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30 December 2020
Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction
1. Clara Stackhouse in The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith
2. Kenneth Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
3. The other children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
4. Uriah Heep in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. Lady Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
6. Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham
7. Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch by George Eliot
8. Alistair Robertson in The Cry by Helen FitzGerald
9. Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
10. Topher St Clair-Bridges/Tiger-Blue Esposito in One by One by Ruth Ware
23 December 2020
Top 10 Christmas crime stories
1. The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934)
2. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie (1938)
3. The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake (1941)
4. An English Murder by Cyril Hare (1951)
5. The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin (1975)
6. The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips (2000)
7. Money, Money, Money by Ed McBain (2001)
8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (2005)
9. A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny (2011)
10. The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by PD James (2016)
16 December 2020
Top 10 house parties in fiction
1. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353)
2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
3. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)
4. Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
5. Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie (1956)
6. Her First American by Lore Segal (1985)
7. Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
8. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (1992)
9. Transit by Rachel Cusk (2016)
10. Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (2017)
09 December 2020
Top 10 books about mermaids
1. Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox
2. The Deep by Rivers Solomon
3. Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué
4. The Pisces: A Novel by Melissa Broder
5. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower
6. The Sea Lady by HG Wells
7. The Mermaid Wakes by Canute Caliste and Lola Berg
8. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
9. The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N McIntyre
10. Ingo by Helen Dunmore
02 December 2020
Top 10 Shakespearean books
1. A Dictionary of the English Language by Dr Samuel Johnson
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
4. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
5. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
6. Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer
7. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
8. The Lodger, Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl
9. Nothing like the Sun by Anthony Burgess
10. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes
25 November 2020
Top 10 books about consent
1. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
2. You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian
3. This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
4. Milkman by Anna Burns
5. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
6. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
7. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
8. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
9. Boys & Sex by Peggy Orenstein
10. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel
18 November 2020
Top 10 books about great thinkers
1. St Augustine by Rebecca West
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil
4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn
5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi
6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey
7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis
10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre
11 November 2020
Top 10 books about Lebanon
1. A House of Many Mansions by Kamal Salibi
2. Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj by Samir Khalaf
3. A World I Loved by Wadad Makdisi Cortas
4. June Rain by Jabbour Douaihy, translated by Paula Haydar
5. Beirut by Samir Kassir, translated by MB DeBevoise
6. The Mehlis Report by Rabee Jaber, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
7. House of Stone by Anthony Shadid
8. Writing Beirut by Samira Aghacy
9. Lebanon: A Country in Fragments by Andrew Arsan
10. Teta, Mother and Me by Jean Said Makdisi
04 November 2020
Top 10 books about books
1. The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte
2. Lila, Lila by Martin Suter
3. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
4. In Praise of Lies by Patricia Melo
5. Death by Publication by Jean-Jacques Fiechter
6. The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester
7. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
8. Hocus Bogus by Émile Ajar
9. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
10. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
28 October 2020
Top 10 horror novels
1. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
3. Horns by Joe Hill
4. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
5. Ring by Koji Suzuki, translated by Robert B Rohmer and Glynne Walley
6. Psycho by Robert Bloch
7. The Passage by Justin Cronin
8. Misery by Stephen King
9. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
10. In the Woods by Tana French
21 October 2020
Top 10 books about the Himalayas
1. The High Road to China by Kate Teltscher
2. There’s a Carnival Today by Indra Bahadur Rai
3. Coronation Everest by Jan Morris
4. The Wayward Daughter by Shradha Ghale
5. A Rage for Rock Gardening by Nicola Shulman
6. Kathmandu by Thomas Bell
7. Thamel by Rabi Thapa
8. The King’s Harvest by Chetan Raj Shrestha
9. The Waiting Land by Dervla Murphy
10. Tibet on Fire by Tsering Woeser
14 October 2020
Top 10 books about creative writing
1. The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
2. Find Your Voice by Angie Thomas
3. Linguistics: Why It Matters by Geoffrey K Pullum
4. Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
5. Feel Free by Zadie Smith
6. Threads by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil
7. Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
8. On Poetry by Jonathan Davidson
9. Essays by Lydia Davis
10. Essayism by Brian Dillon
07 October 2020
Top 10 underrated Agatha Christie novels
1. The Big Four
2. Death Comes As the End
3. By the Pricking of My Thumbs
4. The Pale Horse
5. The Unexpected Guest
6. At Bertram’s Hotel
7. Halloween Party
8. Murder in Mesopotamia
9. Cat Among the Pigeons
10. Sparkling Cyanide
30 September 2020
Top 10 verse novels
