12 picks to carry mood readers through the year
For the reader who can only finish something that meets them where they are, picking your next book doesn’t have to be daunting. No matter what you're in the mood for, this list has just the right story to turn to.
When you're in need of some comfort
Every morning before sunrise, Lim Ah Hock opens the shutters of his small kitchen on Carpenter Street, lights an incense stick and prepares the best laksa soup in all of Kuching. According to Lim family legend, the laksa’s secret ingredient – their ancestral broth – was gifted to them by a deity, who promised the family prosperity as long as the broth is passed down through the generations.
Invited home to Malaysia for his father's 60th birthday, Wei Ming sees a chance to escape his troubles. But when old conflicts resurface and a local businessman threatens to destroy the family legacy, father and son are forced to ask themselves what truly matters.
When you want something short and sweet
Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this special edition of Murakami’s celebrated short story sees the bewildered Katagiri find meaning in his humdrum life through joining forces with Frog in an effort to save Tokyo from an existential threat.
When you're feeling introspective
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
When you're in need of a good cry
Away from the quiet farmlands of Illinois, two lonely teenagers – bound by the burden of their home lives – forge a delicate friendship. But when jealousy ignites in one of their families, it leads to unthinkable tragedy, and severs the two boys' bond forever.
Discover the tragically beautiful world of So Long, See You Tomorrow , a quietly devastating masterpiece of human frailty and resilience.
When you want to feel inspired
Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores.
This book is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.
When you're feeling adventurous
One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to reveal new questions and answers we are still thinking about today. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.
When you want to laugh
Immerse yourself in the creative universe of Margaret Atwood for a riot of life, art and everything in between: the greatest writer of our time tells her own story.
As she explores her past, Atwood reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our boldest imaginations.
When you're in need of whimsy
Prepare to be dazzled once more by the overwhelming power of stories and see Love prevail in the face of Terrible Adversity!
You will read of betrayal, loyalty, madness, bad husbands, lovers both faithful and unfaithful, wise old crones, moons who come out of the sky, musical instruments that won't stay quiet, friends and brothers and fathers and mothers and above all, many, many sisters.
Now a major new film starringEmma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Amir El-Masry, Charli XCX, Richard E. Grant and Felicity Jones.
When you're stuck in a reading slump
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?
Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. A young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner.
Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.
When you're in search of an escape
Charlotte Walker has swapped her grey life in London for a year in a tropical paradise.
Officially, she’s there for conservation but the reality is far more complicated.
For somewhere on the island lies the answer to a truth she’s waited her whole life to learn. If she finds it, then perhaps she might finally find herself too.
When you need a dose of hope
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
