RAG Demo

Tag: 2010s

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Daisy Jones and the Six
    • Malibu Rising
    • Valley of the Dolls

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Conversations with Friends
    • Norwegian Wood
    • Beautiful World, Where Are You

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Great Alone
    • Educated
    • To Kill a Mockingbird

  • Gone Girl

    Nick and Amy Dunne were once a glamorous New York couple, both writers, until the recession cost them their jobs and they moved to Nick's small hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, to care for his ailing mother. On the morning of their fifth anniversary, Amy disappears, leaving signs of a struggle in their living room.

    The story alternates between Nick's account of the investigation and entries from Amy's diary charting their courtship and marriage. Police and media attention soon turn on Nick, whose awkward behaviour and evasions make him look guilty. As each narrator reveals more, the reader is forced to keep revising what they believe about both of them and about the marriage itself.

    Flynn's novel is a sharp dissection of marriage, media frenzy and the roles people perform for each other, including the much-quoted idea of the effortlessly agreeable 'cool girl'. Its unreliable narration made it a publishing phenomenon and a model for a wave of domestic thrillers. David Fincher's 2014 film, with a screenplay by Flynn, was a major success.

    Book details

    AuthorGillian Flynn
    First published2012
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreThriller
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)422
    SettingNorth Carthage, Missouri, and New York City, around 2012

    Themes

    • Marriage
    • Deception
    • Media sensationalism
    • Identity performance
    • Gender roles

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy dark psychological suspense and unreliable narrators.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Girl on the Train
    • Sharp Objects
    • Big Little Lies

  • The Martian

    A dust storm forces the crew of the Ares 3 mission to abort and leave Mars in a hurry. Astronaut Mark Watney is struck by debris during the evacuation, and his crewmates, believing him dead, depart without him. He wakes up wounded, alone, with no way to contact Earth and supplies meant to last a few weeks, while the next mission will not arrive for years.

    Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer, records his progress in sardonic log entries. He grows potatoes in Martian soil, manufactures water from rocket fuel, rigs rovers for long drives and improvises communication. Meanwhile NASA eventually realises he is alive, and engineers, managers and his former crew wrestle with how, and whether, to bring him home.

    Weir first released the novel in instalments on his website and then as a cheap e-book in 2011 before a publisher picked it up. Its appeal lies in plausible problem-solving and a hero who meets disaster with jokes. Readers enjoy the realistic science explained with clarity. Ridley Scott's 2015 film starring Matt Damon brought it to a huge audience.

    Book details

    AuthorAndy Weir
    First published2011
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)369
    SettingAcidalia Planitia and other regions of Mars, plus NASA on Earth, near future

    Themes

    • Survival
    • Ingenuity
    • Humour under pressure
    • Teamwork
    • Space exploration

    Who should read it

    Readers who love hard science, problem-solving and a funny, resilient narrator.

    If you liked this, try

    • Project Hail Mary
    • Artemis
    • Seveneves

  • When Breath Becomes Air

    Paul Kalanithi had studied English literature and biology at Stanford, history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, and medicine at Yale before training as a neurosurgeon at Stanford. In his final year of residency, with prestigious job offers waiting, he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer despite never having smoked.

    The first part of the book describes how a young man obsessed with the question of what gives life meaning chose to pursue it through the brain, the organ where identity resides. He conveys the punishing hours of surgical training and the weight of operating on patients whose speech or personality could be changed by a millimetre. The second part shifts to his illness: treatment, the uncertainty of prognosis, his return to the operating room, and the decision with his wife Lucy to have a child.

    Kalanithi died in March 2015 before finishing the manuscript; Lucy Kalanithi wrote an epilogue, and Abraham Verghese contributed a foreword. Spare and lyrical, it is often read by medical students and by families facing serious illness. The book asks how a person should spend limited time and what work, love and meaning look like when the future suddenly shrinks.

    Book details

    AuthorPaul Kalanithi
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)228
    SettingStanford, California

    Themes

    • Mortality
    • Medicine
    • Meaning
    • Illness
    • Fatherhood

    Who should read it

    Anyone facing serious illness, caring for someone who is, or interested in the ethics and inner life of medicine.

    If you liked this, try

    • Being Mortal
    • Man's Search for Meaning
    • The Year of Magical Thinking

  • Educated

    Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children raised on a mountain in Idaho by parents who distrusted the government, public schools and hospitals. Her father, convinced the world was about to end, stockpiled supplies and put his children to work in his scrapyard, where serious injuries were treated with her mother's herbal remedies rather than at a hospital. Tara had no birth certificate until she was nine.

    At seventeen, having never attended a classroom, she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass the ACT and enrol at Brigham Young University. There she heard of the Holocaust for the first time and began to see her upbringing from the outside. Scholarships took her to Cambridge and Harvard, and she earned a doctorate in history.

