Books that break the rules from Catherine Bohart, Colin Salmon, Dan Smith and Katy Wix

21 June 2022

Whether you want something genre-defying to set you thinking, or a classic tale of defeating injustice, there's a book recommendation for you as Sara Cox's celebrity guests choose their favourite literary treats on BBC Two's Between the Covers?

Each week we reveal the favourite books brought in by guests on Between the Covers. In the final episode of the current series, Catherine Bohart, Colin Salmon, Dan Smith and Katy Wix share their reading recommendations with the nation.

Episode 7 - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world.

Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Catherine says: “I'm obsessed with this book. It's about toxic masculinity and it's also about the legacy of trauma, and familial interactions and dynamics. It's mostly about the minutiae of life in a way that is so fascinating and enthralling that you almost forget it's about such smallness.

Lerner is amazing. He talks a lot about whether or not we should function by just overwhelming people with information, or whether or not we should endeavour to persuade, compel and engage with people. That somehow gets through the whole novel.”
 

The cover says: A tale of love and revenge in the post-Napoleonic era. Edmond Dantes, a nineteen-year-old sailor from Marseilles, is soon to be captain of his own ship and to marry his beloved, the beautiful Mercedes. But spiteful enemies provoke his arrest on his wedding day, and he is condemned to life in prison. His sole companion is the 'crazy' priest Faria, who shares with Edmond a secret escape plan, and a map to hidden riches on the island of Monte Cristo.

Colin says: “Alexandre Dumas wrote this book in homage to his father, who was a Haitian son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave, who came to Paris at the age of 14 and went on to become one of the greatest generals in the history of the French army. Napoleon was jealous of him and had him imprisoned unjustly. His son wrote this book as a story of revenge.

The Count of Monte Cristo is like a precursor to The Dark Knight. As a black, African, European he sort of epitomises something to me of my own heritage. And it's exciting and a good story.”

• Write Around the World: Richard E. Grant discussed The Count of Monte Cristo on his literary tour of southern France - which other books did he choose?

The cover says: This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

Moving through history and across landscapes, this tree-filled novel unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the natural world.

Dan says: “It's an amazing book, really interesting and incredibly readable. It draws together, in almost short-stories, a bunch of American characters. It cuts through generations of immigrant stories in America and brings you to the present day. They're all fascinating in their own right, and from different cultures, and everyone [has different] relationships with trees.

It becomes about activism and about academia, about being overlooked, about being ignored, about neurodiversity. It brings together all these amazing themes about family, the complexities of being from an immigrant family, and clashes of culture as well.

It also makes you have a slightly different perception of the life of trees and how they interact with each other. It's also just really entertaining. I kept buying it for people. It's an insanely enjoyable book.”

The cover says: Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of ‘pillow book’ about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend.

The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief.

Katy Wix says: “It's really unique in that it really defies genre - it's part prose, part poetry, part memoir, part essay, part philosophical investigation, so it's really complex. It's also really experimental, because it's a series of numbered meditations or propositions from 1 to 240, so it's fragments of text. They seem as though they might be unconnected but then they're arranged in such a beautiful, artful way that you arrive somewhere very profound.

By the end I felt really wise from having read it. On one level, it's about a woman and her obsession with the colour blue, and she talks about different figures from history, artists and writers that have also used blue in an interesting way.

But it's also a lot about pain and divinity, alcohol, depression, heartbreak. It's also a story of her having her heart broken and falling in love with the colour blue at the same time.”