Tonight, tonight…

Reading is a pass-time and an ability that many of us take for granted. World Book Night aims to promote literacy across Britain, to an audience that might not normally read. Now in its third year, this literary event sees the distribution of nearly 500,000 books, donated by volunteers.

This year’s list of books includes a variety of popular and well-known titles, a selection of which our writers have reviewed. (The full list of 2013 books available can be found here).

 

Jonathan Pitman: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Noughts and Crosses introduces us to Callum and Sephy and their secret friendship-come-love story. Divided by the novel’s setting, a world where people are divided into Noughts: white lower class individuals who were once slaves, and Crosses: upper class black people, the overwhelming racist binary the novel is immersed in makes their love illicit. Callum being a Nought and Sephy a Cross, they are entangled in a political minefield. The novel bravely radicalises the racism society tries to bury, dramatising it into a world of extreme apartheid and incorporating this overbearing challenge into a love story.

 

Jess Devine: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

For any Winterson fan, the title to her autobiography should send you back to memories of her debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (largely believed to be semi-autobiographical) in which her protagonist is haunted by the words of her religious mother who rejects her daughter for being a lesbian.

In this book Winterson reveals her childhood to be at times much lonelier and heartbreaking than she could bring herself to reveal when she was 25 and writing Oranges. The stories within this work are touching, funny, sad and written in Winterson’s typically accessible and beautiful style. It is an honest piece of writing that at once recounts how Winterson feel in love with both books and found her love of women respectively.

The search for identity within a tumultuous upbringing has never been written so refreshingly fierce and frank. It deserves a place on everyone’s bookshelves and has made me want to re-read all of her novels with fresh insight.

 

Liz Weale: No.1 Detective Ladies Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

As in all good detective stories, the setting of _The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency_ is vividly evoked. Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally built” heroine runs her detective agency from a converted bottle store in suburban Botswana, having sold her cattle in order to fund the business. Despite its gentle eccentricity and character driven narrative, this book is far from saccharine. Mma Ramotswe’s recent escape from an abusive marriage and the grim cases she takes on cause this book to investigate themes of violence against women and the integration of the tradition into modern culture.

 

Dan Mountain: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich

Come, gather round children! Grandpappy Gombrich has a story for you! But this story does not involve dragons, wizards or snarks. It is all of it true, and all of it just as compelling as any favourite story of your childhood. E.H. Gombrich’s _A Little History of the World_ is a delightful read and presents world history in a way that is suprisingly entertaining, and entertainingly surprising.

All the best stories start with “Once upon a time” and this one takes that notion to it’s earliest possible application and brings you hurtling all the way through to the modern era with wit, charm and lashings of that oh-so underrated delicacy – facts. This is a book that all children deserve to be read to them, and that all adults would love to read.

 

Anna Laycock: The Island by Victoria Hislop

Victoria Hislop’s debut novel is the perfect holiday read. It begins by charting the journey of a young woman, Alexis Fielding, as she travels to the small fishing town of Plaka in Crete to uncover the mystery surrounding her maternal relations. There she meets an old family friend whose narration takes us back through the generations to recount the complex relationship between the people of Plaka and the nearby island of Spinalonga, a leper colony. The Island is a dramatic story of love, illness, prejudice and invasion set against exotic and beautiful descriptions of the Mediterranean. I know it will be the first thing I pack in my suitcase this summer.

 

Unnati Shah: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Set in a world where all the women have died and the men are constantly haunted by the sound of each other’s thoughts, Ness’s award-winning novel tells the story of Todd Hewitt, the last boy in Prentisstown. Driven away from his home by an army determined to make him change, Todd must uncover the truth about Prentisstown – and find out exactly what it takes to become a man. Fast paced, exhilarating and brilliantly original, this book will grip you from beginning to end and keep your head spinning long after you’ve turned the last page.

 

Nicole Davis: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

Illiteracy, illicit love and illness provide a veritable tongue-twister, as well as the core narrative to Bernhard Schlink’s novel. Perhaps better known as the film that finally one Kate Winslet an Academy Award, this is a powerful and provocative story set against the backdrop a Germany recovering from WW2. Using the generational conflict between 30-something Hanna and 15-year old Michael, Schlink examines feelings of guilt, shame and blame as it applies to those who lived through the war and those who were born after it.