Press-reports are showing healthy fiction sales and a slow down on the non-fiction front, hard to understand why when reading the books I’ve chosen this month. They feature stories and accounts worthy of any novel. Take David Kynaston’s Family Britain, unputdownable narrative history that leaves you impatient for the next instalment or Mary Beard’s Pompeii, an enthralling account of this rediscovered city. There’s humour in Charlie Connolly’s And Did Those Feet and in Matthew Engel’s Eleven Minutes Late as they investigate history through road and rail respectively. And we have tragedy – Xinran’s Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is guaranteed to touch any heart.  There’s tragedy too in Wendy Moore’s Wedlock featuring a villain so evil it’s hard to believe this in non-fiction we’re reading but this is one story that did turn into fiction, the case outlined in Wendy Moore’s book provided the inspiration for William Thackeray’s novel Barry Lyndon.

I would also especially recommend Roger Hutchinson’s family history, Walking to America. By pulling on one of history’s countless threads he uncovers a wealth of detail, of human love and loss that without his brilliant book would be lost to us all. It’s a worthy successor to his inspirational Calum’s Road which I’ve also recommended.

And, hidden in the Like for Like Reading recommendations you can find a novel – Pompeii by Robert Harris or even a film, David Lean’s This Happy Breed, a wonderful portrayal of the interwar years, providing excellent detail and background atmosphere to Judith Gardiner’s The Thirties. Another excellent source of background detail to this period is Robert Opie’s 1930’s Scrapbook; one of a series of very large albums portraying popular culture of the time through everyday ephemera from food wrappers, magazine articles to advertisements and knitting patterns.

Member of a Reading Group? - Buy 5 or more copies of any single title and get an extra 5% discount!