What books would brighten your Christmas holidays? Greg James suggests a bit of PG Wodehouse

15 December 2021

BBC Two's book club Between the Covers has been inspiring us to fill our bookshelves this winter. To round off the series our guests have selected another diverse stack of great reads, from a dark tale of obsession to a light-hearted satire of social class.

Each week we are revealing the favourite books brought in by Sara Cox's guests on Between the Covers. In the final episode of the current series, Fleur East, Greg James, Imogen Stubbs and Lloyd Griffith reveal the books they can't do without.

Episode 6 - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: One windy spring day in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's calm, organized life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them - something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

Fleur says: I actually studied it at school, so I know it back to front. It starts with a hot-air balloon incident, in the middle of a field, and this guy called Joe is one of the men that runs to try and rescue this balloon. A man dies as a result and, at the scene, Joe meets this man Jed Parry.

After that, Jed starts turning up outside his house, in restaurants, at the library. Really strange. What I love about this book is that it's all from Joe's perspective. So, halfway through, you're like, "Is this man stalking you, "or are YOU imagining this?"

And then there's one chapter from the perspective of Joe's girlfriend, Clarissa, and she has a lot of doubts. She plants the seed of doubt in the reader's mind. Like, he receives a note from Jed and he's like, "This man's obsessed!", and then his girlfriend looks at it, and she goes, "But this is quite similar to your handwriting". So the whole time you're questioning it. I love it because the title has a double meaning; it's enduring love, about love that endures, but also the kind of love that you have to endure.

What the cover says: Bertie is feeling most put out when he finds that his friend Gussie is seeking relationship advice from Jeeves. Meanwhile Aunt Dahlia has asked Bertie to present awards at a school prize-giving ceremony. In a stroke of genius, Bertie realises he can kill two birds with one stone, palming off his prize-giving duties to Gussie by assuring him that the object of his affections will be there. Several terrible misunderstandings later and facing chaos, Bertie turns, yet again, to Jeeves who swiftly and ingeniously saves the day.

Greg says: My favourite book, probably, in the world. It's a book that I read whenever I'm sad, and we've all been sad in the last two years, quite often, so I've revisited a lot of these. It's the second Jeeves and Wooster full-length novel from PG Wodehouse. It is the hapless Bertie Wooster, an eligible bachelor who's just gallivanting around the whole time getting into scrapes and mishaps, and Jeeves is the person who always gets him out of those of those scrapes.

Weirdly, my science teacher Mr Howells also did extracurricular drama stuff, and he was the first person to say, "You should go on a stage and do some fun stuff", and he made me Jeeves. I really loved showing off in front of people, and it gave me confidence - I've just loved these books ever since.

I love the mad characters, and the crazy character names. There's a Gussie Fink-Nottle in this one. Tuppy Glossop is in there as well, all these brilliant names that have come out of PG Wodehouse's head. The inventiveness of the language is something that I really love, and try and aspire to. Gussie Fink-Nottle looked like a fish, but Jeeves would never say that, so he would say, "He does have something of the piscine about him". They're just very, very funny.

The cover says: Amidst a backdrop of wild political turmoil, the lives of four unlikely strangers collide forever. An epic panorama of modern India in all its corruption, violence, and heroism, A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry’s prize-winning masterpiece: a Dickensian modern classic brimming with compassion, humour, and insight – and a hymn to the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Imogen says: It's set in India, in 1975, during The Emergency under Indira Gandhi when she suspended laws, and created some other laws like mass sterilisation and the beautification of cities, which had a staggeringly dreadful impact on the poorest in society.

It follows a group of characters: tailors, a seamstress, a lawyer, a student, a hair collector; and their stories interconnect through a thread of love. Even though it's at an incredibly bleak time, you get this overwhelming sense of a place and of these people. He's a very unshowy narrator, but it takes you to an end which I found so devastating I had to step away and take on the enormity of what I'd just read.

By honouring them with stories, he gives them life and he rescues and salvages these people. I find it absolutely overwhelming as a book. I didn't want to leave it, even though it made me weep. I felt like crawling back into it, and having a bit more, you know… that gift of a wonderful book.

The cover says: Tom may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition he's been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz-Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, he has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life. Tom has the perfect cover - working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. A wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.

Lloyd says: I picked this up a few years back, and I did judge the book by its cover. I liked the cover, I was like, "I'm going to have a little read of this" because I really like Matt's writing. This one is about a man called Tom, who is 500 years old. Every year that we age, he ages about 13, 14 years, so the main thing that he says is, "You can't fall in love, " and you're thinking, "Why?" Then you realise, oh because all these people that you grow close to are just going to die.

He’s trying to get through life without people finding out. There was a scene that really stuck out for me, where he walks past someone's house at night-time, a man has come home to a lady. They have a kiss, an embrace, and he's like, "I will never have that book-end of going home, and sharing the rest of my evening and life with someone". It was a point where I was on the Tube, just sobbing my eyes out. I just absolutely loved it, and I do recommend it to so many people.