Book club

Existential humour and comic absurdity from the Douglas Adams classic. A fun discussion seems guaranteed ...

You can't really go wrong with a classic like Herman Melville's quizzical short story. What exactly is going on here? Of course you could always take refuge in The New York Times summary of "a quintessential New York book" that [ ... ]

His publishers rejected Giovanni's Room as a failure, telling James Baldwin the novel would damage his reputation. Knopf claimed the judgement was nothing to do with the book’s content, but Baldwin was convinced that the publisher didn't want "a story [ ... ]

Lea Ypi's colourful, hectic coming-of-age story through the end Communism in the Balkans, published in 1922, has won several awards, made the shortlist for many more, and features on several 'Best Book of the Year' lists. The shock felt by [ ... ]

Subtitled 'An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson, this 1997 memoir by the award-winning sports columnist Mitch Albom is based on a series of Tuesday visits he made to his former sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, as Schwartz [ ... ]

Another really interesting pick by Book Cellar. The authors – software engineer and writer Kevin Simler and economics professor Robin Hanson – start from the premise that we are often unaware of the real reasons for our behaviours: they go [ ... ]

Vladimir Sorokin's 1983 has been described as "a bizarrely funny saga of a quintessential Russian institution, the interminably long line". Perhaps you might go for "avant-garde" rather than bizarre; the book is solely snatches of dialogue, the voices of people [ ... ]