大象传媒

4 December 2023

This week on Between the Covers, Sara Cox's guests share books that centre on relationships. Discover: a riotous tale of thirtysomething women that’s been called a female Withnail and I; the story of a failed romance told from end to start; a father's poetic book-length letter, inspired by James Baldwin, to his teenage son about culture and race in the USA; and Maya Angelou’s debut memoir, beautifully evoking her childhood in the Deep South of 1930s America.

This week on Between the Covers, Ben Miller, Kerry Godliman, Laura Smyth and Nish Kumar tell us what's in top of their reading list.

Episode five - Favourite books from our guests

Ben says: I love this book. It's basically the female Withnail and I. It’s just the writing.

There's a great, great story about two girls who are friends. They're reaching that stage of their life where maybe one of them will get married and how's that going to affect their friendship. It’s in a haze of partying and all other kinds of things going on, trying to get your career started and that sort of stuff, but it's just the joyous wit of it.

It's just so funny. They've got a running joke between them of puns, which are absolutely brilliant. It's really, really wonderful.

There’s a great, great character in it, Tyler. One of those untouchably brilliant, totally ruined people, with a wreck of a life, but they're just so charismatic that you feel like you can't not be in their company. It’s really fantastic.

Kerry says: It was the first book that I read as a young person and it was the putting away of fantasy and the picking up of real life.

It starts with her (Maya Angelou) as a child and she travels from California - her and her brother, Bailey - they travel with just a label, the address where they’re meant to go, because their mum and dad have split up. Their mum just says, ‘go and live with your grandma down in Arkansas’ and she starts this story, it's her whole life and it's just the most extraordinary life.

It’s like a real version of Any Human Heart because if you read all her memoirs, it is a life of the 20th century and she does encounter real-life people. There's bits of her hanging out with Billie Holiday, and bits of her work in the civil rights movement.

She's such a titan of the 20th century, an incredible personality and presence, and the power in this book. The story is against all the odds. She has this love of humanity, and the love of family and her grandma and her brother, and she goes on to have such a rich life... against all the odds.

Reading it as a young person I was just blown away by it. It gave me a long love of American literature. I've always loved American writing, there's a kind of tone to it that I've always enjoyed. It's just the clarity and the telling of tales. I think she's just brilliant.

• Bookclub on 大象传媒 Sounds - Maya Angelou talks about her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Laura says: It's just so beautiful because it starts off at the end of a breakup - so far, so normal.

This woman is grieving lost love, and then she dissects the relationship by going months and months further back. So it goes to the very beginning, to when they met, and then right back to their childhoods and their parents and, you know, their respective weird mums. And actually what you realise is, yeah, this relationship didn't stand a chance.

Through her grieving she’s really looking into it and all her hang-ups. And that's it, especially when you're young, you get into relationships and even with the best intention they’re doomed, because it’s just two unhealed people really. I think it's so human, and compassionate, and just so funny and lovely - you can really relate to it.

It's just beautiful. It's so beautiful. This has been the one that I've recommended to lots of girlfriends and sisters.

Nish says: It's a non-fiction book written by the author, essentially, to his teenage son. And I think there's something very powerful and universal about a parent's anxiety for their child.

I think if you are a parent that’s, I assume, something you can immediately relate to. And if you're a child, I think it helps you understand the way your parents saw you going out into the world.

It’s also an incredible book about being a black man in America, because that's where his fears are coming from for his son. And it's about the weight of history that is put on the African-American community, by America and the crimes that have been committed by that country on that community; but it's also about the beauty and the joy of being black.

He was pretty consciously trying to write something that would sit in a particular tradition. He specifically refers to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and talks about how he wanted to write something that could essentially be read in one sitting, but then would sit with people for years and years.

He says that in a much more elegant way than I've just managed to... There’s so much weighty subject matter. But the pleasure in it is also that the writing is exquisite. He’s one of my favourite writers and I think this, as a book about being a father and a book about race in America, it's such an exquisite piece of work.

The writing is so beautiful, and it's filled with sentences that you sort of find yourself carving on the walls of your heart.