1. Charlotte by David Foenkinos, translated by Sam Taylor
2. The Long Take by Robin Robertson
3. The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles
4. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
5. The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber
6. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
7. Booked by Kwame Alexander
8. Brand New Ancients by Kae Tempest
9. Citizen by Claudia Rankine
10. The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
23 September 2020
Top 10 books about social media
1. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
2. The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour
3. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
4. The Circle by Dave Eggers
5. The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
6. Tweets and the Streets by Paolo Gerbaudo
7. Crudo by Olivia Laing
8. Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic
9. Taipei by Tao Lin
10. Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
16 September 2020
Top 10 books of autofiction
1. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert, translated by Linda Coverdale
2. Mars by Fritz Zorn, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber
3. Practicalities by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray
4. A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård, translated by Don Bartlett
5. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie
6. Incest by Christine Angot, translated by Tess Lewis
7. Toxique by Françoise Sagan, translated by Frances Frenaye
8. White by Bret Easton Ellis
9. MD by Yann Andréa
10. Consent by Vanessa Springora translated by Natasha Lehrer 
​09 September 2020
Top 10 goddesses in fiction
1. The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino
2. Circe by Madeline Miller
3. Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie
4. Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
5. Ragnarok by AS Byatt
6. Ms Militancy by Meena Kandasamy
7. Boxers by Gene Luen Yang
8. The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies
9. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
10. Paradise by Toni Morrison
02 September 2020
Top 10 books about space travel
1. Carrying the Fire by Mike Collins
2. If the Sun Dies by Oriana Fallaci
3. How Apollo Flew to the Moon by W David Woods
4. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge by Asif A Siddiqi
5. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
6. The Martian by Andy Weir
7. The Invincible by Stanisław Lem
8. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
9. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26 August 2020
Top 10 books about Florence
1. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
2. The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert
3. Secrecy by Rupert Thomson
4. A Tale of Poor Lovers by Vasco Pratolini
5. Florence: A Delicate Case by David Leavitt
6. The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb
7. Hannibal by Thomas Harris
8. A Room With a View by EM Forster
9. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
10. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald
19 August 2020
Top 10 cousins in fiction
1. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
2. Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons by Honoré de Balzac
3. Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell
4. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
5. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
7. The Emperor’s Children by Clare Messud
8. Cousins by Salley Vickers
9. Two Cousins of Azov by Andrea Bennett
10. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
12 August 2020
Top 10 books about the Grand Tour
1. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Black (1992)
2. Of Travel by Sir Francis Bacon (1625)
3. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett (1751)
4. Travels through France and Italy by Tobias Smollett (1766)
5. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne (1768)
6. Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex Since the Grand Tour by Ian Littlewood (2001)
7. Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1816)
8. Ladies of the Grand Tour by Brian Dolan (1992)
9. Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817)
10. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789)
05 August 2020
Top 10 books about probation
1. Worst Case Scenario by Helen Fitzgerald
2. The Man on the Street by Trevor Wood
3. Slow Motion Riot by Peter Blauner
4. Humber Boy B by Ruth Dugdall
5. No Beast So Fierce by Ed Bunker
6. Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard
7. The Do-Right by Lisa Sandlin
8. Dead Inside by Noelle Holten
9. Boy A by Jonathan Trigell
10. Drama City by George Pelecanos
29 July 2020
Top 10 books by Charles Dickens
1. Selected Journalism 1850-1870 (edited by David Pascoe)
2. Sketches By Boz
3. American Notes
4. A Christmas Carol
5. David Copperfield
6. Great Expectations
7. Little Dorrit
8. Bleak House
9. The Old Curiosity Shop
10. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
22 July 2020
Top 10 books about adventures
1. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
2. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
3. Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings by Jonathan Raban
4. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
5. The Kick: A Life Among Writers by Richard Murphy
6. From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography by Margaret Fay Shaw
7. Dersu the Trapper by VK Arseniev
8. Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash
9. The Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator translated by Gerard McNamara
10. Red Dust by Ma Jian
21 July 2020
10 of the best books set in Turkey - that will take you there
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal
Human Landscapes from my Country by Nazim Hikmet
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar
The Iliad by Homer
The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin
The Time of Mute Swans by Ece Temelkuran
15 July 2020
Top 10 books about recovery
1. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
2. Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing
3. The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
4. Joy Enough by Sarah McColl
5. The Sober Lush by Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre Ward
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola
8. Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
9. Know My Name by Chanel Miller
10. Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth
15 July 2020
10 of the best novels set in Germany – that will take you there
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
They Divided the Sky by Christa Wolf
The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Why We Took the Car (‘Tschick’) by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer
