Which classic books are recommended by Ben Miller, Kacey Ainsworth, Rob Rinder and Sindhu Vee?

24 November 2021

BBC Two's book club Between the Covers is back on our screens this winter. Each week, Sara Cox invites her guests to share their favourite reads of all time. This week's titles portray a love triangle, a legendary boxing match, and two very different families.

The intimate book club hosted by Sara Cox is back. Each week we are revealing the favourite reads brought in by Sara's guests. For episode three we discover book choices by actors Ben Miller and Kacey Ainsworth, TV judge and barrister Rob Rinder, and comedian Sindhu Vee.

Episode 3 - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer's The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of the world's greatest boxers, both in and out of the ring... Muhammad Ali and George Foreman made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and monumental egos.

Ben says: Norman Mailer goes to Zaire, to see the Foreman and Ali camps preparing for this big fight, the (1974) “Rumble in the Jungle”. In truth it's existential, like fights are existential, you know, everything's on the line.

There's this fantastic moment where Mailer discovers that, at the hotel he's staying in, the balconies don't have rails. So in the middle of the night he decides he's going to climb onto this narrow balcony and walk out across this narrow ledge - go out through one window and come in through the other one. It's all about how we need to go to go right to the edge to feel truly alive, and it's so brilliantly written.

The style is very odd, because he writes about himself in the third person – “And Norman walked out onto the balcony.” And you think, but wait a minute, you ARE Norman! I'm sure! Hang on!

It's very sparse, but... there's so much between the words and between the lines. It's beautiful.

The cover says: The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy - in fact, all of human existence.

Kacey says: It made me really assess who I was at the time. I didn't read it in 1984, I read it in '89, and when people describe me, they always say I'm down-to-earth, salt of the earth, all of that kind of stuff. But when I was growing up in the '80s, that wasn't a desirable thing to be. Girls had to be light and I had this real sense of darkness and heaviness, and I kept thinking, “Oh, I've got to get rid of that”, because it's not necessary.

This book basically gives you the pros and cons of being both, but also allows you to be heavy. It doesn't tell you that you have to be one or the other. You saw it as an option; there's a benefit in being kind of intense and having depth, and I didn't have to hide it any more.

It also opened up my eyes to lots of things, philosophers, people I had not read. It really allowed me to be me, which was like a revelation.

The cover says: To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, a historical drama of the Great Depression and a sublime example of the Southern writing tradition.

Rob says: I feel really privileged to be the person that gets to champion this book. It is set in the racially segregated south of America, and we see a trial, through the purity and complexity of a child's eye view, and the hero of the story, Atticus Finch.

Atticus, in fact, was going to be the title of the book. He's a man of profound ability, both as a person in society, a lawyer, which matters to me, and as a father.

At its core it is a book about justice, how we reach for justice, and, of course, what it means that children have an innate sense of what that justice is. They're born with it, and this describes that so beautifully and magically.

I read it in a period of my life, about ten years ago, when I'd been prosecuting in international cases, and I came back to defend in a case… You need to believe in the ethical mission of what you're doing and, genuinely, I reread that book at a time I was deeply depressed, and it didn't give me enough, but it certainly gave me a sense to carry on.

And then I reread it again, because I knew were going to be alongside one another today to talk about it. And it had the same, even more acutely special, brand of magic. I cried three times. And I think it just gets better with every read.

The cover says: A chilling work of psychological suspense and forensic memoir, She Left Me the Gun is a tale of true transformation: the story of a young woman who reinvented herself so completely that her previous life seemed simply to vanish, and of a daughter who transcends her mother’s fears and reclaims an abandoned past. “One day I will tell you the story of my life,” promises Emma Brockes’s mother, “and you will be amazed.”

Sindhu says: It's a book about a woman who discovers her mother's extremely colourful, and quite scary and horrifying, past - after her mother has died. The mother has left her a gun, and that's just the start of the story.

So I love this book a lot. I read it by chance. It's nonfiction, but it has a real fiction-y feel. I think, for me, the big thing about this book was, it's the transformation of a woman... for herself, and then later for her children. And as a mother, I feel like so much of what I try to be is a good example to my kid, or I don't want to lose my temper in front of my kid, at a micro level.

This is at a macro level. This lady has really changed her life. Our kids see us as just mum, or dad, as a parent, that's all you are. They don't think of you as a person, who's had adventures, and who gets things wrong, and who doesn't know the answer.

There's so much empathy, by the end of it, that she has for her mother's previous life. It's such a great book, and it has such great plot lines as well.