2026 Reading List
2026 Reading List
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
"84 Charing Cross Road meets A Man Called Ove in this Radio 2 Book Club pick: a heartwarming, witty story about the life of an extraordinary woman, told through her letters.
In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word.
But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest. "
Change by Édouard Louis
The major new novel from the once-in-a-generation author of The End of Eddy
"Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination and violence in his working-class hometown - so he sets out to study in Amiens, and, later, at university in Paris. He sheds the provincial 'Eddy' for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug dealers alike.
Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. Change is at once a personal odyssey, a story of dreams, friendship and the perils of leaving the past behind, and a profound portrait of a society divided by class, inequality and power." Translated by John Lambert
"The second novel in Marlon James's revolutionary DARK STAR TRILOGY.
In this mighty follow-up to his number one bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Booker-winner Marlon James once again draws on a rich tradition of African mythology, fantasy and history to tell the story of Sogolon the Moon Witch.
Part adventure story, part tale of an indomitable woman, Moon Witch, Spider King chronicles the antagonist-turned-antihero's journey from an ostracised no-name girl, hated by her brothers and made to live in a termite hill, to a woman with fully developed powers engaged in a long-standing feud with the Aesi, chancellor to the king."
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022
"It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church."