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29 December 2021
Top 10 books about self-improvement
1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
2. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D Burns (1980)
3. The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris (2007)
4. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
5. The Power of Now: A Guide Book to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle (1998)
6. Altruism: The Science and Psychology of Kindness by Matthieu Ricard (2015)
7. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
8. Grit by Angela Duckworth (2017)
9. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1308–21)
10. The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100–1200 BCE)

22 December 2021
Top 10 Christmas poems
1. ‘Ring out wild bells’, from In Memoriam AHH by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah
3. A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore
4. The Oxen by Thomas Hardy
5. Christmas by John Betjeman
6. Christmas Carol by Paul L Dunbar
7. The Christmas Rose by Cecil Day-Lewis
8. I Saw a Stable by Mary Coleridge
9. Journey of the Magi by TS Eliot
10. A Christmas Poem by Wendy Cope

15 December 2021
Top 10 cosy crime novels
1. Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
2. The Appeal by Janice Hallett
3. Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by MC Beaton
4. Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
5. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
6. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
7. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
8. Three Pines series by Louise Penny
9. Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett
10. Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens

08 December 2021
Top 10 books about the Roman empire
1. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
2. The Corrupting Sea by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell
3. The Acts of the Apostles
4. The Emperor in the Roman World by Fergus Millar
5. The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown
6. The Roman Triumph by Mary Beard
7. Rome. An archaeological guide by Amanda Claridge
8. Roman Presences by Catherine Edwards
9. Asterix the Gaul by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
10. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Mediaeval Empire by Judith Herrin

01 December 2021
Top 10 novels about novelists
1. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
2. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
3. Bunny by Mona Awad
4. The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
5. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
7. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
8. The Retreat by Mark Edwards
9. Jumping Monkey Hill by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

24 November 2021
Top 10 novels and stories of the 1970s
1. God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (1978)
2. Will You Please be Quiet, Please? The Stories of Raymond Carver (1976)
3. Final Payments by Mary Gordon (1978)
4. The Living End by Stanley Elkin (1979)
5. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
6. Corregidora by Gayl Jones (1975)
7. Foreigner by Nahid Rachlin (1978)
8. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (1975)
9. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox (1970)
10. Grendel by John Gardner (1971)

17 November 2021
Top 10 books about Calcutta
1. City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre
2. Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri
3. The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
4. The Byomkesh Bakshi Stories by Saradindu Bandopadhyay
5. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. First Promise by Ashapurna Devi
7. The Sleeping Dictionary by Sujata Massey
8. The Middleman by Sankar (Mani Shankar Mukherjee)
9. The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury
10. The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community by Sudeep Chakravarti

10 November 2021
From Paradise Lost to the Lord of the Rings: top 10 epics in fiction
1. Paradise Lost by John Milton
2. Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano
3. G by John Berger
4. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
5. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
6. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
7. The Siege by Helen Dunmore
8. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
9. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson
10. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

03 November 2021
Top 10 postmodern books
1. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
2. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
3. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
4. The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice by Gilbert Adair
5. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
6. The Language of Postmodern Architecture by Charles Jencks
7. Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour
8. A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
9. The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey
10. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

28 October 2021
Top 10 books on neocolonialism
1. The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)
2. Neo-​Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah (1965)
3. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution by Thomas Sankara (1988)
4. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story by John Stockwell (1974)
5. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002)
6. The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (2020)
7. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (1999)
8. Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1980)
9. How to Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina (2005)
10. The Sale by Tendai Huchu (2012)

20 October 2021
Top 10 true crime novels
1. A Universal History of Inniquity by Jorge Luis Borges
2. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
3. Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn
4. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
5. The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère
6. Nationality Wog: The Hounding of David Oluwale by Kester Aspen
7. Occupied City by David Peace
8. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
9. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
10. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

13 October 2021
Top 10 urban legends in literature
1. The Forbidden by Clive Barker
2. The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen
3. King Rat by China Miéville
4. Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane
5. Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)
6. Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell
7. Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall
8. Candle Cove by Kris Straub
9. Hydra by Matt Wesolowski
10. Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

06 October 2021
Michael Billington’s top 10 books about theatre
1. Actress by Anne Enright
2. Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee
3. Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim
4. Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave by Alan Strachan
5. Mrs Jordan’s Profession by Claire Tomalin
6. Joan’s Book by Joan Littlewood
7. Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle
8. The Empty Space by Peter Brook
9. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence
10. The Good Companions by JB Priestley

