The Radio 2 Book Club has just announced the Summer Season booklist! As well as coverage on Sara’s show, and other shows on Radio 2, there is a weekly podcast on BBC Sounds.
The Radio 2 Book Club’s weekly podcast will shine a light on some of the best new fiction being published in the UK, across all genres. The books are chosen with help from library staff and other reading experts from across the UK to ensure a fair and unbiased selection process.
As it always has done, the Radio 2 Book Club will champion new voices as well as featuring some of the most popular authors writing today, with a range of novels that listeners will love. Sara will also get an insight into the craft and writing process of the chosen authors and hear from listeners about what they have been reading and enjoying too.
We’re delighted to share the eight books that will be featured in this season of the Radio 2 Book Club with Sara Cox:
Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd
If the past catches up with you, time travel can be murder…
London, the present day: commercial time travel is a reality.
Tempus Tours – owned by controversial tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank – offers the wealthy a chance to witness pivotal moments in history.
To immortalise his achievement, Frank enlists award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. On her first day shadowing Inigo, she is set to witness the return of a billionaire property developer and his family from their trip to the past. But instead of their awe-filled return, she captures the group arriving bloodied and traumatized, with one of their number missing.
Not only that, but Phoebe recognizes the missing woman, and knows not only that she’s not who she claims to be but that she has every reason to harbour a grudge against her. And as events begin to unravel in the present day, it seems increasingly clear that she had sinister motives for returning to the past – and that people close to Phoebe are in danger.
Can Phoebe stop the ripple effect before she loses everything – and everyone – she holds dear?
Reader comments
“This is a fast paced enjoyable read with vivid characters and a plot that intertwines and keeps you reading.”
“This had lots of twists and turns and was so much more than a book about the possibilities of time travel – a really great read.”
“It’s entertaining with secrets, intrigue, unexplained tensions and characters whose motivations you’re not sure about when reading.”
The Scandalous Ladies Football Club by Frances Quinn
London, 1897. Minnie Newton – twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher and women’s rights advocate – has a passion for football. But in Victorian society, football is a men’s game. That is, until Minnie decides to take matters into her own hands and place an ad in the newspaper, asking for volunteers to join the first ever women’s football team.
From a motley collection of replies, Minnie puts together a squad. Most of the women have never kicked a ball before – but a little thing like that isn’t about to stop them. And when they take the game public, it isn’t long before they are drawing huge crowds, stirring controversy across the capital and beyond.
But Minnie is hiding an explosive secret. Soon, all the attention the club is getting begins to threaten the life she has built for herself.
Can she walk the line between independence and safety, or will the truth about who she really is finally come out? And is the beautiful game enough to save her freedom?
A story inspired by real-life Victorian trailblazers, who showed the world that women can do anything they put their minds to, even if the world around them says they can’t.
Reader comments
“This novel was a joy to read; it had that wonderful mix of fun and serious that made you laugh but also made you feel sad.”
“This book tackles some serious historical topics with lots of heart, humanity and humour.”
“Highly recommend this fabulous heart-warming novel for fans of historical fiction.”
The House That Eats the Dead by Max Doty
A family moves into their dream home – only to discover that it hides an insatiable hunger – in this dread-laced and darkly outrageous domestic horror novel.
The new house is a fresh start for Claire and her family. It’s a move towards the quiet suburban life she has craved since her turbulent childhood; a step up the corporate ladder for her husband, Tom; and a safe haven for their two children.
Yet, as they unpack their boxes, she senses something is wrong…
Fresh flowers dry up, store-bought eggs are inexplicably hollow and her daughter’s favourite toy disappears. Claire soon confronts a series of impossible truths: the house is hungry. It’s devouring anything that was once alive. And only Claire and Tom, the owners of the house, will remember that this ‘food’ ever existed.
When Claire exploits the house’s power in a moment of weakness, she and the house forge a fragile bond. But as its hunger intensifies and Claire starts to lose control, she fears who else might be drawn to her home – and what sinister appetites they’ll bring.
Reader comments
“The house is clearly the main character in the book and influences the characters’ behaviours in different ways to create a very unusual and compelling story.”
“The premise was intriguing; haunted house meets little shop of horrors.”
