Book of the Month
May 2025
You the Daddy: The Hands-On Dad’s Guide to Pregnancy, Birth and the Early Years of Fatherhood by Giles Alexander
As featured on the Reading Agency’s Reading Well 2025 List.
Welcome to the hands-on dad’s guide to fatherhood – for anyone who’s embarking on the rollercoaster ride of parenting but doesn’t know where to begin.
Split into digestible chapters, this book provides practical and easy-to-follow advice on every stage of pregnancy, birth and the early years of parenthood – up until your baby’s three.
Expectations of new dads and the roles we play have never been greater. This is a life-changing time for you and your partner, and the prep work starts now.
April 2025
Be a Birder: My Love of Birdwatching and How to Get Started by Hamza Yassin
Spring is the perfect time to discover the wonderful world of birdwatching with wildlife cameraman Hamza Yassin. Journey along with him as he recounts stories of his birding adventures, and shares tips and tricks to help you get started in birdwatching.
March 2025
We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes
From the bestselling author of Me Before You and Someone Else's Shoes comes a warm-hearted, wry and empathetic novel about a woman getting to grips with her estranged family.
A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is … complicated. So when her real dad - a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago - suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw.
But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, and what it actually means to be family.
Text from Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/we-all-live-here/jojo-moyes/2928377290535
February 2025
What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close
Fiction Book of the Year, Scotland’s National Book Awards 2024.
A killer stalks the streets of Leeds. Every man is a suspect. Every woman is at risk. But in a house on Cleopatra Street, women are fighting back. Text taken from: https://saraband.net/
January 2025
The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey
Yorkshire, 1979
Maggie Thatcher is prime minister, drainpipe jeans are in, and Miv is convinced that her dad wants to move their family Down South.
Because of the murders.
Leaving Yorkshire and her best friend Sharon simply isn't an option, no matter the dangers lurking round their way; or the strangeness at home that started the day Miv's mum stopped talking. Perhaps if she could solve the case of the disappearing women, they could stay after all?
So, Miv and Sharon decide to make a list: a list of all the suspicious people and things down their street. People they know. People they don't.
But their search for the truth reveals more secrets in their neighbourhood, within their families - and between each other - than they ever thought possible. What if the real mystery Miv needs to solve is the one that lies much closer to home?
December 2024
Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toskvig
The funny, wise and brilliant new novel from the star of QI and the author of Between the Stops - an instant Sunday Times bestseller.
After much searching, the happily married young couple, Amber and Stevie think they have found the perfect spot in Grimaldi Square. Despite the rundown pub across the way, the overgrown garden and a decidedly nosy neighbour, number 4 is the house of their dreams. Stevie, a woman who has never left anything to chance, has planned everything so nothing can spoil their happiness. But ... upstairs in their new home, seated on an old red sofa is the woman they bought the place from - eighty-year-old foul-mouthed, straight-talking, wise-cracking Dorothy - who has decided that she's not going anywhere. It turns out that Dorothy will be only the first in a line of life-changing surprises.
Text and image from Waterstones:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/friends-of-dorothy/sandi-toksvig/9780349018997
November 2024
The Specimens by Mairi Kidd
Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.
The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know? This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.
October 2024
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home.
His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.
September 2024
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
Shortlisted for the Hugo Awards 2024
Amina al-Sirafi has survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.
But when she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse, she jumps at the chance for one final adventure with her old crew that will make her a legend and offers a fortune that will secure her and her family’s future forever.
Text taken from https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-adventures-of-amina-al-sirafi/shannon-chakraborty/9780008381387
Aug 2024
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
‘The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.
There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can't resist writing back.’
Text from Waterstones.com
July 2024
Politics On the Edge by Rory Stewart
Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise.
Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow our democracy and government had become.
Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict.
Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, Politics On the Edge is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life and a remarkable portrait of our age.
Text taken from https://www.waterstones.com/book/politics-on-the-edge/rory-stewart/9781529922868
June 2024
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
The geriatric sleuths of the Thursday Murder Club are faced with their most dangerous case yet when the disappearance of a highly dangerous package sends the body count spiralling in Osman's irresistible fourth crime caper.
You'd think you would be allowed to relax over Christmas, but not in the world of the Thursday Murder Club.
On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast. When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise - including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club - as our gang face an impossible search and their most deadly opponents yet.
With the clock ticking down and a killer heading to Cooper's Chase, has their luck finally run out? And who will be 'The Last Devil To Die'?
Text taken from: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-last-devil-to-die/richard-osman/9780241992401