Reading lists

The perfect reads for your book club

This list of modern masterpieces and timeless classics is guaranteed to stimulate a lively discussion.

21 March 2022

Here’s to book clubs – those thought-provoking, friendship-forming, cheese-nibbling evenings spent catching up with fellow readers.

Whether you're sticking to online or making the leap back into IRL meetings, the tricky part can sometimes be finding the right book to read. If your group loves to discover the newest thing, then take a look at our rundown of the unmissible summer debuts, but otherwise there is much joy to be found in older books with themes that feel as relevant today as ever.

Here we suggest a rolling update of our favourites – old and new – to cater to all book club tastes. Let us know how you get on!

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Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (2021)

Themes: Womanhood, legacy, ambition

Maggie Shipstead’s third novel was an instant New York Times Bestseller and landed itself in the 2021 Man Booker Prize long list. Not enough to convince you? It’s a moving and clever read that dovetails the biographies of two remarkable fictional women - both of whom have familiar real equivalents. Marian Graves is an early aviation heroine, attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world longitudinally, across both poles. She disappears within reach of her final hurdle, but her story lives on in the hands of Hadley Baxter, a modern-day Hollywood ingenue who hopes to resuscitate her career in a Graves biopic. By entwining these two lives, Shipstead paints a gorgeous story of womanhood across the decades.

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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963)

Themes: Civil Rights Movement, racial equality, social justice

Does your book club read non-fiction? It can be a great way to get stuck into a book that demands conversation after reading. Pretty much any of James Baldwin’s work would be a wise choice to read as a group, but Baldwin’s short but vital duo of “letters” is a good place to start. The Fire Next Time became a bestseller upon its release in 1963, capturing the mood of a nation on the brink of a civil rights movement and exposing America’s terrible legacy of racial injustice. Nearly 60 years on and Baldwin’s book remains pertinent as ever as a means of reflecting on what has been – and what still needs to be – done to gain equality.

Read more: Where to start with James Baldwin

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Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh (2020)

Themes: motherhood, feminism, free choice

The decision whether or not to have children feels, in some ways, bigger today than ever with the future of the planet so uncertain. What if that choice was taken out of your hands? In the follow-up to her Booker-nominated The Water Cure, Sophie Mackintosh envisions a world in which women are allocated their reproductive fates by the government as soon as they have their first period.

A novelist with already unmistakable style, the brilliance of Blue Ticket lies in its ambiguity. This is less a fully realised dystopia than a smudgy mirror on the world we inhabit today that will give you plenty to chew over about how we discuss – and dictate – the role of female bodies in society. As Mackintosh told us: "women's pain is not something that can be put aside".

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Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen (2021)

Themes: addiction, memoir, creativity

Last year saw the long-overdue publication of the trilogy of memoirs by Tove Ditlevsen, a well-known, controversial figure in Denmark who has taken a century to be recognised in the UK. The Copenhagen Trilogy, as the series is known, is compelling and tragic and delivered in Ditlevsen's trademark dry wit. She depicts a life of ascending to the literary circles of Copenhagen from a childhood survived in the city's poorest neighbourhoods, with plenty of ill-advised life decisions made along the way.

Ditlevsen may be being heralded as an autofiction master, but she has always won over women readers. If you loved Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Novels, you will devour The Copenhagen Trilogy.

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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)

Themes: race, politics, power

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of America's foremost critical thinkers on culture, politics and social issues. He is also, somewhat unfairly, a brilliant prose writer with gift for storytelling that made his debut novel, The Water Dancer, a favourite of Oprah Winfrey and other literary tastemakers in the US.

A blend of historical fiction and magic realism, it tells the story of Hiram Walker, a man born into slavery on a Virginia plantation who also has a mysterious, superhuman ability to transport himself and others across impossible distances. In a year when race relations in the US has dominated news around the world, this vivid and compelling novel feels even more pertinent.

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Victory by James Lasdun (2019)

Themes: marriage, friendship, sexual politics

If your book club is full of busy people, this duo of novellas might be just the ticket. The first, 'Feathered Glory', is a painfully astute depiction of a seemingly traquil marriage that's disrupted when the husband randomly encounters an old flame.

But it's the second, 'Afternoon of a Faun', that was widely discussed upon publication for being one of the first pieces of literary fiction to grapple with male culpability in the post #MeToo era. In it, the protagonist's friend, a minor celebrity, is accused of a historical rape and the story follows his struggle to find out the truth and reckon with his conflicting senses of loyalty and morality. Brilliantly truthful and never didactic, few books of the modern era have made the case for the value of fiction like this one.

