Platinum picks: 14 splendid reads for a Jubilee summer

6 May 2022

BBC Two's Book Club Between the Covers is back for another series of light-hearted literary banter. This summer, as well as discussing the best new releases, Sara Cox and her guests are picking their favourite titles from The Big Jubilee Read list, which celebrates 70 years of great writing from around the Commonwealth. Read on to find out about some of the recommendations up for discussion.

Sara Cox and her celebrity readers talk about the season's biggest books

This summer, Richard Osman, Sir Trevor McDonald, Mel Giedroyc and Richard E Grant are just a few of the guests dropping in to the Between the Covers studio to discuss the season's biggest reads and reveal what's on their bookshelves at home. Each week, the panel will also be discussing a title from The Big Jubilee Read; a celebration of great books from across the Commonwealth. Drawing on titles from 31 countries and six continents, it's a fitting tribute to the most widely travelled monarch in history.

Between the Covers: 14 must-read books for a Jubilee summer

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

It's 1919, and on the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial. Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. He longs to see his fallen comrades recovered and laid to rest, but his task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.

Amy Vanneck's fiancé is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved. It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo?

Selvon’s novel celebrates a cohort of lonely Londoners who learn to survive and then come to love the heady excitements of their new home.

People Person by Candice Carty-Williams

Dimple Pennington knows of her half-siblings, but doesn't really know them: five people who don't have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad's gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. But Dimple has bigger things to think about. She's thirty, and her life isn't really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, her life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she's never felt more alone.

Then everything changes, when a catastrophic event brings her half-siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie and Prynce crashing back into her life. When the group are forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The curtain is finally closing on World War Two. In an abandoned Italian village, Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning aeroplane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories. The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire – a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with handwritten notes detailing a tragic love affair.

Ondaatje’s novel caused a stir when it forced The Booker Prize judges to split the prize between two authors for only the second time in its history.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. However, it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant Nobel-prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind.

True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable, which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows not everyone is happy, because Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe

Ezeulu, headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But his authority is under threat from his rivals in the tribe, from those in the white government and even from his own family. He still feels he must be untouchable - surely he is an arrow in the bow of his god?

Spare and powerful, Arrow of God is an unforgettable portrayal of the loss of faith, and the struggle between tradition and change. Continuing the epic saga of the community in Things Fall Apart, this is the second volume of Achebe's African trilogy, and is followed by No Longer at Ease.

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancé, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. However, as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin's parents get to know Joe's firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she's also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a 'love marriage' actually means.

Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love in today's Britain, with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family. What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heartbreaking and gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.

Masterfully conceived and executed, this haunting vision of the future places Margaret Atwood at the forefront of dystopian fiction.

Metronome by Tom Watson

For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together, tethered to a croft by pills they must take for survival every eight hours. They've kept busy - Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps - but something is not right. Shipwrecks have begun washing up, and their supply drops have stopped. And on the day they're meant to be collected for parole, the Warden does not come. Instead there's a sheep. But sheep can't swim.

As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. Convinced they've been abandoned, she starts investigating ways she might escape. As she comes to grips with the decisions that haunt her past, she realises her biggest choice is yet to come.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

In London in 1806, William Thornhill is happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal and is making a living as a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until he makes a mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. He is sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. Soon Thornhill, a man no better or worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life.

Grenville draws on her own family’s past to tell a complex story of colonialism and hard choices at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Exactly What You Mean by Ben Hinshaw

Surrounded by the dramatic beauty of Guernsey, a teenager discovers a secret and finds that betrayal has the power to ruin adult lives. In London, a marriage shot through with infidelity leads to a quest for revenge, resulting in a series of comical and catastrophic events. And in California, as wildfires threaten landscapes and lives, a young veteran struggles with the trauma of war, seeking solace at a local ranch.

In this extraordinary debut, a cast of characters grapple with unexpected betrayal, the loss of innocence and the lies we tell. With sharp insight, Ben Hinshaw illuminates the unnerving nature of what it means to grow up, to be a teenager playing at adulthood and an adult playing games.

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a mission: to find his dead master’s severed finger and reunite it with his body. Ren has forty-nine days, or else his master’s soul will roam the earth forever.

Ji Lin, an apprentice dressmaker, moonlights as a dancehall girl to pay her mother’s debts. One night, Ji Lin’s dance partner leaves her with a gruesome souvenir that leads her on a crooked, dark trail.

As time runs out for Ren’s mission, a series of unexplained deaths occur amid rumours of tigers who turn into men. In their journey to keep a promise and discover the truth, Ren and Ji Lin’s paths will cross in ways they will never forget.

The Dictator's Wife by Freya Berry

The beautiful, enigmatic wife of a feared dictator stands trial for her late husband's crimes against the people. The world will finally know the truth. But whose?

Visceral and thought-provoking, haunting and heartbreaking, The Dictator's Wife will hold you in its grip until its powerful conclusion, and keep you turning the pages long into the night.

The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa

Seeking fortune and opportunity, Faredoon 'Freddy' Junglewalla and his family – his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and burdensome mother-in-law – move from their ancestral village in rural India to the bustling metropolis of Lahore. Welcomed by the small but tight-knit Parsi community, Freddy soon establishes a booming business and his family becomes revered and respected. But when tragedy forces Freddy to rethink his legacy, intimations of historic change loom on the country's horizon.

Wickedly funny and searingly honest, The Crow Eaters is a vibrant portrait of a Parsi family taking its place in colonial India on the brink of the 20th century.