麻豆约拍

Each week on Between the Covers, host Sara Cox invites her guests to share their favourite titles. In the first episode of the new series, Alan Davies, Taj Atwal, Sara Pascoe and Adrian Edmondson reveal their reading recommendations.

The cover says: 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?

Adrian says: It's a love story but it's also a comedy about modern loneliness. The backdrop is that someone's trying to matchmake a couple of her lonely friends on a group walk across that narrow bit of the top of England from coast to coast.

I've always loved David Nicholls. I loved One Day and I've loved all his books. I think this is his best. I think he's at the pinnacle of his craft at the minute.

I've never laughed as much, we listened to it on audiobook as we were driving through France, my wife and I, and we've never laughed out loud so much at a book.

This is about two characters. There's Marnie, who's a proofreader, she masks her loneliness with this savage cynicism and then we meet this other guy, Michael, who's a very depressed geography teacher who thinks depression is the way forward. They're serious motifs but he treats them with a humane humour.

The cover says: ‘First I got myself born.'

And so begins the tale of Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, bucket-loads of charm and a talent or two the world is yet to discover. We befriend Demon on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, the dizzying highs of true love, and the crushing losses that can accompany it.

Taj says: It’s set in the Appalachian Mountains against the backdrop of the opioid crisis, and Barbara Kingsolver is from that area and she tells the story through the eyes of Demon – a young boy who is in this impoverished town and becomes as orphan and goes on this huge journey to find home and unfortunately also falls victim to the opioid crisis.

I loved it so much because I really believed his voice, everything he said, his mannerisms, all the people he met along the way. I thought she captured them so truthfully that if somebody had said to me a young boy had written this, I would believe them.

You can find these impoverished towns in every single country in the world, but this one is so specific to the opioid crisis in America. And she talks in her interviews about how her particular area was targeted with this drug for a reason, and I think that's why it's so believable, why it's so captivating.

The cover says: When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different - a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Alan says: It is about a family – a father passes away, and there's a will, and there are four siblings, and how the will pans out, who's given what and why becomes this intense family drama, and you won't be surprised to hear that there are some dark secrets within this family, although whether they're actually secrets or people know what's gone on and are in denial about it. Two of the children have been abused, one sexually and one violently, by the father, and are each invited to keep quiet about it, if you don't mind, thank you, because it's upsetting mum.

It's a hugely successful novel in Norway, but it's been translated into 28 languages, and it's based on the author’s own experience so it's slightly controversial in that she's fictionalised, novelised her own family. Her real family were quite resistant to these revelations. One of the siblings even wrote an accompanying novel about a sibling who told a load of lies to get attention.

It's a real work of art. There are so many short chapters, and sometimes the chapters are just one line. It's full of little philosophical nuggets that really make you stop and think. It's full of things that are so insightful and interesting, and they're dotted throughout the book and all the time you're torn. The truth of it is, she really struggles with the version of their lives that her family want to tell, and she gets to the point where she actually cannot be with them. I highly recommend it.

The cover says: A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Sara says: I loved it. To really distil it down to a story: you've got a married woman who says that she's going to drive to New York, and actually she only drives a little way away, she hires a hotel room and she has an affair, a very intense, emotional affair. She keeps up this charade to her husband that she's traveling across America, and she's 30 minutes down the road in a motel, spending all of her money on refurbishing the hotel room to make it the most sumptuous and beautiful room. And she's hired the wife of the man she's having an affair with. So essentially, all of this money will go towards their family at the beginning of their married life.

I think it's such a fascinating exploration of sexuality, perimenopause, how to be creative when you have children, how to have a long term relationship, what monogamy means anymore. There are so many things that will make you want to read it. It's fiction, but it's very heavily based on Miranda July's life. The character has no name, so you're sort of reading it as Miranda July. I think at a different point in my life, the sexual safari would have been the interesting thing for me, but because I've just had two small children, I am at a different sort of stage in my life. It was how you and your partner divide time if you're trying to do anything and everyone is trying to sort of work out and navigate these things. I just love her brain. I’d read her response to anything.