Books to return to time and again, chosen by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mel Giedroyc, Nigel Havers and Sophie Duker

27 March 2022

With two classic novels, a vibrant short story collection and a unique view of the natural world, this week's guests on Between the Covers reveal books they love to read over and over again.

Each week on Between the Covers, Sara Cox asks her guests to share a favourite book of their own. This week, Mel Giedroyc, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Sophie Duker and Nigel Havers reveal their choices.

Episode three - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: A must-have book for walkers, sailors, swimmers, anglers and everyone interested in the natural world. From wild swimming in Sussex to wayfinding off Oman, via the icy mysteries of the Arctic, Tristan Gooley draws on his own pioneering journeys to reveal the secrets of ponds, puddles, rivers, oceans and more, showing us all the skills we need to read the water around us.

Hugh says: This is a beautiful book - it's just a wonderful read.

It's one of those books that gives you a new pair of eyes to see the world in a different way. He writes about how if you're out for a walk, when you go down to the beach, or when you're by a river or at a pond, how if you just start looking at the water and the way it interacts with reflections, with ripples, with wind and with nature itself, with insects and fish, there's a whole world that's open to you that you just don't see until you get your Gooley glasses on, and then it all starts to make sense.

There’s a whole chapter on puddles. The writing is absolutely beautiful. He talks about things like the ripple maps that appear wherever there are ripples on water. He looks at the effect of light on water. It's this subtle way of adjusting how you look at water, spotting clues and patterns from puddles to the sea.

The cover says: This European masterpiece from the Nobel Prize-winner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War One. Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three-week trip turns into a seven-year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas that will strain and crack apart.

Mel says: This book will change your life. It will change the way you see everything. I'm going to say that outright.

It's extraordinary. It's unputdownable. Some of it is quite complicated, I'm not going to lie. I read this book about once every three years. Running through is this brilliant story about Hans Castorp who goes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin. It's absolutely mesmerising.

This is one of those books that you just go back to again and again. There's a love story in there. There's the most beautiful passage that you'll ever read about hands getting caught in a snowstorm, which just makes you weep. It's about the death of Europe before the First World War.

The cover says: And so the Larkins - Pop, Ma, Mariette, Zinnia, Petunia, Primrose, Victoria and Montgomery - return from an outing for fish and chips and ice cream one May evening. There, amid the rustic charms of home, they discover a visitor: one Cedric Charlton, Her Majesty's inspector of taxes. Before long the family have introduced the uncomplaining inspector to the delights of country living. In fact, soon Charley - as Pop calls him - can't see any reason to return to the office at all...

Nigel says: I think it is just a perfect novel.

H.E. Bates is one of my favourite novelists. This is one of five novellas. He wrote a lot of novels in and around the Second World War. This one is set after the war, when England was getting back together again. I read this every year, once a year. It reminds me so much of my childhood in late 1950s / early 1960s England.

It has this great humour that is laugh-out-loud funny, and all the characters are a wonderful cross-section of society. Pop Larkin is a sort of rag and bone man, so has never paid tax in his life. The tax man comes to investigate, has to stay the night because he’s drunk too much, and then never leaves! I think the TV series have been fantastic but there’s nothing like reading the source material. This is the most charming book you’ll ever read in your life.

The cover says: In ten dazzling stories, Saba Sams dives into the world of girlhood and immerses us in its contradictions and complexities. These young women are feral yet attentive, fierce yet vulnerable, exploited yet exploitative. With striking wit, originality and tenderness, Send Nudes celebrates the small victories in a world that tries to claim each young woman as its own.

Sophie says: I love a short story collection. I also love a title that is an instruction, I feel like it's immediately attention-grabbing. It's immediately vibrant.

The book is kind of transformative and I think it would be for absolutely anyone reading it. What links the stories is that they're all in some way about girlhood, womanhood and the experience of being young. It's that feeling of being in love or lust, and having secret obsessions.

They're all different. There's a young child that's in care. There's a 38-year-old woman who's on a dating app. There's two nameless daughters of a trapeze artist, and you get plonked in these different worlds, where every character feels like you for the time that you spend with them. I think the oranges that are on the cover don't actually feature in any of the stories, but each story is like biting into something luscious. The stories are super vibrant, detailed and sexy, but they are occasionally disgusting as well. It's almost terrifying the way that these women feel and think. A lot of them seem to be neurodivergent and a lot of them seem to have very odd mainstream tendencies or ways of thinking, but their experiences feel very universal.