It’s summer and you’re hitting the beach or relaxing in the park. All you want is a satisfying holiday read to devour on your hard-earned days off, but maybe, like me, you’ve grown tired of the same old tropes popping up in stories.

Here are some hot literary recommendations that challenge readers, but will still hit the mark when it comes to the popcorn factor…

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Contemporary Fiction meets Crime fiction

Megan Abbott started…

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Drop by Readings this week and get all your last-minute Christmas shopping needs.

You can find our Christmas opening hours here and contact information for all seven of our bookshops here. And don’t forget that we also offer gift vouchers for hard-to-buy for friends and family.

Here’s what our booksellers are hoping to find under their own Christmas trees this year.

Ellen, from our Doncaster shop, is keen to dive into our Readings Prize winner, Music and Freedom.

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The Midnight Gang by David Walliams and Tony Ross

Lots by Marc Martin

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (the original screenplay) by J.K. Rowling

A Most Magical Girl by Karen Foxlee

Wormwood Mire (A Stella Montgomery Intrigue) by Judith Rossell

Ruby Red Shoes Goes to London by Kate Knapp

The Call by Peadar Ó Guilín

Withering-By-Sea (A Stella Montgomery Intrigue) by Judith Rossell

Hotdog (Book 1) by Anh Do and Dan McGuiness

Double Down (Diary of a…

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Fight Like a Girl by Clementine Ford

The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape

The Good People by Hannah Kent

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

The Dry by Jane Harper

Fucking Apostrophes by Simon Griffin

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son by Mark Colvin

Music and Freedom by Zoë Morrison

Clementine Ford’s searing memoir/manifesto is our bestselling book of last week. Our reviewer writes that Fight…

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Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Ellen Cregan is reading The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

I have always been the sort of reader who tends to devour books in hours, rather than days. This year I’ve been consciously attempting to slow down and take my time with the books I read. While I was relatively unsuccessful with…

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I am not a fast reader. I’m not able to whizz through hefty novels in a week let alone a night, I struggle to keep up with the new releases, and it takes me a while to get into a new voice, to feel comfortable with a new character. But when something really clicks with me, I obsess – I can’t put the book down, can’t stop talking about the characters to anyone I spend time with, and gift copies…

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To celebrate the release of Archer Magazine’s THEY/THEIRS issue, which collects the experiences of non-binary and gender-fluid folks, we asked one of the mag’s contributors, Asiel Adan Sanchez, to name their top books that broke down the restrictions of gender.

Being non-binary means we often don’t see our lived experiences represented in literature. Although that is certainly changing over the past 10 years, we are nowhere near mainstream representation. We often lack words to describe ourselves, to understand our…

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Our staff share the books that they didn’t quite finish this year… but that you might.

‘I don’t always cope well with violence in books, TV or film, and had to set aside Ian McGuire’s much-raved, page-turner of a novel, The North Water, after a particularly gory moment. I’m convinced that this book is just as brilliant as everyone says – it was voted one of our top ten fiction books of 2016 by my colleagues – but unfortunately…

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Our staff share the books they loved this year, but wouldn’t have read without a recommendation.

‘I picked up Justine Van der Leun’s We are Not Such Things after reading a glowing endorsement from the New Yorker and it’s one of the most powerful books I’ve read this year. It’s a gripping true crime story set in South Africa, during the final days of apartheid.’ – Mark Rubbo, managing director

‘I scored an advanced copy of Liane Moriaty’s most recent…

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Our staff share the books that made their skin crawl this year.

‘The most disturbing book I read this year was The Love of a Bad Man by Laura Elizabeth Woollett . This utterly compelling short story collection offers readers an unusual and affecting reading experience, coupling true crime with literary fiction. Each story centres on a real-life woman enamoured with a 'bad man’ – 20th century criminals from the USA, UK and Australia. Woollett’s immense skill in bringing each…

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