大象传媒

5 November 2021

The clocks have gone back, and that means two things. Firstly, it's the time of year to embrace escaping to a cosy armchair with a great book. Secondly, 大象传媒 Two's Book Club Between the Covers is back with another stack of recommendations to ease you through the winter months. The coming series includes these 12 tantalising titles up for discussion by Sara Cox and her guests.

Missed Between the Covers?

It's the show where Sara Cox invites celebrities to talk about the season's biggest books.

Now in its third series, the new episodes see the likes of Prue Leith, Greg James and Sharleen Spiteri join Sara to review new books and classics, and reveal what favourites sit on their own bookshelves.

Up for discussion each week is one recent release and one novel from more than 50 years of Booker Prize shortlists. Before the panel have their say, warm up and plan your winter reading with this list of 12 great reads - alongside the books' back-cover enticements.

Between the Covers: 12 must-read books

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, that not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.

Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.

Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.

Elegant and hugely entertaining, Good Behaviour is an enchanting portrayal of the discovery of freedom and loss of innocence. Told through a narrator initially entrapped in her inherited codes of conduct, this sparklingly witty black comedy of manners establishes Keane’s position as an exquisite satirist and connoisseur of human nature.

• Good Behaviour was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981.

After a car accident Jarred discovers he'll never walk again. Confined to a 'giant roller-skate', he finds himself with neither money nor job. Worse still, he's forced to live back home with the father he hasn't spoken to in ten years. Add in a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and the fact that total strangers now treat him like he's an idiot, it's a recipe for self-destruction. How can he stop himself careering out of control?

As he tries to piece his life together again, he looks back over his past - the tragedy that blasted his family apart, why he ran away, the damage he's caused himself and others - and starts to wonder whether, maybe, things don't always have to stay broken after all.

The Coward is about hurt and forgiveness. It's about how the world treats disabled people. And it's about how we write and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about our lives - and try to find a happy ending.

In a small East Anglian coastal town Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. She has no idea of the force of opposition that will ensue.

It is 1959. Hardborough has no fish and chips, no launderette, and no cinema except on alternate Saturday nights. The residents are in need of entertainment - but do they want the kind that Mrs Green's new venture will provide?

In attempting to challenge a seemingly sleepy and indeterminate status quo, Florence uncovers an undercurrent of tenacious resentment against her small project. The complex webs of small-town community close in around her as those with minor influence seek to hold sway.

• The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978.

In 1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening as bombs fall around them.

Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered E.M. Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses’ mind that will shape the trajectory of his life – and of those who love him – for the next four decades.

Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing - to fall in love - in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.

Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind - when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world.

• Exit West was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017.

Elliot Kane, a former spy, is trying to leave the world of espionage behind. Kathryn Taylor, her career in MI6 stalled, is running the South Atlantic desk. Rory Bannatyne, a covert technical specialist, is dead, and has apparently committed suicide.

Harris' novel tells the story of three friends from a mission many years ago, who reconnect when one of them dies on Ascension Island. Ascension is a curious legacy of England's imperial past. Only employees and their families are allowed to live there. It is home to several highly-classified government projects, a British and American military base, and forty dead volcanic cones. Entirely isolated from the world, the disappearance of a young girl at the same time as Rory's death means local tensions are high.

Elliot needs to discover what happened. But the island contains more secrets than even the government knows, and it's not going to give them up without a fight.

Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about Aritomo and the garden. But a war would come to Malaya, and a decade would pass before she would travel to see him.

A man of extraordinary skill and reputation, Aritomo was once the gardener for the Emperor of Japan. Now Yun Ling needs him to help her build a memorial to her beloved sister, killed at the hands of the Japanese. She wants to learn everything Aritomo can teach her, and do her sister proud, but to do so she must also begin a journey into her own past; a story inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country.

• The Garden of Evening Mists was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season. Early one morning, he makes a delivery to the local convent - and confronts the darkness and complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.

In 1860s London, orphan Sue Trinder grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'. But from the moment she draws breath, Sue's fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away.

One evening the handsome Richard "Gentleman" Rivers arrives. He has an elaborate scheme to defraud Maud Lilly, a wealthy heiress. If Sue will help him she'll get a share of the "shine".

• Fingersmith was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002.

Anna grew up in England with her white mother, and knowing very little about her West African father. In middle age, after separating from her husband and with her daughter grown up, she finds herself alone and wondering who she really is. Her mother's death leads her to find her father's student diaries, chronicling his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. She discovers that he eventually became the president - some would say the dictator - of Bamana in West Africa. And he is still alive.

She decides to track him down and so begins a funny, painful, fascinating journey, and an exploration of race, identity and what we pass on to our children.

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.

Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

• The Secret Scripture was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008.