Want to try something new, but don’t know where to start? We’ve made it easy for you. Eight books, eight amazing journeys, recommended by real readers.
DiscoveReads is a unique to help you find exciting books and take your reading to new places. All you need is your library card and an open mind!
Browse our featured 2026 titles.
এখনও জীবন
Sarah Winman
‘Still Life’ is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood – and the ghost of E.M. Forster.
We just need to know what the heart’s capable of, Evelyn. And do you know what it’s capable of? I do. Grace and fury.
It’s 1944 and in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allied troops advance and bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening together.
Ulysses Temper is a young British solider and one-time globe-maker, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy.
She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered E.M. Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.
Green Dot
Madeleine Gray
Lucie Whitehouse 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.
The Garden Against Time
Olivia Laing
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.
Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams.
This is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discover, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
Glorious Exploits
Ferdia Lennon
It’s 412 BC, and Athens’ invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.
Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.
And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry.
A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry. But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends.
Human Kind: A Hopeful History
Rutger Bregman
It’s a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. And its roots sink deep into Western thought: from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the tacit assumption is that humans are bad.
Humankind makes the case for a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. When we think the worst of others, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics too.
In his long-awaited second book, international-bestselling author Rutger Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think – and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society. It is time for a new view of human nature.
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith – thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France.
Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of a mysterious elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation tout court.
Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno’s idealism laughable – he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.
But just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Model Home
Rivers Solomon
Two bodies lie in the garden of a sprawling property in Oak Creek Estate, a wealthy gated community in Dallas, Texas.
The bodies belong to the parents of Ezri, Eve and Emmanuel, who have long since abandoned the childhood home in which their parents remained all these years. A home that has haunted and hollowed them throughout their lives, in a neighbourhood where they grew up as the only Black family, hoping to survive a place that wanted to claim them, expel them and ruin them all at once.
In the wake of their parents’ death, Ezri and their siblings are forced to confront the reasons they left, the nightmares that have held them captive and the possibility that realities exist beyond those that have forged them.
Bold and tender, ‘Model Home’ is powerful meditation on the power of memory, loss and identity.
Clear
Carys Davies
1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs.
The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep.
Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies’s intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us.
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