This House is Mine by Dörte Hansen
08 July 2020
​Top 10 books about tumultuous times
1. The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth Century France by Mary C Mansfield
2. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara Hanawalt
3. Five Days in London, May 1940 by John Lukacs
4. Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and His Italian Ambassador by Catherine Fletcher
5. Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini
6. Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Families Under Fascism by Alexander Stille
7. Troubles by JG Farrell
8. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
9. The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History by Peter Heather
10. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
07 July 2020
10 of the best novels set in Russia – that will take you there
Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin translated by Anthony Briggs
Happiness is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky translated by Andrew Bromfield
The Underground by Hamid Ismailov translated by Carol Ermakova
He Lover of Death by Boris Akunin translated by Andrew Bromfield
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov in The Enchanted Wanderer and other stories, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky
2017 by Olga Slavnikova translated by Marian Schwartz
The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya translated by Polly Ganon
The Mountain and The Wall by Alisa Ganieva translated by Carol Apollonio
Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov translated by Katherine Dovlatov
The Women of Lazarus by Marina Stepnova translated by Lisa Hayden
01 July 2020
Top 10 best-dressed characters in fiction
1. The Silver Chair by CS Lewis
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
5. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
6. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
7. Monsieur Ka by Vesna Goldsworthy
8. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
9. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
10. The Secret Countess by Eva Ibbotson
30 June 2020
10 of the best books set in Japan – that will take you there
Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki
Some Prefer Nettles by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai
Vibrator by Mari Akasaka
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
24 June 2020
Top 10 books about remaking the future
1.  The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
2. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
3. Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
4. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
6. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
7. Natural History by Justina Robson
8. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
9. Way Station by Clifford D Simak
10. News from Gardenia by Robert Llewellyn
23 June 2020
10 of the best books set in Ireland – that will take you there
The Silent People by Walter Macken
Falling For A Dancer by Deirdre Purcell
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
The Green Road by Anne Enright
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
Normal People by Sally Rooney
The Sea by John Banville
17 June 2020
Top 10 books about witch-hunts
1. The Discoverie of Witches by Reginald Scot (1584)
2. The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson
3. Circe by Madeline Miller
4. The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
5. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas
6. The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown
7.  The Crucible by Arthur Miller
8. Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell
9. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé
10. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
16 June 2020
10 of the best books set in India – that will take you there
Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Boats on Land by Janice Pariat
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay
Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
10 June 2020
Top 10 books about Tokyo
1. The Little House by Kyoko Nakajima (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
2. Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri (translated by Morgan Giles)
3. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (translated by Meredith McKinney)
4. number9dream by David Mitchell
5. People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
 6. Out by Natsuo Kirino (translated by Stephen Snyder)
7. Underground by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel)
8. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (translated by Ralph McCarthy)
9. Friendship for Grown-Ups by Nao-cola Yamazaki (translated by Polly Barton)
 10. Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)
09 June 2020
10 of the best Latin American novels – that will take you there
Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos
Tierra del Fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Purple Land by WH Hudson
Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Piñeiro
03 June 2020
Top 10 four-dimensional novels
1. Flatland by Edwin Abbott
2. The Hall Bedroom by Mary Wilkins Freeman
3. The Time Machine by HG Wells
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
5. Teleportation Physics Study by Eric Davis, Warp Drive Metrics
6. The Mummy and Miss Nitocris by George Griffith
7. The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer
8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
9. The Fourth Dimension Is a Many Splattered Thing by Jack Kirby
10. Solid Geometry by Ian McEwan
02 June 2020
10 of the best novels set in Portugal – that will take you there
Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago
Hunting Midnight by Richard Zimler
Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali
Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Agustina Bessa-Luís, Maria Judite de Carvalho, Hélia Correia, Teolinda Gersão and Lídia Jorge
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Pereira Maintains by António Tabucchi
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel 
The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso
Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga
The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
27 May 2020
Top 10 Scottish crime novels
1. Laidlaw by William McIlvanney
2. The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh
3. The Jump by Doug Johnstone
4. The Long Drop by Denise Mina
5. Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin
6. Quite Ugly One Morning by Chris Brookmyre
7. A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
8. Two Way Split by Allan Guthrie
9. Worst Case Scenario by Helen Fitzgerald
10. Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride
26 May 2020
10 of the best books about mountains – for a virtual climb
Space Below My Feet by Gwen Moffat
Mountaineering in Scotland by WH Murray
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A Croft in the Hills by Katharine Stewart
No Map Could Show Them by Helen Mort
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
The White Spider by Heinrich Harrer
A Herd of Red Deer by Frank Fraser Darling
Sky Burial by Xinran
20 May 2020
Top 10 books about silence
1. Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
2. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
3. A Quiet Kind of Thunder by Sara Barnard
4. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
5. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
6. The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
7. Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson
8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
10. Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
19 May 2020
10 of the best novels set in Greece – that will take you there
The Odyssey by Homer
The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Little Infamies by Panos Karnezis
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis
Freedom and Death by Nikos Kazantzakis
The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell
The Names by Don DeLillo
Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths by Lucy Coats and Anthony Lewis
13 May 2020
Top 10 books about Iran
1. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
2. My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad translated by Dick Davis
3. Saved By Beauty by Roger Housden
4. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
5. Iran Between Two Revolutions by Ervand Abrahamian
6. Touba and the Meaning of Night by Shahrnush Parsipur
7. Things We Left Unsaid by Zoya Pirzad
8. A Selection of Poems from The Eight Books by Sohrab Sepehri, translated by Bahiyeh Afnan Shahid
9. Journey From The Land of No by Roya Hakakian
10. Iran: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat
12 May 2020
10 of the best novels set in Spain – that will take you there
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza
Offside by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Outlaws by Javier Cercas
The Baztán Trilogy by Dolores Redondo
In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda
Homeland by Fernando Aramburu
A Heart so White by Javier Marías
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga
06 May 2020
Top 10 books about nursing
1. Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
2. Notes on Nursing. What It Is, and What It Is Not by Florence Nightingale
3. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole
4. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
5. Endell Street by Wendy Moore
6. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
7. The Language of Kindness by Christie Watson
8. In the Midst of Life by Jennifer Worth
9. One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens
10. Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe
05 May 2020
10 of the best novels set in Italy – that will take you there
The Other End of the Line by Andrea Camilleri
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
A Room with a View by EM Forster
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Acqua Alta by Donna Leon
Ratking by Michael Dibdin
29 April 2020
Top 10 novels about moving
1. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
2. Good-bye Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson
3. Little Gods by Meng Jin
4. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
5. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
6. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
7. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
8. Eye Level by Jenny Xie
9. The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin
10. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
28 April 2020
10 of the best novels about France – that will take you there
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
Jean de Florette by Marcel Pagnol
Ripening Seed by Colette
Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène
22 April 2020
Top 10 Latin American short stories
1. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
2. The Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo
3. Absit by Angélica Gorodischer
4. The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow by Gabriel García Márquez
5. Perfumada Noche (Scented Night) by Haroldo Conti
6. The Fifth Story by Clarice Lispector
7. Letter to a Young Lady in Paris by Julio Cortázar
8. Las amapolas también tienen espinas (Poppies Also Have Thorns) by Pedro Lemebel
9. Sky and Poplars by Margarita García Robayo
10. Towards Happy Civilisation by Samantha Schweblin
15 April 2020
Top 10 novels about unconventional families
1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
3. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
5. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
6. There There by Tommy Orange
7. The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
8. Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
9. Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
10. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
08 April 2020
​Top 10 books about Londoners
1. Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza (1816)
2. London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1861)
3. Life and Labour of the People in London by Charles Booth (1892)
4. Living London, edited by George R Sims (1902-3)
5. Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill (1902)
6. An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile by Donall MacAmlaigh (1964)
7. Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)
8. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
9. One Way Ticket: The Autobiography of a London Cypriot by Fotis Loizou (2019)
10. London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God by Jerry White (2006)
01 April 2020
Top 10 Irish gothic novels
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
2. The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (1992)
3. Other Words for Smoke by Sarah Maria Griffin (2019)
4. No Bones by Anna Burns (2001)
5. By the Bog of Cats by Marina Carr (1998)
6. Himself by Jess Kidd (2016)
7. Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry (2012)
8. The Wych Elm by Tana French (2019)
9. Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan (2017)
10. A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen (1954)
25 March 2020
Top 10 novels and stories about shame
1. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll
2. Ransom by David Malouf
3. Unbecoming by Eric Michaels
4. Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
5. Scandal by Shusaku Endo
6. Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima
7. Love by Patricia Cornelius
8. The Book of Job