29 September 2021
Top 10 books about human consciousness
1. The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist
2. Scatterlings by Martin Shaw
3. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
4. The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
5. Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung
6. Nine-Headed Dragon River by Peter Matthiessen
7. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Blackmore
8. Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness
9. Beyond Words by Carl Safina
10. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

22 September 2021
Top 10 novels of the 1930s
1. Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell
2. Burmese Days by George Orwell
3. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
4. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
5. Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
6. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
7. Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
8. Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
9. The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
10. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

15 September 2021
Top 10 books about lies and liars
1. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
2. The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers
3. The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova
4. History’s Greatest Lies by William Weir
5. The Bible
6. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
7. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
8. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
9. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
10. The Prestige by Christopher Priest

08 September 2021
Top 10 books about long-distance relationships
1. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
2. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney
4. Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
5. Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
7. The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante
8. Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
9. Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro
10. Love from Paddington by Michael Bond

01 September 2021
Top 10 magical short stories
1. Arrival of the Snake-Woman by Olive Senior
2. The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde
3. What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie
4. Five Leaves and a Stranger by Jacob Ross
5. The Standard of Living by Dorothy Parker
6. Bind Your Hair by Robert Aickman
7. The Magic Shop by HG Wells
8. The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen
9. This Blessed House by Jhumpa Lahiri
10. Al-Addin, or the Wonderful Lamp – attributed to Hanna Diyab

​25 August 2021
‘You think wrong!’: top 10 gripes in literature
1. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
5. Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences by Mark Twain
6. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
7. Cutting Timber: An Irritation by Thomas Bernhard
8. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
9. SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
10. The Complete Works of Shakespeare

18 August 2021
Top 10 books about family life
1. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
2. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
3. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver
6. Amongst Women by John McGahern
7. Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
8. Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
9. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
10. Boys Don’t Cry by Fíona Scarlett

11 August 2021
Top 10 bookworms in fiction
1. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
2. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard
5. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers
6. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
7. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
8. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
9. Milkman by Anna Burns
10. The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

04 August 2021
Top 10 millennial heroines in fiction
1. Reese from Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
2. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
3. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
4. Korede from My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
5. Edie from Luster by Raven Leilani
6. Ruth from Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
7. Candace from Severance by Ling Ma
8. Helen from Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell
9. Wendy Reimer from Little Fish by Casey Plett
10. Marianne from Normal People by Sally Rooney

28 July 2021
Top 10 stories about bored teenagers
1. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)
2. Passion by Alice Munro (2004)
3. Ghost World by Daniel Clowes (1997)
4. Atlantic City by Kevin Barry (2007)
5. Extraordinary Little Cough by Dylan Thomas (1940)
6. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
7. Long Time, No See by Dermot Healy (2011)
8. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (1994)
9. National Institute by Alejandro Zambra (2015)
10. Honoured Guest by Joy Williams (2004)

21 July 2021
Top 10 books about Sicily
1. Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure That the Italians of the South Became ‘Southerners’ by Pino Aprile
2. The Council of Egypt by Leonardo Sciascia
3. Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti
4. Beautiful Antonio by Vitaliano Brancati
5. Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories by Giovanni Verga
6. Idylls by Theocritus
7. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa by David Gilmour
8. Conversations in Sicily by Mason Elio Vittorini
9. The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194: The Normans in Sicily Volume II by John Julius Norwich
10. Ciao Ousmane: The Hidden Exploitation of Italy’s Migrant Workers by Hsiao-Hung Pai

14 July 2021
Top 10 books about the aftermath of empire
1. Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V Carby
2. In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman
3. Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist
4. An End to Suffering by Pankaj Mishra
5. The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
6. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
7. Old Filth by Jane Gardam
8. Till the Sun Grows Cold by Maggie McCune
9. Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera
10. Life and Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee

07 July 2021
Top 10 platonic friendships in fiction
1. Sula by Toni Morrison
2. A Painful Case by James Joyce
3. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
4. A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor
5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
6. The World According to Garp by John Irving
7. Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley
8. The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
9. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
10. Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan

