Looking for a new novel for your reading group? Take a look at our recommended feel-good, touching and funny stories! All free to borrow with your library card.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The Authenticity Project
Clare Pooley
Six strangers with one universal thing in common: their lives aren’t always what they make them out to be. But what would happen if they told the truth instead?
Desperate to confess the deep loneliness he feels, Julian begins The Authenticity Project – a small green notebook containing the truth about his life – to pass on and encourage others to share their own.
Leaving it on a table in Monica’s café, a warm, friendly place where Julian escapes at his most lonely moments, he never expects Monica to find it and track him down. Or that his small act of honesty will impact all those who come into contact with the book, and lead to a life-changing world of friendship and forgiveness.
The Vintage Shop
Libby Page
Among the cobbled streets of the Somerset town of Frome, Lou is embarking on the start of something new. After the death of her beloved mother, she takes a deep breath into the unknown and is opening her own vintage clothes shop.
In upstate New York, Donna has just found out some news about her family which has called into question her whole upbringing. The only clue she has to unlock her past is a picture of a yellow dress, and the fact it is currently on display in a shop in England.
For Maggy, she is facing life as a 70-something divorcee and while she got the house, she’s not sure what to fill it with now her family have moved out. The new vintage shop in town sparks memories of her past and reignites a passion she’s been missing.
Together, can these three women find the answers they are searching for and unlock a second chance at a new life? It’s never too late to start again.
Green Dot
Madeleine Gray
Hera is in her mid-twenties, which seems young to everyone except people in their mid-twenties. Since leaving school, she has been trying to kick and scream into existence a life she cares about, but with little success so far.
Until she meets Arthur. He works with her, he is older than her, he is also married. But in her soulless office – the large cold room she feels destined to spend her life in – he is a source of much-needed sustenance.
And though Hera has previously dated women, she soon falls headlong into a workplace romance that will quickly consume her life.
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
First published in the year 2000, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was one of the most celebrated novels of the new millennium. Adored by critics and readers alike, it remains a perennial bestseller, which still delights with the audacity of its scope and vision, its fresh-minted style, and the wit and warmth of its voice.
Funny, generous and big-hearted, it deals – among many other things – with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle.
The Satsuma Complex
Bob Mortimer
Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub. He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway.
When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: ‘The Satsuma Complex’. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.
And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life.
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
When Tova Sullivan’s husband died two years ago, she talked her way into a job mopping floors at Sowell Bay Aquarium. Keeping busy helps her cope, which she’s been doing since her 18-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished.
30 and headlining for washed-up band Moth Sausage, Cameron Cassmore has some serious growing up to do. Then the discovery of an old class ring sends him on a mission to Sowell Bay to track down the father he’s never known.
Marcellus, a ‘prisoner’ at the Aquarium, wouldn’t lift one of his eight tentacles for his human captors until he forms a friendship with the cleaning lady. Keenly observant, but with time running out, Marcellus deduces that Cameron is a missing key to what happened the fateful night of Erik’s disappearance.
Now Marcellus must use every trick his old, invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for Tova before it’s too late.
The Husbands
Holly Gramazio
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right. Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her.
There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes. The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch). The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich. The one who turns everything into double entendres (‘I’ll weed your garden’). And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch.
But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out?
The Switch
Beth O’Leary
After blowing a big presentation at work, Leena takes a two-month sabbatical and escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some overdue rest. Eileen is newly single and about to turn eighty. She’d like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn’t offer many eligible gentlemen. A life swap seems the perfect solution.
But with a rabble of unruly OAPs to contend with, as well as the distractingly handsome local schoolteacher, Leena learns that switching lives isn’t straightforward. In London, Eileen is a huge hit with her new neighbours, and with the online dating scene.
But is her perfect match nearer to home than she first thought?
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life.
But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
You Are Here
David Nicholls
Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it’s passing her by.
Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells.
When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?
Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with – of all things – her mind.
True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (‘combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride’) proves revolutionary.
But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook.