In this episode Kate is joined by Amanda Moulson, co-host of Curious Readers, to consider the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Ahead of the prize ceremony next week, which one do we think will win?

Perhaps like Amanda you have read them all, but if, like Kate, you're going to struggle to get to all six, which ones should you focus on? Which are the standout reads? Which are the books most likely to delight, surprise, and stay with you long after you've turned the final page?

We're covering all six books, and you’ll also find out what Amanda has on her TBR, the books she most loves recommending, and how a busy book podcaster organises her bookshelves.

Timestamps for the time-poor

00:00 Welcome and Prize Preview

01:31 Meet Amanda Molson

01:44 Quickfire Reading Habits

03:18 Bookshelf Organization

04:06 Favorite Recs and Current Reads

06:20 Kate’s Power Broker Detour

08:54 Patreon Readalong and Book Club

10:12 Women’s Prize Context and History

15:09 Shortlist Book 1 Flashlight

20:51 Shortlist Book 2 Dominion

25:23 Shortlist Book 3 The Correspondent

26:31 Sybil’s Dark Past

27:07 Audiobook Clip Letters

29:15 Cozy Yet Dark

30:22 Famous Author Replies

31:14 Sybil Effect Debate

32:49 Craft and Book Clubs

33:28 The Mercy Step Setup

34:40 Mercy Step Clip

36:35 Child Narrator Power

37:12 Small Press Spotlight

38:01 Kingfisher Obsessive Love

38:50 Kingfisher Clip Warning

40:40 Kingfisher Reactions

41:35 Heart the Lover Clip

44:07 Two Halves Romance

45:36 Illness and Mortality

47:33 Marketing and Triggers

49:04 Winner Predictions

51:23 Wrap Up and Patreon

52:25 Kate’s Recent Reads and Outro

Books mentioned

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate

Open Book by Jessica Simpson

A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

We Are Green and Trembling Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

The Director by Daniel Kehlman

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

You'll find all the titles we mentioned in our Bookshop.org list. Buying books there helps support independent bookshops, and also supports The Book Club Review.

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When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.

Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email [email protected], or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?

Check out the Patreon for all kinds of extras, from our monthly book club to extra shows and Kate's reading diaries. Find it at patreon.com/thebookclubreview

The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.

*underlined – the ones Kate has read

1. Middlemarch
2. Beloved
3. Ulysses
4. To the Lighthouse
5. In Search of Lost Time
6. Anna Karenina
7. War and Peace
8. Jane Eyre
9. Pride and Prejudice
10. Madame Bovary
11. The Great Gatsby
12. Bleak House
13. Emma
14. Mrs Dalloway
15. Moby-Dick
16. Nineteen Eighty-Four
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude
18. Persuasion
19. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
20. Wuthering Heights
21. The Portrait of a Lady
22. Things Fall Apart
23. Midnight’s Children
24. The Remains of the Day
25. Lolita
26. Don Quixote
27. The Trial
28. The Brothers Karamazov
29. Pale Fire
30. Frankenstein
31. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
32. The God of Small Things
33. David Copperfield
34. Wolf Hall
35. Great Expectations
36. The Handmaid’s Tale
37. Invisible Man
38. The Age of Innocence
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God
40. Song of Solomon
41. Heart of Darkness
42. The Magic Mountain
43. Housekeeping
44. Giovanni’s Room
45. The Golden Notebook
46. The Leopard
47. Vanity Fair
48. The Metamorphosis
49. A Fine Balance
50. Wide Sargasso Sea
51. My Brilliant Friend
52. The Golden Bowl
53. The Transit of Venus
54. Orlando
55. The Waves
56. Mansfield Park
57. The Sound and the Fury
58. Disgrace
59. Never Let Me Go
60. Howards End
61. The Rings of Saturn
62. Half of a Yellow Sun
63. White Teeth
64. The Good Soldier
65. The Color Purple
66. The Master and Margarita
67. The Man Without Qualities
68. Blood Meridian
69. Crime and Punishment
70. Jude the Obscure
71. Kindred
72. Our Mutual Friend
73. Austerlitz
74. Nervous Conditions
75. The Bluest Eye
76. Dracula
77. The Rainbow
78. A House for Mr Biswas
79. Go Tell It on the Mountain
80. Rebecca
81. Buddenbrooks
82. The End of the Affair
83. A Farewell to Arms
84. The Talented Mr Ripley
85. The Vegetarian
86. The Turn of the Screw
87. The Line of Beauty
88. Ragtime
89. The Left Hand of Darkness
90. Jacob’s Room
91. Life and Fate
92. Sentimental Education
93. Invisible Cities
94. The Known World
95. The Return of the Native
96. Pedro Páramo
97. Catch-22
98. The Road
99. The Go-Between
100. My Ántonia

Particular books we touch on in the show

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
• The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
• A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
• The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
• The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
• The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
• The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
• The New Life by Tom Crewe
• Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
• The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
• The Warden by Anthony Trollope
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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What if the antidote to our increasingly frantic world isn't a grand gesture, but simply the act of paying attention?