30 June 2021
Top 10 books about circuses and spectacle
1. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
2. The Girl Aquarium by Jen Campbell
3. Beneath the Big Top: A Social History of the Circus in Britain by Steve Ward
4. Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl by Nell Stroud
5. The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age by John Woolf
6. The Electric Woman by Tessa Fontaine
7. Patient by Bettina Judd
8. The Circus 1870s-1950s
9. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
10. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

23 June 2021
Top 10 books of everyday social anthropology
1. Think Like an Anthropologist by Matthew Engelke
2. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the 20th Century by Charles King
3. The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
4. Debt, the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
5. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox
6. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri
7. The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them by Simon Roberts
8. Sensemaking by Christian Madsbjerg
9. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd
10. Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World edited by Jeremy MacClancy

16 June 2021
Top 10 books about public spaces
1. Jaws by Peter Benchley
2. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
3. Central Park Then and Now by Marcia Reiss
4. The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith
5. Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed by Ahdaf Soueif
6. Jazz by Toni Morrison
7. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri
8. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
9. The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford
10. Here Is New York by EB White

09 June 2021
Top 10 novels told in a single day
1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
3. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
4. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
6. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
7. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
10. Pincher Martin by William Golding

02 June 2021
Top 10 books for a greener economy
1. Steady State Economics by Herman E Daly (1977)
2. The Corruption of Capitalism by Guy Standing (2017)
3. The Limits to Growth (1972)
4. The Money Makers by Eric Rauchway (2015)
5. Localization: A Global Manifesto by Colin Hines (2000)
6. Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption by Simon Pirani (2018)
7. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich (2019)
8. A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni & Daniel Aldana Cohen (2019)
9. This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (2014)
10. Planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Layborne-Langton

26 May 2021
Top 10 books about ballet
1. Ballerina by Deirdre Kelly
2. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
3. Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead
4. A Body of Work by David Hallberg
5. Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh
6. A Proper Little Nooryeff by Jean Ure
7. Dancing on My Grave by Gelsey Kirkland
8. Life in Motion by Misty Copeland
9. Bolshoi Confidential by Simon Morrison
10. No Ballet Shoes in Syria by Catherine Bruton

19 May 2021
Top 10 books about depression
1. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
2. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3. Darkness Visible by William Styron
4. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
5. Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum
6. A First-Rate Madness by Nassir Ghaemi
7. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
8. Thrive by Richard Layard and David M Clark
9. Shock by Kitty Dukakis and Larry Tye
10. The Inflamed Mind by Ed Bullmore

12 May 2021
Top 10 books about duels
1. The Duel by Anton Chekhov
2. The Duel by Giacomo Casanova
3. The Flower of Battle by Fiore dei Liberi
4. A Coward by Guy de Maupassant
5. The Duel by Joseph Conrad
6. Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Duelling from Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk by Barbara Holland
7. The Duel by Aleksandr Kuprin
8. The Shot by Alexander Pushkin
9. The Duel by Heinrich von Kleist
10. The Duel: A History of Duelling by Robert Baldick

05 May 2021
Top 10 books about Colombia
1. Liveforever by Andrés Caicedo, translated by Frank Wynne
2. Fiebre Tropical by Juli Delgado Lopera
3. The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman
4. The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes, translated by Daniel Alarcón
5. Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo, translated by Charlotte Coombe
6. Ornamental by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis
7. There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno
8. Missionaries by Phil Klay
9. My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind by Silvana Paternostro
10. Virus Tropical by Powerpaola, translated by Jamie Richards

28 April 2021
Top 10 books about museums
1. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
2. The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan
3. The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
4. The Night at the Museum by Milan Trenc
5. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
6. The Horror in the Museum by HP Lovecraft
7. Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
8. The Murder Room by PD James
9. Still Lives by Maria Hummel
10. The Monuments Men by Robert M Edsel

21 April 2021
Top 10 books about brothers
1. The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer
2. The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes
3. Moonrise by Sarah Crossan
4. Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent
5. Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
6. My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal
7. The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard
8. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
9. No Matter What by Debi Gliori
10. The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh

14 April 2021
Top 10 books about revenge
1. The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. Nutshell by Ian McEwan
4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
5. Escape, Evasion and Revenge by Marc H Stevens
6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
7. The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson
8. The Bible
9. The Millennium series by Stieg Larsson
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

