Best book you’ve ever read...

[Beautyschooldropin]

Wanting ideas for summer reading really. What’s the best book you’ve ever read? Do you have a book that you go back to and read again and again? Do you listen to audiobooks? Would you recommend them?
TIA!!!📚

Anne of Green Gables
Little Women
Ballet Shoes
Party Shoes

It's probably the Tokyo Zodiac. The best thing I've read. It's a great detective. If you're interested I can tell you what it's about.

@fuzzymoomin I’ve been listening to the bbc one and it’s awful ! Going to get the book now 👍🏻

@EarringsandLipstick me too! I like to think she is very happy and stomping about in her merkin somewhere

Best book I've read in a very very long time has to be The Last House on Needless Street. Jesus christ that was an amazing book.

Hard to pick best ever but really enjoyed these:
Half a yellow sun and The Purple Hibiscus - both by Chimananda Ngozi Adiche
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hossieni
A light between oceans...have tissues ready!
The Help
The hearts invisible furies
The slanting of the sun by Donal Ryant
The vanishing act of Esme Lennox
The Ballroom
Brooklyn
We need to talk about Kevin
19 minutes by Jodie Picoult
Graham Norton 's books
Any by Maeve Binchy...I read these whenever I'm homesick 😁

The Handmaids Tale
We need to talk about Kevin
I don't know how she does it

the last one being the one i would save from a burning building or the waves of a desert island

i wish there was a version of desert island discs where the gust had to pick 7 books...

@Theredjellybean start a new thread 😁

Jane Austen - Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Tolstoy War and Peace. Anna Karenina.

Charles Dickens. Tale of two Cities Great Expectations

David Copperfield Little Dorrit.

Georges Simenon Any Maigrets

Honore de Balzac Any, Colonel Chabert The Lily in the Valley
Mrs Gaskell North and South
PG Wodehouse. Any Jeeves and Wooster

@theredjellybean - what a brilliant idea! Please contact Radio 4!

Thank you, I have thought about it for several years so now spurred on by mn I will!

The last book I really really loved was Circe by Madeleine Miller (also enjoyed Song of Achilles by her) and that was a few years ago now. Not much has been impressing me recently for some reason.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood is up there for me. Hence the username.

Thanks to pps for recommending 'the hearts invisible furies'. So good, and very funny.

@JanuaryJonez

Last year while on holiday in Spain (never thought we'd make it) I read Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift. It blew me away and has now been made into a film with Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth and Olivia Coleman (now showing at Cannes).

Straight after I read his latest, Here We Are, which affected me in a way no other book has done since Atonement, and maybe more so. Just thinking about it makes me actually well up sometimes.

@JanuaryJonez, thank you so much for recommending Mothering Sunday. I bought it yesterday and finished it in one sitting - and then read it again today. What a beautiful book. I am about to start Here We Are.

@Pallisers so glad you liked it - what an amazing reader you are!

A few of my friends read both books after I raved about them and all preferred Mothering Sunday, but Here We Are is more complex and mysterious and just left me wondering and wondering. I love it!

Tigana