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz
18 March 2020
Top 10 books about boarding school
1. The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Frost in May by Antonia White
4. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
5. Old School by Tobias Wolff
6. The Ruined Boys by Roy Fuller
7. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
8. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
9. The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
10. Such, Such Were the Joys by George Orwell
11 March 2020
Top 10 books about the Windrush generation
1. Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)
2. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (1956)
3. To Sir, With Love by ER Braithwaite (1959)
4. Mother Country edited by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff (2018)
5. Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz (2017)
6. War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939 to 1948 by Stephen Bourne (2018)
7. Windrush Songs by James Berry (2007)
8. Surge by Jay Bernard (2019)
9. Voices of the Windrush Generation by David Matthews (2018)
10. The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment by Amelia Gentleman (2019)
04 March 2020
Top 10 mentors in fiction
1. Mentor/Athena in Homer’s Odyssey
2. Lord Henry Wotten in A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
3. The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes in Howards End by EM Forster
4. M in the James Bond series by Ian Fleming
5. Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
6. Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy
7. Earl Copen in The Animal Factory by Edward Bunker
8. Sando in Breath by Tim Winton
9. Cardinal Wolsey in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
10. Teddy Prince in Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
26 February 2020
Top 10 books about imaginary friends
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. The Pisces by Melissa Broder
3. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
4. Among Others by Jo Walton
5. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
6. The Good People by Hannah Kent
7. The Other by Thomas Tryon
8. The Boy Who Could See Demons by Carolyn Jess-Cooke
9. The Tall Man by Phoebe Locke
10. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
19 February 2020
Top 10 random encounters in literature
1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
2. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter (1990)
3. An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
4. Tan Tien by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
5. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
6. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
7. Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton (1924)
8. Ulysses by James Joyce
9. The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
10. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
12 February 2020
Top 10 books of eco-fiction
1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
2. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin
3. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
4. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
5. The Overstory by Richard Powers
6. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
8. American War by Omar El Akkad
9. Clade by James Bradley
10. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
05 February 2020
Top 10 tales about the rich
1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
2. Run River by Joan Didion
3. Howards End by EM Forster
4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence
5. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
8. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
9. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
10. The Swimmer by John Cheever
29 January 2020
From Homer to Alexievich: top 10 books about the human cost of war
1. The Iliad by Homer
2. The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil
3. Evidence by Diana Matar
4. Trieste by Daša Drndić
5. The Ethiopian War: 1935-1941 by Angelo Del Boca
6. The Conscript by Gebreyesus Hailu (translated by Ghirmai Negash)
7. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
8. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)
9. The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon
10. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna​
22 January 2020
Top 10 political travel books
1. English Journey, or The Road to Milton Keynes by Beryl Bainbridge
2. The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685–c.1712 (ed Christopher Morris, 1995)
3. The People of Providence: A Housing Estate and Some of Its Inhabitants by Tony Parker
4. Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis
5. The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie
6. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations With Palestinians in Israel by David Grossman
7. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh
8. Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
9. Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek
10. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley
15 January 2020
Top 10 books about trouble in Los Angeles
1. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis (1990)
2. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith (1994)
3. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)
4. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD by Lou Cannon (1998)
5. Southland by Nina Revoyr (2003)
6. The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse (2010)
7. The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots by Brenda Stevenson (2013)
8. Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell Hall (2014)
9. All Involved by Ryan Gattis (2015)
10. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (2015)
08 January 2020
Top 10 books about toxic masculinity
1. The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère
2. The Wych Elm by Tana French
3. McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh
4. The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis
5. The Iliad by Homer
6. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
7. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
8. The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
01 January 2020
Top 10 books about new beginnings
1. Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
2. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
3. In the Mood by Laura Bloom
4. Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee
5. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
6. Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones
7. Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce
8. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
9. Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
10. The Waves by Virginia Woolf