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Harriet Walter, actor and author
I have recently enjoyed Doppelganger by Naomi Klein: a miraculously lucid laying-out of what is really happening in the world via the dark web, the interested parties behind fake news and the human psyche. It is at once personal and universal and not in any way hectoring.
Meanwhile, Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women is brilliantly researched and riveting; a vast story of how women of all kinds have participated in every sphere of our history. It is full of facts that I am ashamed not to have known.
And Precipice by Robert Harris is top-notch writing. The author builds the tension of the looming first world war alongside the passionate extramarital love affair between the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and the much younger Venetia Stanley. Although much has changed for the better since those days, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic for a relatively unsurveilled daily life, and for politicians who could quote Browning and Shakespeare and speak and write in beautifully wrought sentences.
She Speaks! by Harriet Walter is published by Little, Brown (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
David, Guardian reader
I’m about halfway through a reread of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, which I first read when I was 13. I had seen the TV adaptation and wanted more, so I tried to borrow it from my school library. I wasn’t allowed to take it out as I was too young, so I went and bought it instead. Some of the content went over my head but, the main plotline was brilliantly terrifying. Fast forward 36 years, and I’m totally invested all over again. It is still brilliantly terrifying and I am loving every word of it. What a brave 13-year-old I was!
AL Kennedy, author
Thanks to Duolingo, I have started reading in French and I am now relatively obsessed with Bernard Minier’s epic series of thoughtful yet horrifying mysteries. His Commandant Servaz – chain-smoking, blighted in love and poetically philosophical – appears in multiple books within which he is confronted with bizarre deaths, tortures and brooding landscapes. I would recommend Don’t Turn Out the Lights, which is available in English translation by Alison Anderson. Meanwhile, Spike: The Virus v the People – the Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja is a beautifully written and appropriately enraging account of the battle between science and fantasy.
My happy place in hard times tends to be golden age crime, and I am a long-term admirer of the British Library reissues of classic investigative yarns. A recent delayed train journey (which briefly involved rolling backwards down a hill for lack of sand) was brightened by October’s new offering from R Austin Freeman, Mr Pottermack’s Oversight. It’s a Columbo-style willhegetawaywithit rather than a whodunnit and pits a fastidious and likable criminal against implacable amateur detective Dr Thorndyke.
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The audiobook of On Bullfighting by AL Kennedy is available via Spiracle
Paul, Guardian reader
I have read two books this month, Orbital by Samantha Harvey and Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen. Orbital was a joy to read, very uplifting. At only 138 pages, I finished it in two sittings. I felt the characters’ thoughts and emotions throughout their 16 orbits of Earth and I had to keep reminding myself it was not a true story. A truly worthy winner of the Booker prize.
Nuclear War was another great read, but not for the faint-hearted. A truly terrifying account of what could happen in the event of a nuclear war and the decisions leaders would have to make in a matter of minutes. It shows there would be no winner if, God forbid, the doomsday scenario ever happened.
