“The Keeper of Secrets” is as a Regency novel with a difference. In this book, Judith Cutler has successfully combined the dark world of crime writing with an era that we perceive as being almost universally polite, delicate and graceful. The Regency period is, after all, the world that Jane Austen inhabited. The result is an unusual novel that is an interesting combination of historical mystery and social comment that shows the bleaker side of this undoubtedly elegant period.

It is 1810, and the rural backwaters of Moreton St Jude, Warwickshire, are about to get a rude awakening in the form of the new parson, Tobias Campion. Young and freshly out of Cambridge University, Tobias marks himself as very different from previous incumbents on his first night in the village, standing up for housemaid Lizzie Woodman’s honour when a drunken guest of local aristocrat Lady Elham (“a distant but generous cousin of my mother”) attempts to molest her.

Judith Cutler, Regency period

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In 1917, as the First World War raged across Europe, artist Kathleen Scott was busy fighting her own battles for the memory of her late husband, Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Following the tragic events of the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic, one-time popular hero Scott is widely treated as a man of poor judgement and foresight, who lost the pole to Norway, who brought disaster on those depending on him, and Kathleen seeks desperately to publish a new book that will re-establish him as a great man. In this vision she partially succeeded, with him becoming a hero once more before it later become fashionable in a more sceptical age to condemn the man, instead raising Sir Ernest Shackleton – who never reached the pole but also never lost a man – to the position of Antarctic hero in his place.

Robert Falcon Scott, Robert Ryan, South Pole

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“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know….Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider that for 3.8 billion years…every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstance to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combination that could result…in you”. [Introduction, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”]

Bill Bryson

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If you had asked me a week ago what one thing I would most want if I was about to live through the collapse of Western civilisation, my answer would almost certainly have been “Ray Mears”. As a life-long urban dweller who has only once been camping, my only means of survival should we lose all the comfy trapping of civilisation that most of us have come to depend on for food, warmth and safety is a battered old Swiss army knife dating from the days I went on archaeological digs; a pair of hiking boots (ditto); a torch, and a husband who was once a boy scout. Thinking about it now, it seems quite a trivial haul to last until rescue comes (you will be on your own for 3-5 days is case of a major disaster according this book, if help comes at all). In an emergency, people apparently respond in one of three ways, known as to 10-80-10 rule: 10% would be utterly useless and a potential liability to their fellow survivors, 80% would be too shocked to think or act rationally, and 10% would remain calm and become the leaders of the group. A sneaking suspicion that I would definitely fall into the second group if not the first suggested that it would be no bad thing to read Neil Strauss’ “Emergency”; it may not make me into a Ray Mears, but I might just pick up something useful from it.

Neil Strauss

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I daresay that everyone reading this is familiar with the name Jack the Ripper. For that matter, you are probably aware of the basics of the case – that a serial killer murdered and mutilated prostitutes in the East End of Victorian London, successfully evading the then fledgling police force in what would become known as “the autumn of terror” in 1888. Although this era is associated with the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, his real-life counterparts had their work cut out for them in this case; forensic science was only in its infancy, fingerprinting was a novelty rather than a serious crime-solving tool, and constables found themselves with barely any training and equipped with lanterns that were at best ineffective in the smoggy streets and at worst dangerous to use. In the 120 years since these notorious crimes took place, the mystery of who the Ripper was has never ceased to fascinate people. There are doubtless scores of unknown killers in London’s history, but this case continues to cause speculation because of both the shocking brutality of the crimes and the very fact we know so little about them and the perpetrator.

Jack the Ripper, Patricia Cornwell, true crime

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Released in time to coincide with the “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” feeding frenzy in 2003, Shadowmancer quickly triggered a lot of media hype and even got itself tipped in some circles as being “hotter than Potter”. In fact, Shadowmancer soon had something of a cult growing around it, with sales outstripping many other children’s books, and first editions fetching as much as £1,000 on the web. The bewildering popularity of this novel has only grown since then, with three other books having been released to make up the Shadowmancer quartet (Wormwood, Tersias and The Shadowmancer Returns), and I understand that a film is also being made of this book by Universal Pictures (which just goes to show really that any of us can make it big with our writing, if you can become a millionaire from writing this stuff).