This week, Kate and Laura are joined by actor, podcaster, and author Miranda Keeling – returning to the pod to talk about her wonderful new book, The Place I'm In, a collection of the small, luminous moments she's gathered from daily life. After her debut The Year I Stopped to Notice, Miranda is back with more of her 'noticings': fragments from parks, supermarket queues, and streets that remind us how much magic is hiding in the everyday.

Their book club read is the perfect complement: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Şavas – a soulful, quietly funny novel following Asya and Manu as they hunt for an apartment, trying on different futures for size in a city far from home. Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days in the park gathering footage – an anthropologist of the ordinary – and her project rhymes beautifully with Miranda's own.

Plus recommendations inspired by the art of the everyday.

You can find out more about Miranda and her work at mirandakeeling.com, and her podcast Stopping to Notice – over 200 five-minute episodes of binaural location recording – is the perfect companion listen.

Find all the books mentioned at our bookshop.org shop. And if you'd like to join Kate's monthly book club and reading community, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

Booklist

Ashes and Stones by Alison Shaw – a journey through Scotland in search of the women killed in the witch trials

Open Book by Jessica Simpson – Laura takes a nostalgic trip back through her twenties

No Such Thing as Monday by Sîan Hughes – a brilliantly written novel from the author of Pearl; up there with Eimear McBride ( A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) and Maggie O'Farrell

The Anthropologists by Aysgul Savas

The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman's newsletter

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Flesh by David Szalay

The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler

Memories of Distant Mountains (illustrated notebooks) by Orhan Pamuk

A Nobel Laureate's journals offer much colour but little drama, by Dwight Garner for the NYT (gift link)

Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading by Robert Douglas Fairhurst

The Place I'm In by Miranda Keeling

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A new local literary festival provided the perfect opportunity to record the very first Book Club Review live. Kate is joined by author and broadcaster Bee Rowlatt, whose books include the best-selling Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, which went on to be dramatised by the BBC, and In Search of Mary inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft. Bee also runs the Wollstonecraft Society, a human rights charity. Her debut novel, One Woman Crime Wave, is a novel that explores the realities of wealth, influence, and inequality in present-day London and offers plenty of talking points for book club discussion and debate. Join our festival audience to hear more about Bee's life and work and why Mary Wollstonecraft and her writing has never been more relevant.

Books mentioned

Find all the titles below in The Book Club Review's bookshop on Bookshop.org

Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

One Woman Crime Wave by Bee Rowlatt

An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly

Uprising by Tahmima Anam

Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter

Notes

Find out more about The Mary Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture (The Guardian)

Follow the Barnsbury Book Festival for news and updates

Patreon

Discover what's on offer over on The Book Club Review Patreon. In becoming a member you'll get extra shows and become part of a warm community swapping book recommendations and connecting over our shared love of books and reading. At the book club tier you can join our monthly book club and come and talk books with Kate in person every month. And as a paying member you're supporting Kate in making this independent podcast.

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The Book of Love vs The Dud Avocado: Fantasy, Paris & Book Club Verdicts

In this episode of The Book Club Review, we return to our book club roots with two wildly different novels: The Book of Love by Kelly Link and The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.

The Book of Love is the first novel from acclaimed American short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link. In a seemingly ordinary coastal town three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle. Vulture magazine named it ‘the escapist masterpiece of the year’ but what did Laura’s book club think?

Our second book-club pick is Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado – a fizzing, exuberant novel from 1958 about a young American woman let loose in Paris, determined to live life on her own terms. It gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living, a book that feels bracingly modern despite being nearly seventy years old. But did it make for a good book club read?

We've also got some listener feedback on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, we're catching up on recent reads, and the books we’re excited about next.

Get more from the pod on Patreon

Come behind the scenes and enjoy extra episodes, book club membership, community chat threads, readalongs, Kate's reading diaries and more, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview

Booklist

You'll find all the books mentioned in the pod's Bookshop.org bookshop

Bookshop.org list

Slow Days Fast Company by Eve Babitz

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

Other links of note

One Grand Books

Frances Ambler's substack

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Valentine’s-ish Literary Romance: Lucas Oakley on Nearly Departed, Boys Book Club & love stories that stay with you long after reading

Join Kate and Lucas Oakeley for this Valentine's-ish episode of The Book Club Review, recorded at Housmans Bookshop in King's Cross. We're exploring literary fiction where love takes centre stage, but the reward is complexity rather than a guaranteed happy ending.

