Dystopia, dark comedy and distance running: books chosen by Adam Garcia, Charlie Higson, Katie Melua and Sara Pascoe

3 April 2023

Explore a sleepy southern American town and a world ravaged by climate change, meet the world's best ultra-marathon runners and enjoy a perfectly crafted family drama, in books chosen by this week's guests on Between the Covers.

Between the Covers is the BBC Two show that loves a good book recommendation. This week, Sara Pascoe, Charlie Higson, Katie Melua and Adam Garcia tell Sara Cox what they think we should be reading next.

Episode four - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, and calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.

Adam says: It is set in a dystopian future that’s not so far away, and tells the story of this man called Snowman, who we meet right at the beginning. The world has effectively ended, there are no more people on the planet. It's environmentally fine but something's happened where there are no more people left except for this strange race of other type humanoids.

We follow Snowman, this tragicomic figure who's very funny and a bit eccentric and weird. How did he get to this place where there are no more people, and what was his involvement in it? It deals with themes of corporate nation states, segregation through medication, pharmaceutical giants trying to control everything and commercial ventures controlling politics.

It's an extraordinary tale. I love nature and environmentalism, and this is a tale warning of impending catastrophe. It's also a hilarious tale that's massive in its scale. Atwood creates this new world brilliantly, and the mystery of what happens is incredibly engaging.

The cover says: Nick Corey likes being the high sheriff of Potts County. But he has a few problems that he needs to deal with: like his loveless marriage, the pimps who torment him, the honest man who is running against him in the upcoming elections and the women who adore him. And it turns out that Nick is as sly, brutal and corrupt as they come.

Charlie says: I love crime fiction. I love writing it and I love reading it, but what I've realised is that I prefer crime books that are about criminals rather than coppers. I like a book that takes you inside someone's twisted mind and shows you why people do terrible things, and then how they justify that to other people and to themselves.

Jim Thompson was one of these pulp fiction authors in the 1980s, which is when I got really turned on to crime fiction. He is brilliant at writing about criminal psychopathy. He was very troubled, he'd had a difficult life and he wrote about troubled people who had difficult lives.

This is my favourite of his books. It's set in a sleepy flyblown southern town in America towards the end of the First World War, with a population of 1,280 people. It's narrated by the sheriff Nick Corey who is lazy, self-serving, self-pitying and very corrupt. He runs the town by doing nothing. He says, "If I start arresting people for doing something wrong, I'm gonna have to lock up the whole town." So everything is fine for him until the sheriff of the neighbouring county starts mocking him. He sets about sorting things out with disastrous consequences.

It could be really bleak and cynical and nihilistic, all of which Nick is, but he's also very funny. There is this rich, very dark seam of comedy running through the book, which actually gives it a very modern sensibility. So I think people who like Coen Brothers films or the David Lynch crime films or TV series, like Breaking Bad and Dexter would really love this book. In fact, I think anyone would like this book.

The cover says: At the heart of Born to Run lies a mysterious tribe of indigenous Mexicans, the Tarahumara, who are reputed to be the best distance runners in the world; in 1993, one of them, aged 57, came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing a toga and sandals. A small group of the world's top ultra-runners (and the awe-inspiring author) try to learn the tribe's secrets.

Katie says: I absolutely adored it! It’s a non-fiction book in which the writer sustains running injuries and goes on this adventure to try and find out how to become a great runner. He goes to the Copper Canyon in Mexico, which is a fascinating and difficult landscape to get to and he tracks down the Tarahumara.

They're an indigenous group who are quite hidden from society but they're phenomenal runners. Everything they do involves running, and the book then goes into describing some of the first races where the Tarahumara were invited to race against Westerners. They run barefoot and are essentially brilliant ultra-runners.

Reading this book let me dive into the world of running. The descriptions are so great I was able to pretend that I could be an ultra-runner, which in reality I’m quite a way off!

The cover says: Helen Grant has always been a mystery to her daughter. Twice-divorced, with few friends, her desire to join in is matched only by her need to stand apart. As Bridget looks back over their fractious relationship, she is forced to confront the cruelties inflicted on both sides.

Sara says: You know when you read a book and you love it so much, you just want other people to read it. It's really funny in its observations of parents. For me there may be slight similarities with my own parents, but overall it still feels universal.

She’s an incredible writer. The prose is very beautiful, and she says a lot very succinctly. It looks like a small book but when I finished it I felt so emotional, as though what had happened in the story had happened in real life. Not a word is wasted.

It’s the story of a woman whose mum gets sick. So it's a really small story and very everyday, and that's what's so devastating about it. It’s a brutal book, but at the beginning I just kept laughing because the mum was speaking in a way my mum would speak, and the mother-daughter relationship felt very believable. Because it all feels so real, it very gently becomes more devastating.

It explores the way that sometimes human beings can mean well and have all this potential for love but after years of dysfunction and non-communication, they can never truthfully connect. Then the person is gone. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't get something from it because it's brilliantly written.