    The heart of the memoir is less about academic success than about the cost of change. Westover writes about a violent older brother, the pull of family loyalty, and the struggle to trust her own memory when relatives remember events differently. Her clear, unsentimental prose made the book a long-running bestseller.

    Book details

    AuthorTara Westover
    First published2018
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)334
    SettingRural Idaho, Utah and Cambridge, England

    Themes

    • Education
    • Family loyalty
    • Abuse
    • Self-invention
    • Memory

    Who should read it

    Readers moved by stories of self-transformation and anyone wrestling with the pull between family and personal growth.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Glass Castle
    • Hillbilly Elegy
    • I Am Malala

  • Born a Crime

    Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg in 1984 to a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when their relationship was illegal under apartheid's Immorality Act. His very existence was evidence of a crime, so as a small child he was often kept indoors and could not be seen in public with his father.

    The memoir is organised as a series of linked essays rather than a strict chronology. Noah recounts life in Soweto with his grandmother, being too light-skinned for Black neighbourhoods and too dark for white ones, using language to slip between groups, running a pirated CD business as a teenager in Alexandra township, and brushes with the police. Each chapter is introduced by a short explanation of the history or politics behind it.

    At the centre stands his mother, Patricia, a devout, independent woman who refused to let the system define her son. The book is laugh-out-loud funny yet unflinching about poverty, racism and domestic violence. It won the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor and has a young readers' edition.

    Book details

    AuthorTrevor Noah
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)304
    SettingJohannesburg and Soweto, South Africa, 1980s-2000s
    AwardsThurber Prize for American Humor 2017

    Themes

    • Apartheid
    • Race and identity
    • Mothers and sons
    • Poverty
    • Language

    Who should read it

    Readers who want to understand apartheid's legacy through a personal story that is as funny as it is moving.

    If you liked this, try

    • Long Walk to Freedom
    • Educated
    • The Glass Castle

  • Shoe Dog

    In 1962, fresh from Stanford business school, Phil Knight persuaded his father to lend him money for a trip around the world and pitched himself, with no company behind him, to the Japanese shoemaker Onitsuka Tiger. He came home as the American distributor of their running shoes and started selling them from the back of his car at track meets in Oregon.

    The memoir covers the years from that crazy idea to Nike's public offering in 1980. Knight describes his partnership with Bill Bowerman, his old University of Oregon track coach, who tinkered with soles on a waffle iron, and the eccentric early employees who ran the business. Much of the drama is financial: constant cash crises, hostile banks, a bitter split with Onitsuka and the creation of the Nike brand and swoosh, plus a ruinous customs duty dispute.

    Knight writes with unusual candour about self-doubt, mistakes and the toll on his family. Little of it reads like a corporate history; it is a story about persistence and the chaotic reality of starting a company. The final chapters step back to reflect on what the company cost him and on the people who made it possible, giving the memoir an unexpectedly moving close.

    Book details

    AuthorPhil Knight
    First published2016
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)386
    SettingOregon and Japan, 1962-1980

    Themes

    • Entrepreneurship
    • Persistence
    • Partnership
    • Risk
    • Sport

    Who should read it

    Aspiring founders and sports fans who want an honest account of how messy and uncertain building a business really is.

    If you liked this, try

    • Steve Jobs
    • Zero to One
    • The Ride of a Lifetime

  • I Am Malala

    Malala Yousafzai wrote this memoir with British journalist Christina Lamb a year after a Taliban gunman shot her in the head on her school bus in October 2012. She was fifteen. The book begins with that day and then steps back to tell the story of her family and of the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan.

    Her father, Ziauddin, ran a school and was an outspoken advocate for education, and Malala grew up in his classrooms. As the Pakistani Taliban gained control of Swat, banning girls from school, blowing up buildings and broadcasting threats over the radio, she began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC Urdu service and giving interviews. The book describes the army offensive that displaced her family and the uneasy return home.

    Later chapters cover her treatment in Birmingham, England, and her new life there. Alongside the personal story she explains Pashtun culture, Pakistani politics and her Muslim faith. In 2014 she became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The memoir is also a portrait of a close father-daughter relationship and a reminder of how ordinary family life continued under fear and military conflict.

    Book details

    AuthorMalala Yousafzai
    First published2013
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)327
    SettingSwat Valley, Pakistan, and Birmingham, England

    Themes

    • Girls' education
    • Courage
    • Extremism
    • Family
    • Activism

    Who should read it

    Young readers and adults who want to understand the fight for girls' education and life under extremist rule.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Diary of a Young Girl
    • Long Walk to Freedom
    • Educated