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  • Klara and the Sun

    Klara is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot companion sold to keep children company, and she narrates from her place in a city store. Unusually observant, she studies passers-by and the movements of the Sun, which she regards as a benevolent force that nourishes her and perhaps everyone else. She waits to be chosen.

    Eventually she is bought for Josie, a lively but chronically ill girl living with her anxious mother in a remote house. Josie's illness is linked to a procedure many families undergo to give their children advantages, and her neighbour and close friend Rick has not had it. Klara devotes herself to Josie's welfare and forms her own logic about how she might help.

    Ishiguro's first novel after his Nobel Prize returns to the territory of Never Let Me Go: a narrator with a limited view of a disquieting world. Through Klara's literal, generous perspective he raises questions about love, loneliness, artificial intelligence and whether a person can be replicated. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published2021
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)303
    SettingAn unnamed American city and a rural house, in the near future

    Themes

    • Artificial intelligence
    • Love and devotion
    • Loneliness
    • Faith
    • What makes a person unique

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a gentle, thoughtful novel about AI and human attachment.

  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

    Monique Grant is a junior reporter at a New York magazine, struggling with a stalled career and a collapsing marriage, when she is unexpectedly summoned by Evelyn Hugo. Evelyn, now in her late seventies, was one of the biggest film stars of Hollywood's golden age, and she has decided to tell her full life story, but only to Monique, for reasons she will not explain.

    In Evelyn's Manhattan apartment, the story unfolds husband by husband, from her escape from a poor Cuban-American childhood in Hell's Kitchen to studio-era stardom in the 1950s and beyond. She reveals the bargains she made with studios, gossip columns and the men she married, and the hidden love of her life, whose identity she had to protect for decades.

    Reid structures the novel around the seven marriages, one section for each, with interludes of magazine clippings and tabloid stories. It explores fame, ambition, bisexuality and the cost of living in secret. Initially a modest seller, it later became a huge hit through online reading communities, especially BookTok, and remains a book-club favourite.

    Book details

    AuthorTaylor Jenkins Reid
    First published2017
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)389
    SettingHollywood from the 1950s to the 1980s, and present-day New York

    Themes

    • Fame
    • Ambition
    • Hidden love
    • Sexuality
    • Sacrifice

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a glamorous, emotional story about Old Hollywood and the secrets behind a public image.

  • Normal People

    In the small town of Carricklea in County Sligo, Connell Waldron is a popular, quietly clever footballer, and Marianne Sheridan is a sharp, unpopular girl from a wealthy family. Connell's mother cleans Marianne's house. The two begin a secret relationship in their final year of school that Connell hides from his friends, setting a pattern of closeness and withdrawal.

    At Trinity College Dublin their social positions reverse: Marianne finds her circle while Connell feels out of place and anxious. Over four years they drift together and apart, through other partners, study abroad, depression and a troubled home life for Marianne, always drawn back by an understanding they share with no one else, and always hampered by what they fail to say.

    Rooney writes in clean, unadorned prose without quotation marks, paying close attention to power, class and consent in relationships. The novel won the Costa Novel Award and was named Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Its 2020 television adaptation became a lockdown sensation, introducing Rooney to an even wider audience.

    Book details

    AuthorSally Rooney
    First published2018
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)273
    SettingCarricklea, County Sligo, and Trinity College Dublin, 2011-2015
    AwardsCosta Novel Award 2018, British Book Awards Book of the Year 2019

    Themes

    • Class
    • Intimacy
    • Miscommunication
    • Mental health
    • Power in relationships

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy close, character-driven love stories about young adulthood.

  • The Midnight Library

    Nora Seed is thirty-five, living in Bedford, England, and convinced she has failed at everything. She quit a promising swimming career, walked out of a band that might have made it, cancelled her wedding and has just lost her job and her cat. One night, overwhelmed by despair, she decides she does not want to go on.

    She finds herself in a vast library that exists between life and death, watched over by Mrs Elm, the kindly librarian from her old school. Every book on the shelves holds a version of her life that might have happened had she made a different choice. Nora can step into any of them: Olympic swimmer, rock star, glaciologist in the Arctic, wife and mother, and test whether those lives would have made her happy.

