Main content

The Big Jubilee Read - 2012-2022

17 April 2022

Throughout this year of Platinum Jubilee celebrations, the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and The Reading Agency are celebrating 70 great books from across the Commonwealth. Read on to discover more about The Big Jubilee Read selections drawn from 2012 to 2022.

A celebration of literature from around the Commonwealth

A South African family gather for their mother's funeral, a young boy in Singapore sets out to discover what happened to his grandmother during the Japanese invasion and a ghost story unfolds on the goldfields of New Zealand in these books published between 2012 and 2022.

The Reading Agency

  • The Big Jubilee Read is a partnership between the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and the Reading Agency.

Our Lady of the Nile

by Scholastique Mukasonga (2012, Rwanda)

It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns. A quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school’s Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents’ preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history.

Our Lady of the Nile is a landmark novel about a country divided and a society hurtling towards horror. In gorgeous and devastating prose, Mukasonga captures the dreams, ambitions and prejudices of young women growing up as their country falls apart.

The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton (2013, New Zealand)

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.

The Luminaries is a feast of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, with a fiendishly clever structure. Evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery.

Behold the Dreamers

by Imbolo Mbue (2016, Cameroon)

After two long years apart, Jende Jonga has brought his wife Neni from Cameroon to join him in New York. Drawn by the promise of America they are seeking the chance of a better life for them and their son. When Jende lands a dream job as chauffeur to a Lehman Brothers executive, Neni finds herself taken into the confidence of his glamorous wife Cindy. The Edwards are powerful and privileged: dazzling examples of what America can offer to those who are prepared to strive for it. But when the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, all four lives are dramatically upended.

As faultlines appear in both marriages and secrets bubble to the surface they must all decide how far they will go in pursuit of their dreams. And what will they sacrifice along the way?

The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross (2016, Grenada)

After standing witness to a murder on the streets of the Caribbean island of Camaho, young Michael ‘Digger’ Digson is recruited into a unique plain clothes homicide squad, an eclectic group of semi-official police officers led by the enigmatic DS Chilman. Digger becomes enmeshed in Chilman’s obsession with a cold case, the disappearance of a young man. But Digger has a murder to pursue too: that of his mother, killed by a renegade police squad when he was a boy.

Together, the two men find themselves dragged into a world of dangerous secrets that demands every ounce of their courage to survive.

How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee (2019, Singapore)

As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked. Only three survivors remain, one of them a tiny child. In a neighbouring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military camp.

In the year 2000, her mind is still haunted by her experiences there, but she has long been silent about her memories of that time. It takes twelve-year-old Kevin, and the mumbled confession he overhears from his ailing grandmother, to set in motion a journey into the unknown to discover the truth.

Weaving together two timelines and two life-changing secrets, How We Disappeared is an evocative, profoundly moving and utterly dazzling novel heralding the arrival of a new literary star.

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo (2019, England)

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope.

Evaristo’s novel is a story of Britain as you've never read it before.

The Night Tiger

by Yangsze Choo (2019, Malaysia)

In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a mission: to find his dead master’s severed finger and reunite it with his body. Ren has forty-nine days, or else his master’s soul will roam the earth forever.

Ji Lin, an apprentice dressmaker, moonlights as a dancehall girl to pay her mother’s debts. One night, Ji Lin’s dance partner leaves her with a gruesome souvenir that leads her on a crooked, dark trail.

As time runs out for Ren’s mission, a series of unexplained deaths occur amid rumours of tigers who turn into men. In their journey to keep a promise and discover the truth, Ren and Ji Lin’s paths will cross in ways they will never forget.

Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart (2020, Scotland)

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive.

Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and as she descends deeper into drink, her children try their best to save her, yet one by one must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. He believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.

Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel is at once deeply personal and profoundly political.

A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam (2021, Sri Lanka)

It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother”s former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence.

Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and a luminous meditation on time, consciousness, and the lasting imprint of the connections we make with others.

The Promise

by Damon Galgut (2021, South Africa)

On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swart family are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land, yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored.

As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise?

More from The Big Jubilee Read

  • 1951-1961

    An ex-RAF pilot confronts racism in the classroom, a young girl is caught up in the partition of India, and an alcoholic goes in search of his dead palm-wine tapster.

  • 1962-1971

    A Nigerian priest believes he has been chosen by his god, an Englishman and a South African join forces to modernise their community and a group of Australian schoolgirls vanish without trace.

  • 1972-1981

    An Indian family move from the countryside to the bustling city of Lahore, a retired spy is recruited to hunt down a mole in the British Secret Service and the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

  • 1992-1991

    A woman is forced to serve as a Handmaid in a dystopian future society, a German industrialist saves hundreds of Jews from death in Auschwitz and a Maori artist meets a mute six-year-old with a haunting past.

  • 1992-2001

    Two Second World War veterans try and rebuild a life in London, two twins grow up among political turmoil in Kerala and a young boy is stranded at sea with a ferocious Bengal tiger.

  • 2002-2011

    A commoner causes turmoil in the court of King Henry VIII, a London waterman is transported to New South Wales, and a Pakistani woman tries to create a day to remember.

Discover more about brilliant books across the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