Caitlin Moran's Book Recommendations

"Learned about Hildegaard's Cosmic Egg in this book, which is absolutely brilliant, and highly recommended, with extra Cosmic Egg on top:"

"Book recommendation - I've just read @WixKaty's "Delicacy", which I believe has been criminally over-looked. It's a memoir about food - too much, not enough - & illness, & grief, & rammed with lines I read over & over. A book whose company you really enjoy, & a new hero to love"

"If you want a book recommendation for your holidays, I can't recommend @itsanitarani's "The Right Sort Of Girl" enough. It's everything you want from a memoir - SO honest and intimate and funny. Every reader ends it feeling like Anita's their new best friend."

"Just started reading this, and it's very comforting to have every aspecting of parenting teenage girls all laid out in a book, so you can say "Oh thank god it isn't just me" repeatedly."

"The publication of this book is so timely. One of those "everyone must read this" books. Abuse isn't mysterious, or random, or "a moment of emotion." It follows rules, and you can spot it from Day One."

"Brilliant review for a brilliant book:"

"This book really is something special - dirty and true, often painful, often funny. I ate it up in a single evening."

"A follow-up to the much-loved bestseller The Shepherd’s Life, English Pastoral recounts how Lakeland shepherd James Rebanks has, slowly, returned his 300 acre family smallholding to an older way of farming - both rewilding vast tracts and becoming more financially viable, whilst delighting - in beautiful billows of prose - in the return to his land of oyster-catchers, owls, falcons, dung-beetles, orchids and moles. An outrageously hopeful book. Again, LIFE WOULD BE BETTER if this was required reading in Parliament."

"How could this not win the Booker? How? What is the point of the Booker if The Mirror & The Light doesn’t win - for, let’s not make any bones, this is the greatest book of 2020, and maybe this decade. For the final part of a trilogy to be the best part of the trilogy is borderline impossible, but Mantell’s genius burns like a feasting-hall of candles. Presumably she’ll now get the Nobel Prize for literature. There’s no reason for the Nobel to exist if she doesn’t. I stan her ferociously. A queen writing about queens."

"I’ve never cared for short stories - they’re too short - but Lorrie Moore blows the doors off, every time. She’s got a jeweller’s knack of taking the most precious and exquisite of words, and placing them in a setting that makes them genius. All the things you didn’t think need doing again - describing a sunset, or a kiss, or salty soup - she does for what might be the final and best time, on behalf of humanity. The humour is dark, the stories corkscrew, and the characters keep on talking to you, even after the final full stop. It’s endlessly amusing that people sometimes still suggest women writers struggle to match the achievements of men. Hahaha are you on glue?"