Nearly Departed manages to combine the enjoyable tropes of Rom Com with the thoughtful exploration through writing that we associate with literary fiction. We explore how Lucas’s real-life experiences—witnessing a fatal cycling accident and his father's first wife dying young—shaped the book's exploration of love, loss, and second chances, and the art of balancing humour with heartbreak while playing with rom-com tropes.

Of course, we’ve got plenty of recommendations for love stories with emotional depth, including Lily King's Writers & Lovers, Andrew Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, David Nicholls' Sweet Sorrow, Douglas Stuart's John of John, and hot-book-of-the-moment Wuthering Heights. 

We’re also discussing Boys Book Club, the organization Lucas has co-founded to encourage men to read and talk about books. What makes a great book club pick for an all-male book club? We’re going to be finding out.

We’ve even got Valentine's recipe – rigatoni with a long-simmered ‘Sunday sauce’ – and a couple of cocktail ideas. 

All in all, the perfect ingredients for a literary Valentine’s weekend.

Become a member of The Book Club Review community

Join The Book Club Review community on Patreon for ad-free listening, extra episodes, Kate’s weekly reading diaries, the opportunity to connect with other listeners in the chat groups, and at the higher tier to talk books in-person with Kate at the monthly book club. Find all the details and how to sign up at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

Booklist

You can find all the titles mentioned in this episode in the Book Club Review bookshop on bookshop.org

Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley

 Heart The Lover by Lily King

All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Comfort MOB: Food that Makes You Feel Good

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger

Links

Follow Lucas on Instagram and Tik Tok @lucasoakeley, and you can find out all the details for the Boy’s Book Club at theboysbookclub.co.uk

Housmans bookshop, the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959

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What makes a bestseller? Is it the quality of the writing, or just the right book at the right time? This week Kate is joined by co-host Laura Potter and returning guest Phil Chaffee to find out.

Between us we've tackled six of the biggest bestsellers out there – Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets, Freida McFadden's The Housemaid, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, Matt Dinnerman's Dungeon Crawler Carl, SenLinYu's Alchemised, and Sarah Adams' In Your Dreams – and we have some opinions.

We're sharing our honest experiences of each one: what worked, what didn't, and whether these books truly earned their place on the bestseller lists. But this isn't just a round of verdicts. We're also pooling our recommendations for the bestsellers we genuinely think are worth your time, like The Correspondant by Virginia Evans – because there are some real gems out there among the hype.

And as always, we round off with our current and upcoming reads.

Press play to find out which bestsellers passed the test – and which ones didn't.

Support the pod on Patreon

Explore all the benefits of membership. Kate's weekly reading diary is available to free members. Paid tiers include ad-free episodes, extra shows, chat group access and our monthly book club at Patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

Booklist

You can also find all the books mentioned in The Book Club Review bookshop on Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports independent bookshops.

The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

The Housemaid by Frieda McFadden

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

In Your Dreams by Sarah Adams

Alchemized by SenLinYu

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Martian by Andy Weir

Nobody's Fool by Harlen Cobden

The Correspondant by Virginia Evans

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Robin Buss)

Rivals by Jilly Cooper

The novels of Stephen King

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Smiley books by John Le Carre

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin

Ice by Jacek Dukaj (Author) , Ursula Phillips (Translator)

The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

I'll Take The Fire by Leïla Slimani

(also The Country of Others and Watch US Dance)

Lullaby / The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani

Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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New year, new intentions – but if you're in the northern hemisphere, January can feel less like renewal and more like the darkest, coldest stretch of endless winter. Maybe what you need isn't another resolution. Maybe you just need the right book.

Ella Berthoud is an writer and an artist, but most importantly from our point of view a bibliotherapist. She has been prescribing fiction for life's ailments for over a decade. She co-wrote The Novel Cure, a brilliant guide that matches books to every psychological state and is packed with sound recommendations.

Who better then to give me some great suggestions for avoiding the January blues. Join Kate and Ella as they talk about the questions that vex every reader: how do we find more time for reading? How do we escape reading slumps? And how can we read more deeply without it feeling like homework?

Plus of course we're swapping lots of great book recommendations for January and the year ahead. Listen in for a shot of literary inspiration that might be just what you need.

Booklist

The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud

 Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

Metamorphoses by Ovid 

Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell

The Golden Ass by Apuleius

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (Jane Degras)

Dálvi by Laura Galloway

The Artist by Lucy Steeds

The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Robin Buss)

Find out more about Ella at ellaberthoud.com

Find all the books mentioned in this episode in the Book Club Review Bookshop, on Bookshop UK, the online retailer that supports independent bookshops.