Shadowmancer is set in the 1700s in the smuggling country that surrounds the Yorkshire coast

GP Taylor

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William Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers the world has ever seen; a household name whose turns of phrase are so well known that many have slipped into everyday usage with us hardly even noticing. Yet for someone who produced such a magnificent body of work, had such a huge impact on the English language and whose image is recognised the world over, there is remarkably little evidence that he ever existed at all. A gravestone, a few references in legal documents and six signatures are the only remaining tangible evidence of his life – such small traces that there have even been questions asked about whether he wrote the plays and poems that bear his name at all (and plenty of theories abound about who might have written then if Will didn’t). Scholars in many countries dissect, interpret, reinterpret, argue and debate Shakespeare’s life and work, and there are huge numbers of books, journal articles, museums, conferences and websites devoted to the Bard. His work is still widely performed centuries after it was written, and the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London has been a huge success. In short, the Shakespeare industry seems bigger now than it ever was.

What, then, do you think a find of a genuine but previously unknown and unperformed Shakespeare manuscript would be worth?

Michael Gruber’s novel “The Book of Air and Shadows” estimate’s the value of such an object at $150 million, which would make it the most valuable portable object on Earth.

Michael Gruber, Shakespeare

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“We need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, winner of the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, has to be one of the best – and most provocative – books I have read in years. It is both a literary feat and an excoriating account of American society, modern parenting, and the phenomenon of Columbine-style school shootings. “Kevin” is shocking in two ways; firstly in its controversial perspective on parenting, and motherhood in particular, and secondly in that this book has as its subject Eva Khatchadourian, a woman who is coming to terms with the murderous actions of her teenage son whilst internally debating the extent of her own culpability for his actions. So shocking is this book that when initially presented with it, Shriver’s agent refused to send it out to publishers,

America, Lionel Shriver, school shooting

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“The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” was not a book I had initially set out to read; my local bookshop was offering best-selling paperbacks on a “buy one, get one half price offer”, and after choosing the one I really did want to read, this was my choice for the half price book. I was swayed by the fact that it was written by an assistant Professor of English, Kim Edwards, and was suggested by the booksellers to be literary fiction. It was also billed as a multi-million copy US number 1 bestseller, and books don’t achieve that without an awful lot people thinking it was very good (or at least one hell of a marketing campaign behind it). It certainly looked worth a try.

The book opens in 1964, with newlywed couple David and Norah Henry expecting their first child in the small town of Lexington, Kentucky. When Norah goes into labour late one night in the middle of a freak snowstorm, David decides the safest course of action is to drive his wife to the local clinic where he is a doctor, rather than risk taking her further to the hospital in such bad weather.

family, Kim Edwards

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“The Time Traveler’s Wife” is the story of Henry, a librarian, and Clare, an artist. They have known each other since Clare was 6 and Henry was 30, and were married when Clare was 22 and Henry was 30. At this time Henry had known Clare for two years, but Clare has known Henry for most of her life.
Confused yet?

This scenario sounds impossible, but has come about because Henry is the first person in the World to be diagnosed with a genetic condition called Chrono-Displacement Disorder. In other words, he is a time traveller. Time travel is a premise that has been used before in countless books, usually with the protagonist travelling through large chunks of time, back into the past or into the distant future, through some magical or technological means.

Audrey Niffenegger, romance, time travel

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I have always been a big, if not a fast, reader if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Books play an important role in my life, and not just because I was a student for a full 7.5 years (and therefore theoretically read them from time to time), but also because they are also a hobby. My mum was a librarian for most of her working life, so I grew up with books around me all the time; not only is my parent’s house permanently overflowing with books, but also there are always two large of library offerings (one to be read and one to go back). My own place is scarily similar – between me and the Other Half, three large and two small bookcases have been filled beyond capacity, and there are various piles and deposits of books dotted around the place. And guess what I did during my fundraising gap year before starting my MA?

favourite books

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