Lawless lads and ladies who lunch: Books chosen by Helen McGinn, Nick Knowles, Ore Oduba and Sara Barron

10 April 2023

From the dazzle of Hollywood to a dystopian future Britain, there's a wide range of reading recommendations from the guests on Between the Covers this week.

Each week on Between the Covers, Sara Cox's guests reveal a favourite book of their own. This week, Nick Knowles, Helen McGinn, Sara Barron and Ore Oduba tell us which titles keep them turning the pages.

Episode five - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: This scorching blockbuster exposes the glittering bitchery of Beverly Hills before racing to a chilling and unexpected climax. There have been many imitators, but only ever one Jackie Collins.

Helen says: You're taken into a world of LA, sunshine, film sets, movie stars. I mean, it's just everything you wanted it to be as a teen. What I really loved about it is that, for me, Jackie is the ultimate storyteller: you cannot stop reading, her chapters are really short and snappy, she always leaves you on a cliffhanger and you love her characters.

Jackie's characters, the women, particularly the Hollywood wives in this case, they’re not always very nice, but you still root for them because they are phenomenal women.

They know what they want, they know how to get it, they don't mess about and so they don't do the whole kind of ‘Ugly Duckling to Beautiful Swan’ thing, which I think a lot of books did in those days. Jackie never did that. She was just writing a different narrative. Her characters are hilarious, some of them are so outrageous, but you just love them.

The cover says: An elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat. A stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his unwary adoptive family from unimaginable evil. A young couple receives a wedding gift that reveals a chilling alternative history of their marriage. These tales and much more await in this extraordinary collection of stories.

Nick says: Neil just has this way of looking at the world sideways and seeing it from a different angle.

Not only does he have the short stories, he also has a small chapter on why he wrote the story. I'll give you a quick example: He got invited to somebody's wedding and he thought the best thing he could do as a story writer for this couple was to write them a story. So he wrote a story about somebody who was an author who was invited to somebody's wedding and he wrote a story and gave it to them at the wedding. They got married but some years later the marriage goes wrong, and she returns to the wedding box and opens the box and takes out all the mementos and takes out the story and reads it again and realises that the story has continued and is now slightly ahead of the marriage in what's happening. And so it starts to lead her in her decisions that she makes.

What’s lovely is in the explanation. He says, "I got to the point it became so dark I couldn't give it to them as a wedding present." That lead in and that idea of how you go about creating an unusual story - it's just a beautiful insight in how to write and then you get all these beautiful stories as well.

The cover says: Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention that created a new language for its characters.

Ore says: This story has been with me for 20 years and it has really stuck with me. It is about a dystopian, futuristic society that is lawless, it's a wild west. A lot of the young people in society are violent, they're debauched, there's a lot of awful behaviour that goes on in it.

I read it when I was a teenager who happened to be a head boy, a prefect, a sports captain, very prim and proper, so you can understand how the idea of seeing other teenagers doing slightly different things was quite intriguing and interesting.

It's so dark and I think getting into it when I did aged 17 or 18 in English Literature just told me so much more. And I think what's so wonderful, what's so current about it and the reason why the story never gets old, is because it does throw forward to an idea that a lack of restraint allows society to fall into this unearthly, inhumane world. What happens with Alex is the government decides that he’s going to be made an example of and they try to correct him. It goes in all sorts of different ways and it's awful, and you cheer for him then his friends turn on him.

The cover says: In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection of interconnected essays, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood, and explores the humiliations, poignancies and possibilities of midlife.

Ore says: Months ago, six-plus years into motherhood, I was away working and I was listening to an American podcast that Jessi Klein was on. The host asked her to read from the beginning of her book, and she started describing this moment of watching her son in a playground.

I immediately welled up with tears, not because what she was saying was even so moving or emotional, but because I felt that my experience of motherhood was so represented just in this description of being sat there, feeling gross, feeling lonely, feeling like you just want to look at your phone, in a playground.

The way that she takes all these moments of parenthood that feel like nothing, that feel like the moments of your life just disappearing, when you want to be somewhere else and turning them into the most exquisite, detailed description of being a parent - I loved it. So, I would like to pitch it as the book about motherhood for the women and men who think they would never read a book about that.