand Books

Frances Ambler's substack

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Valentine’s-ish Literary Romance: Lucas Oakley on Nearly Departed, Boys Book Club & love stories that stay with you long after reading

Join Kate and Lucas Oakeley for this Valentine's-ish episode of The Book Club Review, recorded at Housmans Bookshop in King's Cross. We're exploring literary fiction where love takes centre stage, but the reward is complexity rather than a guaranteed happy ending.

Nearly Departed manages to combine the enjoyable tropes of Rom Com with the thoughtful exploration through writing that we associate with literary fiction. We explore how Lucas’s real-life experiences—witnessing a fatal cycling accident and his father's first wife dying young—shaped the book's exploration of love, loss, and second chances, and the art of balancing humour with heartbreak while playing with rom-com tropes.

Of course, we’ve got plenty of recommendations for love stories with emotional depth, including Lily King's Writers & Lovers, Andrew Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, David Nicholls' Sweet Sorrow, Douglas Stuart's John of John, and hot-book-of-the-moment Wuthering Heights. 

We’re also discussing Boys Book Club, the organization Lucas has co-founded to encourage men to read and talk about books. What makes a great book club pick for an all-male book club? We’re going to be finding out.

We’ve even got Valentine's recipe – rigatoni with a long-simmered ‘Sunday sauce’ – and a couple of cocktail ideas. 

All in all, the perfect ingredients for a literary Valentine’s weekend.

Become a member of The Book Club Review community

Join The Book Club Review community on Patreon for ad-free listening, extra episodes, Kate’s weekly reading diaries, the opportunity to connect with other listeners in the chat groups, and at the higher tier to talk books in-person with Kate at the monthly book club. Find all the details and how to sign up at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

Booklist

You can find all the titles mentioned in this episode in the Book Club Review bookshop on bookshop.org

Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley

 Heart The Lover by Lily King

All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Comfort MOB: Food that Makes You Feel Good

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger

Links

Follow Lucas on Instagram and Tik Tok @lucasoakeley, and you can find out all the details for the Boy’s Book Club at theboysbookclub.co.uk

Housmans bookshop, the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959

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