    Haig, who has written openly about his own depression, uses a high-concept premise to explore regret, mental health and the value of an ordinary life. The tone is gentle and accessible, with short chapters and a philosophical bent touching on quantum ideas of many worlds. It became a major bestseller and won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2020.

    Book details

    AuthorMatt Haig
    First published2020
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)288
    SettingBedford, England, and a library between life and death
    AwardsGoodreads Choice Award for Fiction 2020

    Themes

    • Regret
    • Depression
    • Choice
    • Parallel lives
    • Hope

    Who should read it

    Readers who like uplifting, idea-driven fiction about second chances and mental health.

  • Where the Crawdads Sing

    In 1952, six-year-old Catherine 'Kya' Clark watches her mother walk away from their shack in the coastal marshes of North Carolina. Her older siblings soon leave too, and eventually her violent, drinking father disappears, leaving Kya to survive alone by selling mussels and smoked fish to Jumpin', a kind Black storekeeper, and his wife Mabel. Townspeople in Barkley Cove call her the Marsh Girl.

    A gentle boy named Tate teaches Kya to read and shares her love of the natural world, and she later becomes involved with Chase Andrews, the town's charming former quarterback. In a parallel timeline beginning in 1969, Chase is found dead below an old fire tower, and suspicion falls on the isolated young woman everyone has gossiped about for years.

    Owens, a wildlife scientist, fills the novel with precise observations of herons, fireflies, tides and shell patterns, and the marsh becomes a character in its own right. The book mixes coming-of-age story, romance and courtroom drama. It sold many millions of copies, stayed on bestseller lists for years, and was adapted into a 2022 film.

    Book details

    AuthorDelia Owens
    First published2018
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)368
    SettingCoastal marshes near the fictional town of Barkley Cove, North Carolina, 1952-1970

    Themes

    • Isolation
    • Nature
    • Abandonment
    • Prejudice
    • Resilience

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy nature writing woven into a coming-of-age mystery.

  • The Shining

    Jack Torrance, a former teacher and aspiring playwright, is a recovering alcoholic with a violent temper that has already cost him his job. He accepts a post as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a grand old resort high in the Colorado Rockies that is cut off by snow for months. His wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny come with him.

    Danny has a psychic gift the hotel's cook, Dick Hallorann, calls the shining, which lets him sense thoughts and glimpse the future. Before leaving for the season, Hallorann warns Danny that the Overlook has a dark history. As the snow closes in, Danny sees things in certain rooms and in the topiary garden, and Jack becomes increasingly absorbed in the hotel's past.

    King uses the haunted-house tradition to explore addiction, domestic violence and a family under pressure, drawing on his own struggles with alcohol. The isolation and slow psychological unravelling make it one of the most frightening novels in popular fiction. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, which King famously disliked, became a horror landmark in its own right.

    Book details

    AuthorStephen King
    First published1977
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)447
    SettingThe Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, during winter

    Themes

    • Addiction
    • Isolation
    • Domestic violence
    • Madness
    • Family

    Who should read it

    Horror fans and anyone curious about the novel behind one of cinema's scariest films.

  • The Godfather

    Vito Corleone, a Sicilian immigrant, has built the most powerful of New York's five Mafia families through loyalty, favours and calculated violence. At his daughter's lavish wedding in 1945, he grants requests from those who seek his help. His youngest son Michael, a decorated Marine who has kept away from the family business, attends with his American girlfriend Kay Adams.

    When the Don refuses to support a rival's move into narcotics, an attempt on his life plunges the families into war. The hot-headed eldest son Sonny takes charge, adopted son and lawyer Tom Hagen advises, and Michael finds himself pulled in. A period in Sicily and the brutal logic of power gradually transform him, while the book also follows figures such as the singer Johnny Fontane in Hollywood.

    Puzo presents the Mafia as a parallel society with its own codes of honour, family and justice, a portrait that shaped how the world imagines organised crime. The novel was a massive bestseller and became the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film, co-written with Puzo, often ranked among the greatest films ever made.