“I think it would be a fascinating choice for the book club as there is just so much to discuss and the originality makes it stand out from so many other books.”
Ghost Month by Simon Wroe
Perhaps you’ve already noticed little things, strange details. A shadow not attached to anything. A face in a window which might be a trick of the light. They come at dusk. Today.
Every September, the spirits of the dead return before vanishing four weeks later in a puff of green ash.
The haunting has become a holiday – part Christmas, part Halloween, full of annual reckonings with the past. The ghosts aren’t real in any way that can hurt you, so it’s hard to tell the silent spectres from ashen commuters: they linger on train platforms, they crowd buses, they take up space on your sofa. The proper term these days is ‘people without pulses’.
This year, four strangers prepare for a visit from their dearly departed. The season forces them to confront all the things that haunt them, not just their dead. As suppressed truths emerge from the shadows, each of them will end Ghost Month changed in ways they never imagined. Happy Haunting.
Reader comments
“How would we feel if the dead came back each year? A question worthy of discussion at a book club for sure!”
“What begins as a seemingly disconnected set of characters becomes part of a wider story and comes to a very satisfying conclusion.”
“This darkly humorous, moving and thought-provoking novel was brilliantly surprising.”
Agrippa by Robert Harris
‘Time was conquered, and gradually my old friend ceased to be a man, or even a monarch, and became instead an epoch’.
Julius Caesar is dead, and the lives of two teenaged boys are about to be changed forever. One is Caesar’s 17-year-old nephew, Octavius, whom he has made his heir.
The other is Octavius’s closest friend, Agrippa.
To claim Octavius’s inheritance, they must fight the giant figures of the Roman Empire – and, against all odds, they win. Octavius becomes the Emperor Augustus. For twenty years, they rule the world together.
Now Agrippa is fifty. Ailing and alone, betrayed by his wife’s infidelity, he takes refuge in his house on the Bay of Naples and begins to write his memoirs. Yet to stir up the past can be dangerous. From his earliest meetings with Julius Caesar, through the epic conflict with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the great naval battle of Actium and the endless wars to expand the empire, he describes how one man has dominated his life: the cunning, ruthless, unknowable Octavius.
When it comes to power, does friendship exist at all?
Where Are the Kings by Donal Ryan
Jack is just twelve years old when he rushes down the hill after his mother’s car on his bike, desperate to reach her before she reaches the lake.
What happens next cannot be undone. Jack’s life changes just at the moment he is entering those dizzying years when he will transition from boy to man; when nothing makes sense at the best of times.
Yet Jack is not alone. Enveloped as he is by his extended family – his ferociously loving Nana; Grandad, given to sudden bursts of rage; his earthy uncles Haulie and Theo who want to show him what it means to be a man, and the irascible JJ who resents him deeply. Then there is beautiful aunt Rose, whose mere presence ignites every atom in his changing body.
But how can a boy with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, understand the person he is becoming? Without his mother to ground him on the earth, will he spin off into the stars?
Reader comments
“This book is so well written it almost feels like poetry.”
“This is an exceptionally beautiful book that discusses difficult topics.”
“The prose is deceptively simple, but every line carries weight, and the cumulative effect is deeply moving. A novel that trusts the reader and lingers long after finishing.”
Contrapposto by Dave Eggers
Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She’s older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he’s in love. When they’re together, they talk about their futures, how they’re going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.
Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them. And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.
This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.
Reader comments
“This ambitious book is about enduring friendship, art and the artistic temperament.”
“The writing is beautiful and some sections are almost poetic in nature.”
“The book is epic in its scope, beautifully written and completely engaging.”
Switzy by Emma Cline
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.
A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.
This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.
His final destination is Zurich.
David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.
As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unravelling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he’s relied on, vanish.
Reader comments
“A thorough and unflinching insight into dementia – the lucidity, the confusion, the frustration, the anger and the sense of being overwhelmed, all described without mawkishness or sentimentality.”
“his is not a likeable nor an easy book, but it is an important one and it is compellingly written.”
“It examines how we hold memories, feelings and hopes. It describes the futility of life, the fact that it carries on regardless and that we each play an insignificant part.”
For all the latest Book Club content, including interviews with the authors, visit BBC Sounds. You can even subscribe, to make sure you never miss an episode!
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