50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Four

[Southeastdweller]

Welcome to the fourth thread of the 50 Books Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2026, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read as this makes it much easier to keep track of books or authors that may appeal (or not appeal) to everyone else.

Some of us bring over our updated lists to the new thread. Again, this is up to you.

The first thread of the year is here the second thread here and the third thread here

Fallen off the thread a bit as life has been ridiculously busy.

@SheilaFentiman – I have added The Keeper of Stars to my Would Like To Read List

I think I’ve read 17 and have one on my TBR pile of the Guardian list. It’s tricky to know though. I honestly don’t remember if I’ve read The Turn of the Screw or Great Expectations.

@SheilaFentiman @SpunkyKhakiScroller I’m also a fan of Sharon Kay Penman

58 The Widows of Malabar Hill – Sujata Massey. Thank you @SpunkyKhakiScroller for this recommendation. I loved it! Historical fiction set in Bombay in 1916 and 1921, Perveen Mistry, India’s first female solicitor, is trying to execute the will of a wealthy Muslim man with three wives. Perveen is very uneasy with the paperwork. Murder ensues. Can Perveen solve the mystery and ensure the safety of the widows of Malabar Hill?

59 The Killing Time – Elly Griffiths – Ali Dawson 2. Like @bibliomania I was underwhelmed. It kept harking back to book 1 and I couldn’t remember most of it. Not helpful. Ali time travels back to 1851 and visits the Great Exhibition.

60 The Fair Botanists – Sara Sheridan. Oh this was good! The Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE) moved from Leith to Inverleith in 1821/2 and this is the backdrop to the story. Elizabeth Rocheid is recently widowed from her vile husband and moves from London to Edinburgh to take care of his elderly aunt. The family have sold some land and the RBGE is being put together there. Elizabeth is a talented artist and draws plants etc at the new gardens. This sounds so dry, but its such a lovely story. Oh and Sir Walter Scott makes an appearance. I love the RBGE, MIL no 1 used to work there and we had her funeral tea there. It’s a very special place for me. I had no idea that it was previously situated in Leith.

1. Death at the White Hart - Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall wrote Broadchurch, which was excellent. He is also responsible for the Flux storyline in Doctor Who, which was not.

This is his first novel and an engaging thriller. Jim Tiernan is the landlord of the White Hart in the two pub town of Fleetcombe. At the start of the book, Jim is found murdered, strapped to a chair in the middle of the A35 with antlers glued to his head and a buttock full of morphine.

DS Nicola Bridge has moved to Dorset from Liverpool with her unfaithful husband and teenage son, to rebuild their relationship in a quieter place. So of course her first job is the murder.

Nicola is well drawn and this was an enjoyable read.

Sharon Penman does historical fiction really well - I have read the Welsh Princes trilogy but need to read her others. They are very long!

30. London Falling - Patrick Radden Keefe
Already much reviewed on here and I agree that I found it really unsettling. Also unbelievable how poor a job the police did. Recommended.

31. From London with Love - Katie Fforde
Read as part of RWYO. Reliably light and lovely. Set in the 1960s. Felicity comes to London from Provence to stay with her mother and attend a secretarial course. Whilst Felicity has little in common with her mother, she soon makes friends with Violet, who works in a bookshop, and both girls find love with trials and tribulations along the way.

@Tarragon123 Our Bookclub read The Fair Botanists a few months ago. I would never have picked it up otherwise. I really enjoyed it as well.

Thanks for the reminder about The Sunne in Splendour - I read it years ago, also with the Welsh trilogy and remember loving them, might be time for a reread.

I'm on a run of reading about Polar explorers, I have read the Shackleton biography and have just finished Erebus by Michael Palin.

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin
Erebus was one of the ships in the failed Franklin expedition to discover the unchartered north west passage through the Arctic linking the northern Atlantic to the Pacific (modern day Canada) . In the 1840s, the British Empire decided it need to be under their control, so the Erebus was dispatched with her sister ship the Terror under the command of Franklin and about 120 men. None of them returned and both ships were never seen again. Over the years there were various stories from Innuit about two ships stranded in the ice and reports of white men walking south. The ships were eventually discovered in 2014, and there is now a fair amount of evidence of what happened. The ships were trapped for two years and eventually the men abandoned the ships to walk south for help, which they ultimately failed to find and they all died. It's a pretty harrowing story.
Rather than focusing on the Franklin expedition, it focuses on the history of the ship Erebus which was built in Pembroke, and had seen navel service in the Mediterranean and a well documented, successful expedition to the Antarctic in the 1830s.
I like Michael Palin's writing in general.

