From Bond to a real-life spy thriller: Inside stories for your book shelves from Between the Covers

17 November 2021

BBC Two's book club Between the Covers is back on our screens this winter. Each week, Sara Cox invites her guests to share their favourite reads of all time. Selections this time include an unconventional love story, a real-life spy thriller, and a new outing for the world's most famous fictional secret agent.

The intimate book club hosted by Sara Cox is back. Each week guests reveal their favourite reads for Bring Your Own Book. Here we discover the books chosen by actor John Thomson, comedians Fern Brady and Lou Sanders and wine guru Olly Smith.

Episode 2 - Favourite books from our guests

The cover says: Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days' ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.

Fern says: “It's one of my favourite books, if not my favourite book ever. I'm such a Jeanette Winterson stan. It's about a girl in Accrington, in Lancashire, growing up in a really working class town. She's a member of a very evangelical church, and then she realises she's gay and her family don't take it well, and they try and exorcise her of her demons, and then she manages to get away and go to Oxford.

My family were very religious. They weren't evangelical Christians, but I love the character of her mum in it, she looms massively over the dad who's just this little guy in the background.

When I was a teenager, I would always look at the picture of Jeanette Winterson on the back - she's so androgynous, and there were so few androgynous women to kind of look up to then. She's just so forthright and like nothing I've ever come across. It's also got a lot of really fantastical bits in it, so it's not a straightforward 'girl in a small town leaving her home' memoir.”

Carte Blanche in a nutshell: A James Bond novel written by Jeffery Deaver. Commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications, it is the thirty-seventh original outing for the legendary agent. It updates James Bond's backstory to fit with a 21st century setting; born in 1979, he is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan (Operation Herrick), instead of a Second World War veteran as originally conceived by Fleming.

John says: “I was aware that the Fleming estate, after Ian died, commissioned writers they thought worthy of the ability to continue the legacy of James Bond, one being Young James Bond - Charlie Higson, from The Fast Show, wrote those.

But I remember this was a holiday read, and I was absolutely gripped. Classic Bond. Same story every time, world domination from a nutter. I love the villain in this, Severan Hydt, who is a Dutchman... sounds like a very posh apartment building, calls himself a rag-and-bone man, but is massively successful in - very contemporary - recycling. The details are spoilers, but it's a brilliant device for a book. ”

The cover says: From award-winning comedian and writer Katy Wix comes Delicacy - a different kind of memoir from an astonishing new voice. Shocking, raw, darkly funny and deeply humane, Wix's exploration of trauma, grief, addiction, love, loss, memory and hope is truly unforgettable.

Lou says: “It’s absolutely brilliant, so well written and so many beautiful observations. Not just a message of hope, but someone’s experience of losing someone close to them.

It is a funny book by a funny woman, so compelling, so mesmerising. She has a wonderful way with language and words, and you're just in it. She's so vulnerable and she lays out everything about her life and pain, her relationship with her mum and eating. Oh, man, it's just wonderful.

She had three deaths in about two years, and then she didn't want to go to work or anything. And she's very funny about the fact that someone offers her some flowers, and they just sit there dying. That sounds like a nightmare because I don't like books that are all about woe and depression, but she makes it so funny.”

The cover says: A thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians.

Olly says: “It's a book that I would recommend to anybody. The narrative is a ticking clock, so you're drawn in from the first word.

It's about a spy defecting from Russia to Britain in the '80s and... how the Russians are at every stage closing in on him. He keeps basically rolling sixes throughout the book. You think at some point his luck's going to change, it's going to be awful.

The kind of ‘why now’ aspect of the book for me is, who do you trust - what's going on with democracy? And there are so many versions of it in this book.

Oleg Gordievsky, the central character, basically lays down his life to sort of say, ‘I'm going to try to prevent World War Three happening,’ because the KGB reckon that the Brits are about to launch nuclear war at all times. And he convinces MI6, ‘Relax, guys. This is not happening.’ So peace was very much in his heart, I think.

I genuinely believe that it was a soulful kind of defection, and it's a book that's so dramatic. It does encourage you to ask, ‘who am I? What am I standing for? What kind of world do we want to live in?’ And these are the questions of our time.”