A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)
by George R R Martin
A Game of Thrones is the first book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, first published in 1996. The book achieved cult status, though Martin did not start hitting the bestseller lists until later in the series (In fact, Martin joked in an interview that at one book signing for A Game of Thrones, rather than attracting a crowd, he actually drove four customers out of the bookstore). The book is nearly 800 pages long and creates a world that is essentially medieval. Different families vie for power—the 'game of thrones'—in a world of horses and knights, jousting tournaments, castles for the aristocracy and huts for the masses. Across the sea, there is also a Mongol-style empire with horsemen living out on the grasslands. The story is told through multiple perspectives, mostly though not exclusively members of one artistocractic family, the Starks. It's a brutal world, where no one can trust anyone.
Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
🏆 Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, follows the life of an acerbic retired schoolteacher and her husband in a small coastal town in Maine. Olive is refreshingly not a people-pleaser. The novel has been made into an award-winning TV series starring Frances McDormand. The unsentimental journey of Olive Kitteridge continues in Olive Again which was published in 2019.
The Cuckoo's Calling
by Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo's Calling introduces Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling's detective Cormoran Strike. How does he compare to other literary detectives? In our experience, there are (broadly) two types of literary detective. The first type are patently ludicrous, but a lot of fun. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are among the best known examples, but Simon Brett's Charles Paris or MC Beaton's Agatha Raisin are also wonderfully ridiculous detectives. The second type aim to be 'real' characters. We are still expected to suspend disbelief, but there's a basic aim to make a believable character we can identify with. In that aim, crime novelists rarely succeed. One detective might like jazz, another poetry, but they're pretty generic. Not so Cormoran Strike. He is a memorable detective, with a character that sticks with you (in our mind, he looks like the actor Robbie Coltrane).
As the first in the series, The Cuckoo's Calling is one of the best, also introducing Robin Ellacott, the Yorkshire woman who starts the book as Strike's temp. In the audiobook, actor Robert Glenister is excellent at narrating her Yorkshire accent and, like Strike, she seems like a real person.
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale is a haunting epistolary novel narrated by Offred, a woman living in a future America where environmental and societal breakdown have led to the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. In Gilead, women have been stripped of their fundamental rights and reduced to their reproductive potential. Lesbians and other 'gender outlaws' are executed, as are doctors who conduct abortions.
The Handmaid's Tale was recognised as a modern classic and first adapted into a film in 1990. It reappeared in the headlines (and the bestseller lists) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s US electoral victory, after which time the handmaid's bonnet became an icon of the feminist protest movement. More recently it was adapted as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss, who also narrates the audiobook of The Handmaid's Tale.
The sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is The Testaments, set 15 years later.
