Looking for reading inspiration for your book group? Take a look at our recommended reads, curated especially for reading groups.
A luxury cruise liner, abandoned with no crew, steaming into the mid-Atlantic. And you are the only passenger left on board. Caz Ripley, a cafe owner from a small, ordinary town, boards the RMS Atlantica with her boyfriend Pete and a thousand fellow passengers destined for New York. The next morning, she wakes to discover that everyone else on board has disappeared. And that's just the beginning. Caz must prepare for a crossing that will be anything but plain sailing.
Suffolk, 1944. American pilot Charlie's second tour is about to draw to a close, but his heart is forever changed when he meets Kitty, a local land girl with dreams of joining the Women's Land Army. As love blooms, the pair are all too aware that every perilous mission Charlie flies may well be his last. Suffolk, 2023. When Kitty's granddaughter and ambitious tearoom owner Amy meets American tourist and photographer Jack, she agrees to show him around in exchange for his photographic talents. The deal quickly grows into an unexpected bond - but when long-buried secrets emerge, neither of their worlds will ever be the same again.
Set in a New York apartment building, 'Fourteen Days' is an irresistibly propulsive novel with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of neighbours has been secretly written by a different, major literary voice - from Margaret Atwood and John Grisham to Emma Donoghue and Celeste Ng. One week into lockdown, the tenants of a run-down apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop each evening and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants - some of whom have barely spoken to each other before now - become real neighbours.
When you're trained to protect the lives of others, how far will you go to protect your own? Laura is a perfectionist and extremely capable air ambulance doctor. As part of the ethics committee at the hospital, she is also the person who chooses whether critical care patients live or die. She's worked hard to get here: gruelling years at medical school, made bearable by her two best friends, level-headed Olivia and livewire Anjali. As wild all-nighters and exam pressure gave way to the struggles and joys of new motherhood and new jobs, their unbreakable bond has supported each other through it all. And then, one night, life overturns in a moment and the past threatens to shatter everything they hold dear in the present. Can even those we trust with our lives be dangerous in the right circumstances? And is there a limit to what we would do for those we love?
1759, Ipswich. Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into mental confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out. When the family move to Bath, the sisters are thrown into the whirl of polite society, where the merits of marriage and codes of behaviour are crystal clear, and secrets much harder to keep. As Peggy goes to greater lengths to protect her sister from the threat of an asylum, she finds herself falling in love, and their precarious situation is soon thrown catastrophically off course.
On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were 30 emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's ship The Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, The Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than 100 days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell.
When hero policeman Grant Cliveden dies from a poisoning in the Old Bailey, it threatens to shake the country to its core. The evidence points to one man. Jimmy Knight has been convicted of multiple offences before and defending him will be no easy task. Not least because this is trainee barrister Adam Green's first case. But it will quickly become clear that Jimmy Knight is not the only person in Cliveden's past with an axe to grind. The only thing that's certain is that this is a trial which will push Adam - and the justice system itself - to the limit.