Patreon

Head to Patreon.com/thebookclubreview to join The Book Club Review community for book recommendations, readalongs, book club and, new for 2026, Kate’s Reading Diaries. You can also buy someone gift membership at https://www.patreon.com/thebookclubreview/gift 

Serious Readers

Take advantage of the Serious Readers offer. Head to seriousreaders.com/bcr and use the code BCR at checkout for £150 off any HD light.

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We're celebrating the end of the year with a look back over our favourite reads of 2025, from new releases to backlist gems, best book club books, best non-fiction, best comfort reads and more. Between us we read over 350 books in 2025. Listen in to hear the ones we loved best. We've also got a radical new idea for a book club involving cold-water swimming and the works of Robert B. Parker, and how to embrace DNFing without guilt. Join us for recommendations to see you through the festive season and set your new reading year off in style.

With Phil Chaffee and Sarah Oliver

Serious Readers

Take advantage of Serious Readers offer. Head to seriousreaders.com/bcr and use the code BCR at checkout for £150 off any HD light.

Patreon

Head to Patreon.com/thebookclubreview for all the benefits of membership and how to sign up.

You can also buy someone gift membership at https://www.patreon.com/thebookclubreview/gift 

Booklist

Mother Mary Come to Me by Arundhati Roy

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

Crudo by Olivia Laing

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngoze Adiche

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

Lake Shore by Gary Shteyngart

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm

The First Man by Albert Camus

Robert B. Parker novels

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Muybridge by Guy Delisle

The Sense & Sensibility Diaries by Emma Thompson

The Lockwood & Co novels by Jonathan Stroud

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower

Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple

Maurice and Marilyn, or A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst

Agent Zo by Clare Mulley

The Devil Two Step by Jamie Quattro

Train Dreams by Denis Johnston

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnston

The Director by Daniel Kelman

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

How to End a Story by Helen Garner (3 volume diaries collection)

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

Pet Sematary 1983 cover

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'I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train' wrote Oscar Wilde, in the Importance of Being Ernest. In this episode Kate is joined by critic, editor and podcaster Lucy Scholes and regular pod guest Phil Chaffee to explore the intimate world of diaries. Can immersing ourselves in the details of other people's lives offer us valuable insight into how to fully appreciate the passing moments of our own? From gossipy self-mythologising Samuel Pepys right up to the present with the experimentation of Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries, and the beauty and hard-won insight of Helen Garner's Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries. Also not to be missed, living it up Vanity Fair style through the glitz and glamour of 80s New York, with Tina Brown.

And if you enjoy this conversation don't miss Part II, over on the Patreon, where we swap notes on our favourite fictional diaries, consider the diaries we'd love to read if they had only been published and share some thoughts on our own diary keeping. You'll find that episode plus lots of benefits including ad-free listening, extra episodes, our community of readers and the pod book club over at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.

And to take advantage of that Serious Readers offer of £150 off any HD light head to serious readers.com/bcr and use the code BCR at checkout.

Book list

The Private Life of the Diary by Sally Bayley

The Paris Review

They by Kay Dick

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke

Part of the Story by Margaret Busby

Woman Alive by Susan Ertz

Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista

Look Closer by Robert Douglas Fairhurst

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham (ed)

The Diaries of Virginia Woolf

How To End a Story by Helen Garner

Henry Chips Channon: The Diaries

The James Lees Milne diaries

Writing Home by Alan Bennett

There and Back: 1999–2009 by Michael Palin

The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983–1992 by Tina Brown

End of a Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer

War in Val D'Orcia by Iris Origo

Russian Journal by Andrea Lee

Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance by Felix Platter

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati

Modern Nature by Derek Jarman

Pharmacopeia by Derek Jarman

Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter

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Explore this year's Booker Prize shortlist on the latest episode of the Book Club Review! Hosts Kate and Laura and contributors Phil Chaffee and Martin Vovk discuss and debate the six shortlisted novels.

Listen in to hear our predictions, and then find out our reaction to the winner as we listen in to the live Booker Prize ceremony. We won't spoil the plots for you, just whet your appetite to read some or all of the books, all of which make for brilliant discussion.

Booklist

Paddy Clark, Ha, H, Ha by Roddy Doyle

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Flesh by David Szalay

All That Man Is by David Szalay

Starling House by Alex E. Harrow

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markowits

Carmageddon by Daniel Knowles

You Don't Have To Live Like This by Ben Markowits

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

All Fours by Miranda July

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

Booker Longlist episode

Episode 181 of The Book Club Review

Links

A Good Read: Colm Toibin and Zadie Smith discuss Flesh

Martin's Eyes On the Prize blog

Browse Martin's archive and discover his extensive reviews (including The Women's Prize) here.

Patreon

Head to www.patreon.com/thebookclubreview for all the benefits (extra shows, readalongs, book club and more) and how to sign up.

Serious Readers

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