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Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Themes: PTSD, womanhood, aging and mental health

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Quite a lot of people, it seems. Depending on the book club, to raise Mrs Dalloway as next month's option might well be accused of being anything from trite to pretentious, such is the reputation of Modernist literature’s leading lady. Cast away those presumptions, though, and Woolf’s searing portrayal of crumbling domesticity - and London in a post-pandemic word – in the wake of the First World War has the potential to conjure all manner of conversations on matters that still resonate today. There's also the opportunity to bed in with Woolf's famed stream-of-consciousness writing style, which radically changed the literary form we read today, and like only the best books holds new meaning for every age.

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Ordinary People by Diana Evans (2018)

Themes: modern marriage, black identity, domesticity

Not to be confused with Sally Rooney’s Normal People, this realistic novel paints a portrait of a marriage that, 13 years in, is running dry. Evans’ has previously spoken of her ambition ‘to see the everyday in middle-class black lives normalised and humanised’ and in Melissa and Michael’s (‘M&M’) Crystal Palace home, things seem gratingly familiar - until they don’t, and the otherworldly starts to unfold.

For those who have a soft spot for the traditional novel, Evans has earned comparisons to Dickens and Tolstoy, such is her ability to create a complete and familiar world. Which means that, even if you don't want to talk about relationships, marriage or long-term love, there is the recent history of Barrack Obama's inauguration and the death of Michael Jackson to reconsider as a group.

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A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr (1980)

Themes: memory, loss, rural life, the lost golden age of England

Not for nothing did the much-lauded literary podcast Backlisted make this 1980 Booker-nominee the subject of its first-ever episode. You’d be hard pressed to find a more perfect novella, nor one so strangely overlooked. It’s tells the deceptively simple story of a single, rejuvenating summer spent uncovering a mural in a village church by Tom Birkin, a restoration expert and war veteran escaping London in the wake of a failed marriage. A Month in the Country richly and gently evokes rural English life – both its scenery and cast of eccentric characters – but without ever getting misty-eyed or glib. As a prompt for exploring the topic of nostalgia and national character in the year we leave the EU, this is just the ticket.

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The Thing About December – Donal Ryan (2014)

Themes: coming-of-age, grief, the Irish crash

Novels with grand political points to make are all well and good – and indeed, this 2014 novel has plenty to say about the economic flagrancy of pre-recession Ireland – but what really makes for a good book club discussion is the way characters make you feel. For one who will play with your heart like a rag doll, meet Donal Ryan’s protagonist Johnsey Cunliffe, part of fine literary tradition of big-hearted but not-too-bright giants pitted against a cruel world. Newly orphaned, the young Johnsey struggles with the upkeep his family farm in Ireland while local vultures circle his estate. Grieving, lonely and ill-equipped, his life takes a turn for the better when he befriends a nurse and a fellow local oddball.

The Thing About December is wonderfully sad and devastatingly funny, executed with a lyrical beauty that is often stunning, with clear shades of Flowers For Algernon, Of Mice and Men and Forest Gump among others.

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Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999)

Themes: abuse of power, consent, race

This Nobel Prize-winning novel follows David Lurie, a middle-aged professor in Cape Town who has an affair with a young student. When it ends and she makes a complaint to the university, he is publicly shamed but refuses to apologise. Sound familiar? Coetzee’s slender masterpiece (Disgrace is only 220 pages long) was lauded for its examination of post-apartheid in South Africa in 1999, but is finding fresh relevance in the post-#MeToo era thanks to its protagonist, a powerful, pompous man who is appalled when his own daughter is attacked while being unable – or unwilling – to see his own behaviour in a similar light. Coetzee is at the peak of his powers here, sifting through giant and complex themes with prose as taunt as a drum.

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The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon (1956)

Themes: immigration, identity, the Windrush generation

Immigration dominated British politics earler this year, with the government announcing a new ‘point-based’ entry system and the Windrush Generation deportations being carried out against an ongoing outcry. What better time to revisit one the finest works of fiction about the latter, Samuel Selvon’s classic novella The Lonely Londoners. It follows several West Indians who arrive in the capital following the 1948 British Nationality Act, which granted citizenship to those living in Commonwealth countries. A freewheeling and somewhat raucous affair, the book centres on Trinidadian Moses Aloette, a veteran who takes new arrivals to London under his wing and shows them how to survive. Full of sex, scams and adventure, it’s also a quietly touching insight into immigrant life and the sorrow of being far from home.

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