The Guardian has a follow-on list today to the 100 books - this time it’s books to fall in love with (although they still sound quite literary). I’ve read 2:
Left Hand of Darkness (like but it was on the original list so I think this is cheating).
The Dark is Rising (like very much & planning to reread it in December)

On the subject of books to love,

@Tarragon123- I’ve added The Fair Botanists to my wishlist as it sounds a fantastic subject for a book.

@SpunkyKhakiScroller- I enjoyed The Searcher too.

@SheilaFentimanThe Sunne in Splendour was the first of Sharon Penman’s books that I read & it lead me to read her Welsh trilogy, which I also enjoyed very much. I have to say that I cringe in a few places in her books (the love parts) but she is really good at getting across the tragic sweep of history - the end of both The Sunne & The Reckoning are especially sad.

57 . The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow: I read this as I wanted to watch the TV adaptation (influence of MN TV thread) - I don’t normally tend to read sequels by other authors (lasting impact of having been disappointed in childhood by the sequels to Heidi). Remus mentioned it as not being that good on her last visit - which surprised me as I was then reading the first section, which I found rather enjoyable as it quotes and misquotes P&P & has a lot of fun with the characters. I especially liked the parts where Charlotte & Mary give their view on events. Unfortunately, only the first section corresponds with P&P in this way, and I found the rest much less compelling. This was not helped by realising that the introvert isolated within her family plot had actually been used by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park - hence my next reading choice.

58 . Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - my other reason for rereading this was that Miranda Kaufman claims in Heiresses that the spiteful Mrs Norris was based on Jane Austen’s aunt (who derived her fortune from the slave trade). The slave trade is discussed by characters in the book, but frustratingly we don’t find out what they (or the author) think. After the discussion MP’s appearance in the 100 book list, I did think about why it is the least popular of JA’s books & my view is it’s due to because a lot of the values & rules in JA’s fictional universe seem adrift here especially as it’s a book where few characters are likeable. Whereas in P&P, the reader either discovers characters by their actions (Whickham) or is given a brief authorial judgement, which is then illustrated by a character’s speech & actions (Mr Collins; Lady Catherine); in MP we are told what to think by the author but this doesn’t not always match the character’s actions. For example, JA clearly approves of Fanny Price but disapproves of Mary Crawford - yet Mary is actually genuinely kind and friendly to Fanny, whereas Fanny really doesn’t have friendly feelings towards Mary. All this is very jarring, but despite this it’s still a bold for me as it’s an immensely complex text to read and think about. This time I thought much more about the issue of parents in the book (as I’m now a lot older than when I first read it) & it’s striking that only Edmund has a close relationship with his actual parent. All the other young people find a substitute parent & their eventual fate corresponds to the moral calibre of the choice of substitute parent. Returning to Mrs Norris, I was very entertained to realise that she is so mean that Dr Grant had had to take her to court when he took over the parsonage to repair the building. All of this was conveyed in just a throwaway sentence, but it’s details like these that give the text the richness & complexity that compensates for its shortcomings.

Solace House by Will Maclean
This was fantastic! If I could double-bold it I would. Maybe Gold it?
Alex faces university summer break with nowhere to go. After overstaying in Halls and dodging accomodation letters for as long as he can, salvation arrives in the form of a paid summer job clearing out an old asylum (Marshlands) with seven other equally aimless students. Then they find the task extended as the university has first refusal on the house behind the hospital, Solace House. The owner was a hoarder who died aged 102 and things get……weird.
Pretty impossible to describe the plot further without spoilers, but it’s a glorious mixture of student cynicism and impulsiveness, pasts so traumatic they can only be hinted at, psychedelic philosophies, Neolithic art and bad poetry. It could have been bloody awful in the wrong hands but it’s perfectly paced and mind-bendingly plausible. He takes the base characterisations of Stoner, Loner, Goth etc and fleshes them out into believable people. It’s up there with the best of Iain Banks and it will stay with me a long time. Maclean also co-wrote Bear Behaving Badly, so he’s an actual writing Genius imo.

ooh this was in the deals @MaterMoribund so I've just picked it up.

Managed to finish off a few books I’ve been reading this week:

Behind The Scenes At The Museum - Kate Atkinson

This was her debut novel and I love it. It’s narrated by Ruby Lennox and takes us through her life from her conception in 1951, up to the early 1990s. It’s interspersed with flashbacks about her ancestors. I love Ruby’s voice and the story she tells, although the whimsical writing style won’t be for everyone. It’s a bold for me though.

Murder At The Spirit Lounge - Jess Kidd

The second in the series featuring Nora Breen, an Irish ex-nun solving crimes in a small English seaside town. Here Nora helps solve the murders of a famous medium and some of her clients. I did enjoy this but didn’t feel it was as good as the first in the series. I’ll still read the next one though!

Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother - Rachel Trethewey

A biography of Sydney, mother to the six Mitford sisters and their brother Tom. It was fascinating to see the background of one of their parents, although it’s hard to like Sydney due to her politics (she was a champion of Hitler even after it was known what he was up to). Worth a read if you are a Mitford fan.

Is Muv recent ? @ChessieFL i didn't know it existed

Catching up on a few reviews as I had a bit of a reading slump recently and was struggling to get through anything for a while there.

54 Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez

I’ve read a few books by this author now, and have really liked them, but I wasn’t a fan of this one. There are two ER doctors, one with horrendous anxiety (and who is possibly autistic), a brother with kidney failure, and a fake dating scenario. Unfortunately the characters never really came to life and it all felt a bit flat and one dimensional. I will, however, give the author another go as I enjoyed the other books by her so much.

55 Hot To Go by Kristen Bailey

I quite enjoyed this story of Carlos, a Spanish yoga instructor, and Amelie, a French champagne heiress who hook up in Mallorca for a red-hot holiday romance. They get a chance to see if their holiday romance could become something more when they turn out to be new colleagues. But things are complicated by the fact that Carlos is really Charlie, a Spanish teacher, and Amelie is really Suzie, a French teacher. I thought this was quite sweet and I liked the main and side characters. This also delivered on the ‘com’ element of the rom-com and I laughed out loud a few times. Yes it was a little cheesy, and yes the coincidences stretched my credulity, but I liked it, and even better it was free with kindle unlimited. I’ll definitely check out more books by this author.

56 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

I read the author’s book about Chernobyl and was impressed with the level of detail, and the author’s ability to make technical information understandable to a lay person. As I have a fascination / terror of space I thought this book might be just as good. I wasn’t wrong. This had the same strengths that I saw in the Chernobyl book, the detailed scene setting, in this case covering the space race, shuttle programme and the impact of the Apollo 1 fire, in which 3 astronauts lost their lives in a launchpad fire. I read with fascination, horror, and a mounting frustration, the arrogance, corruption and stupidity lead straight to disaster. The author also did a great job of honouring ALL of the victims of the disaster, not just Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first teacher in space. If I have a criticism, and it is a small one, it’s that the book didn’t seem very well weighted, there was just a bit too much of the build up, and a bit too little on the actual Challenger disaster and its aftermath. A RWYO and a bold.

Going against the trend here, but Bookish is a DNF. I find Mangan’s journalism and reviews entertaining enough but here she turns up the Twee to 11 and a quarter of the way in it really started to grate. The little vignettes of family life in particular made me want to throw my Kindle across the room.

Yes, published last year @EineReiseDurchDieZeit
There’s also a new biography of Decca, Troublemaker by Carol Kaplan. Not read that yet although my library reservation is due in soon.

Book 34
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce - Vic Kemp is a famous artist and raised his four children alone after the death of their mother. The book kicks off with him telling the (adult) children he is marrying a much younger woman - he does so, decamps to his Italian lake house and inexplicably drowns shortly afterwards. The story deals with the fallout as the sibling relationships are tested and they all meet their elusive young stepmother.
This started slowly for me - the siblings seems almost caricatures 'the clever one; the homemaker, the misfit etc' and I found it hard to care about any of them. I also wasn't really engaged by Vic. I loved the Italian lake setting though and I do like an 'everyone in a big house in a beautiful setting' story, so that carried me along for a bit. Then it all really got going in the last 150 pages or so - the characters came properly into focus, the page picked up and it all moved towards a moving, enjoyable and, in parts, funny conclusion. I now think the slow start is intentional, and clever, but it's fortunate that I read it at a time when I was doing quite a lot of reading, because I think I'd have found it hard to stick with if I was in a 'just-a-few-pages-a-night' reading phase.

I also picked it up yesterday!

@MamaNewtNewt the Challenger book is on my Kindle TBR, glad to hear a good review.

The Seven Sisters - Lucinda Riley

This (and the next three in the series) are on kindle unlimited so I thought I would try as someone at book club raved about them.

There are six sisters who have been adopted from around the world by Pa Salt. Pa Salt dies at the start of the book and leaves mysterious clues so his (adult) DDs can track down their origins. A bit like the Walsh family, each sister has her place (the beauty, the leader, the quiet one etc)

This book focusses on the eldest, Maia, who follows her trail to Brazil and discovers both love and the identity of her family.

It was an ok read, I’m not sure I want to read all the books though, on the strength of this one.

Nervous Conditions is 99p today, I think a few of us added it to wishlists recently.

Is This Working by Charlie Colenutt Like Terpsichore I heard of this from PermanentTemporary‘s review - thanks for the recommendation - I really enjoyed it. A collection of accounts from people about their working lives in the UK today, from Canary Wharf to warehouses, call centres to Pupil Referral Units. Interesting and often inspiring, you get a real sense of each person and their work.

