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Radio 2 Book Club picks – David Nicholls, Helen Heckety and Amor Towles

The BBC Radio 2 Book Club features the best new fiction around. With a wide range of titles and authors, this is a great resource for recommendations for great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging people to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, or simply discover the latest novel from their favourite author.

The Reading Agency, along with a panel of library staff and reading experts across the UK, help the BBC to choose the Book Club titles. Hundreds of the best brand-new fiction titles are submitted to us each year and are then read by our brilliant readers, who select their favourites. The best books are shared with the BBC, and they choose the final picks for the Book Club.

We’re delighted to share three recent Radio 2 Book Club picks that we love, which are featured in the latest Radio 2 Book Club podcast eposode on BBC Sounds. Find out more about them below:

You Are Here

Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way

Marnie is stuck.
Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it’s passing her by.

Michael is coming undone.
Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?

You Are Here is a novel of first encounters, second chances and finding the way home.

Our readers thought:

“I absolutely love David Nicholls and hiking, so this definitely hit all the right notes for me!”

“Heartwarming, humorous, great escapism”

“I absolutely loved this book. I loved the characters, I loved the plot and I especially loved the setting”

Alter Ego

Six months ago, something happened that changed everything for Hattie. The next morning, she came up with The Plan. It was time for a whole new life. That’s how Hattie ends up in a little cabin in the middle of nowhere, where the woodland stretches for miles and stars light up the night sky. Here, Hattie can be whoever she wants to be.

At two years old, Hattie was diagnosed with a condition that would alter the course of her life. Ever since then she’s had to constantly explain herself and pretend that the pitying looks don’t bother her.

If she wants The Plan to work, nobody back home can know why she really left, and nobody in her new life can know the truth about her.

But it’s not long before she’s caught in her lies – trapped between who she really is, and who she so desperately wants to be. When everything falls apart, can she piece herself back together?

Our readers thought:

“This was fun to read, the intrigue from the beginning as the character reveals what her plan is well done, the narrator was well drawn and likeable and the shifting between timelines was enjoyable and engaging”

“Loads to talk about and easy to read”

“The book provides an interesting perspective of life with hidden disabilities and the ways that even friends can make you feel. The tiny moments that build up and become unbearable are described in a very relatable way”

Table for Two

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.

In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself―and others―in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles.

Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.

Our readers thought:

“Amor Towles is a great storyteller as shown in this collection. He observes and captures human nature so expertly”

“I love this author and his quality of writing was avidly displayed in these stories”

“Towles is exploring complex ideas about identity, art vs. artifice, coincidence/serendipity and the divide between secrecy and privacy”

Get involved

You can listen to this and other Radio 2 Book Club podcast episodes on BBC Sounds.

Planning to buy books for your book club? Buy books from Bookshop.org and support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no extra cost to you.

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