07 April 2021
Top 10 homecomings in fiction
1. Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri
2. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
3. A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta
4. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
5. The Family Clause by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
6. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
7. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
8. Love, Etc by Julian Barnes
9. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
10. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

31 March 2021
Top 10 books about New York
1. The Long-winded Lady by Maeve Brennan
2. The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
3. Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss
4. Harvey Wang’s New York
5. Ice Cream for Freaks by Dejon
6. No Matter by Jana Prikryl
7. The Company of Strangers by Gus Powell
8. Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz
9. Harlem Is Nowhere by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
10. Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

24 March 2021
Top 10 novels set in villages
1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
3. One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard (Un Nos Ola Leuad, translated by Philip Mitchell)
4. Lanny by Max Porter
5. Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
6. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
7. Galore by Michael Crummey
8. The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey
9. Harvest by Jim Crace
10. Euphoria by Lily King

17 March 2021
Top 10 matriarchs in fiction
1. Livia Drusilla in I, Claudius by Robert Graves
2. Tenar in Tehanu by Ursula K Le Guin
3. Sethe in Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. Mary in The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
6. Helen Clark in Oreo by Fran Ross
7. Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
8. Mrs Armitage in The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
9. Amisa in Ponti by Sharlene Teo
10. Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht

10 March 2021
Top 10 books about the body
1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
2. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
3. The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
4. Poster Child by Emily Rapp Black
5. Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo
6. The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
7. A Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille T Dungy
8. The Carrying by Ada Limon
9. Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
10. Teratology by Susannah Nevison

03 March 2021
Top 10 books about roots
1 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
2 Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
3 Nine Continents by Xiaolu Guo
4 Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
5 The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom
6 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
7 Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
8 There There by Tommy Orange
9 A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul
10 Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

24 February 2021
Top 10 books about castaways
1. I Am An Island by Tamsin Calidas
2. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
3. The Beach by Alex Garland
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
5. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
6. Dirt Music by Tim Winton
7. Grandad’s Island by Benji Davies
8. The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex
9. Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
10. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

17 February 2021
Top 10 classic stories retold
1. Circe by Madeline Miller
2. Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin
3. Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
4. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
5. The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre
6. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
7. Midsummer’s Mayhem by Rajani LaRocca
8. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
9. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
10. Pride by Ibi Zoboi

10 February 2021
Top 10 books about the Irish war of independence
1. A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
2. Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor
3. Guerilla Days in Ireland by Tom Barry
4. The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey
5. Women and the Irish Revolution by Linda Connolly
6. On Another Man’s Wound by Ernie O’Malley
7. British Voices: From the Irish War of Independence by William Sheehan
8. Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love by Fergal Keane
9. The Burnings 1920 by Pearse Lawlor
10. Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan

03 February 2021
Top 10 books about football
1. The Damned United by David Peace
2. The Blinder by Barry Hines
3. Best and Edwards by Gordon Burn
4. A Natural by Ross Raisin
5. The Van by Roddy Doyle
6. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
7. McIlvanney on Football by Hugh McIlvanney
8. Fan by Danny Rhodes
9. Snapshot by Daniel Gray and Alan McCredie
10. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson

27 January 2021
Top 10 books about children fending for themselves
1. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
2. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
3. Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
4. Milkman by Anna Burns
5. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
6. Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
7. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
8. Foster by Claire Keegan
9. The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
10. I’m Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti

20 January 2021
Top 10 books about spirit mediums
1. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen
2. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
3. Affinity by Sarah Waters
4. The Seance by John Harwood
5. Shadow Land or, Light from the Other Side by Elizabeth d’Esperance
6. Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
7. The Goddess and the Thief by Essie Fox
8. The Lost Village by Neil Spring
9. Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz
10. The Quickening by Rhiannon Ward

13 January 2021
Top 10 unconventional essays
1. Holy Land by DJ Waldie
2. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany
3. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
4. The Women by Hilton Als
5. Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger
6. The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
7. The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly
8. This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
9. Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
10. Calamities by Renee Gladman

06 January 2021
Top 10 books about the unknowable
1. 10:04 by Ben Lerner
2. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
3. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
4. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
6. Evening’s Empire by Zachary Lazar
7. Writing to Save a Life by John Edgar Wideman
8. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
9. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
10. Hamlet by William Shakespeare