The Book Club Review

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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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