    Book details

    AuthorMario Puzo
    First published1969
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreThriller
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)448
    SettingNew York City, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Sicily, 1945-1955

    Themes

    • Family loyalty
    • Power
    • Corruption
    • Immigrant experience
    • Violence

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a gripping crime saga about family, honour and the price of power.

  • Rebecca

    The unnamed narrator, a timid young woman working as a paid companion to a vulgar American in Monte Carlo, meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy, brooding English widower. After a whirlwind courtship he marries her and brings her home to Manderley, his celebrated estate on the Cornish coast, where she feels gauche and out of place from the moment she arrives.

    Everywhere she turns she finds traces of Maxim's first wife Rebecca, who drowned in a sailing accident a year earlier and was, by every account, beautiful, accomplished and adored. The sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers, devoted to Rebecca's memory, makes the new Mrs de Winter feel like an intruder, and the narrator becomes consumed by comparison and jealousy as secrets begin to surface.

    Du Maurier opens with one of the most famous first lines in English fiction and sustains an atmosphere of mounting dread. The novel blends romance, psychological suspense and gothic mystery, and explores class, identity and the power of the dead over the living. Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

    Book details

    AuthorDaphne du Maurier
    First published1938
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)410
    SettingMonte Carlo and the Manderley estate in Cornwall, England, 1930s
    AwardsNational Book Award for Favorite Novel 1938

    Themes

    • Jealousy
    • Identity
    • Class
    • Obsession
    • The past haunting the present

    Who should read it

    Readers who love atmospheric gothic suspense and psychological tension.

  • The Silence of the Lambs

    A serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill is abducting and murdering young women across the American Midwest. Jack Crawford, head of the FBI's Behavioral Science unit, sends Clarice Starling, a promising trainee at Quantico, to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist held in a Baltimore asylum for a series of grotesque murders.

    Lecter agrees to help, but only in exchange for personal details of Clarice's own past, including a painful memory from her childhood in Montana. Their tense exchanges form the heart of the novel. When a senator's daughter is kidnapped, the clock begins to run, and Clarice must navigate FBI politics, the asylum's self-serving director and Lecter's games to find the killer.

    Harris combines procedural detail drawn from real FBI profiling methods with gothic menace and genuine psychological depth. Clarice is a determined, intelligent heroine in a male-dominated world. The novel won the Bram Stoker Award, and Jonathan Demme's 1991 film adaptation swept the five major Academy Awards, making Lecter a pop-culture icon.

    Book details

    AuthorThomas Harris
    First published1988
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreThriller
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)338
    SettingQuantico, Baltimore, Memphis and the American Midwest, 1980s
    AwardsBram Stoker Award for Best Novel 1988

    Themes

    • Evil and intellect
    • Women in male institutions
    • Trauma
    • Identity
    • Manipulation

    Who should read it

    Fans of dark crime fiction who want the definitive serial-killer thriller.

  • The Da Vinci Code

    Late one night, the elderly curator of the Louvre is murdered inside the museum, leaving behind a bizarre arrangement of his own body and a string of coded clues. Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology who happens to be in Paris, is summoned by the French police, who quietly regard him as their chief suspect.

    Sophie Neveu, a police cryptologist and the curator's estranged granddaughter, helps Langdon escape, and the two follow a trail of puzzles hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Pursued by a determined police captain and a fanatical monk serving a secretive Catholic organisation, they turn to an eccentric British historian, Sir Leigh Teabing, as the search widens to London and Scotland.

    Brown's formula of short chapters, cliffhangers, art history and conspiracy theories about the Holy Grail and early Christianity made the book one of the best-selling novels of the century. Historians and churches criticised its claims, which only fed public fascination. It inspired tourist trails around its locations and a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks.

    Book details

    AuthorDan Brown
    First published2003
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreThriller
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)454
    SettingParis, London and Scotland over about a day, early 2000s

    Themes

    • Secret societies
    • Religion and history
    • Codes and symbols
    • Conspiracy
    • Art

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a fast, puzzle-packed thriller full of art and conspiracy lore.