Thanks for posting about Chinese Voices elkie - sounds fascinating. I’m slowly making my way through Tony Parker’s oral history books and Studs Terkel is on my list.

Finished William Boyd's second Gabriel Dax thriller novel , The Predicament. This one moves about from England to Guatemala and then to West Berlin. Nothing really happens. It's OK but I am not sure I care about Dax's sex life or his obsession with Faith Green. Quite a lot of the book is spent reminding us of Book One and setting up Book Two. I thought Book One was more interesting. But is was all fine. I'll read the next one.

38. What Happened That Night - Nicci French

After a bit of a book drought I've managed to load myself up with a logjam of library loans all coming due at the same time, so I wanted to whizz through this. TBH it was almost a DNF. I'm getting quite disenchanted with NF and while this was a bit better than some recent efforts, that’s not saying much.

A group of people who were friends back in their university days reunites at the request of Tyler Green, who's just out of prison after serving 29 years for the murder of one of said group. Thing is, he says he didn’t do it. He wants to see them to convey this message, and thereby to point out that someone else in the group is a killer.

I won't give any spoilers but this set-up section was so long and dull I almost gave up, and read ahead to find it's actually another in the series of Detective Maud O'Connor novels. It gets a bit better when she appears, but as she’s in danger of becoming another Freida Klein - perpetually reviled by her superiors but blessed with almost supernatural powers of deduction and saintliness - I'm finding her a bit problematic too. Anyway, I finished it, but that’s about all I can say 🥴

Oh, I need that Jessica Mitford bio, will look. Would like to read about their mother too. I hate fascism, then and now, but I think Sydney was very much of her time and class. Even the Royals were implicated, but it was before the media picked over views and public position for our rulers, and many newspapers were also Fascist sympathising.

Also, Decca wasn't as estranged from her family as I had the impression she was. Leslie Brody's book about her for example, finds that after Decca eloped with a "communist " cousin, mum actually caught up with her and helped organise a wedding which she attended. Decca wrote to her sisters and she still loved Unity as her sister and childhood playmate.

Compare and contrast with Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst who were seriously estranged from their better known mother, Emmeline, and sister Christabel. They did try but then E & C tried to disown her, and Sylvia tried to see her mum at the end of E's life but couldn't get to do so. The Mitfords were much posher than the Pankhursts and the political gulf sometimes more extreme - E had for years tried to exploit SP's commitment to the family cause at some cost to her middle daughter.

I am deeply absorbed in a wonderful biography of Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes, huge but worth every minute spent reading it. Very different families but both divided politically with passionate political beliefs and somewhat dysfunctional.

Decca was never really estranged from her mum - as you say Sydney helped organise the wedding and they then kept in touch for the rest of their lives, including Sydney visiting Decca in America and several trips by Decca back to the UK.

However, sadly Decca never saw or spoke to her father again once she ran away with Edmund.

I have often wondered if Unity was neurodivergent and then of course disaster struck with her brain injury. Decca didn’t think twice about overlooking Unity’s behaviour which makes you wonder why she considered Unity’s behaviour a lesser evil than Diana’s presumably because she felt Diana had more agency. She bore a lifelong grudge against Diana and I think it was because Unity was vulnerable and easily led and was encouraged by the Mosley’s. That’s my 2p anyway.

You Killed Me First - John Marrs

Ridiculous thriller which I nearly DNFed. At least it was free on KUL.

39 . Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (audiobook)

Read by Elle Fanning, who stars in the TV adaptation.

20 year old Margo becomes pregnant by her college professor. She very quickly finds herself struggling to stay above water financially, eventually turning to Only Fans to make an income, but what price will she pay in the court of opinion?

I don’t know, this was good, but I’m nearly 45 and I felt a little too old for it. There’s a lot of social media plot. Filming TikToks etc. It’s quite funny in parts and I liked the character Jinx who is played by Nick Offerman in the series and I love Nick Offerman so I might watch it. But yeah, this was distinctly average if easy to engage with.

I’ve read one John Marrs. It made me hate him as a person not just the book. Never again. @SheilaFentiman

32 Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments by Hema Sukumar

Shelterbox book about the inhabitants of an apartment building in Chennai, which is under threat of destruction for redevelopment. The book is exactly as you would imagine from the title. Disparate cast of characters who pull together in the face of adversity. There were some nice touches (I liked the friendship between Kamala and Sundu, who are well-realised female characters) and some funny moments, but it felt a bit slight and was also slightly awkwardly written. The pacing was also odd; a very slow burn and then a rushed ending. Fine, but no more.