The MILD team recommends

I’ve been a fan of MacLaverty ever since I first read Cal, many years ago. He describes a wintry weekend in Amsterdam undertaken by a couple in their 70s, one abstemious tending to ascetic and one an alcoholic. Moving, captivating, and ultimately uplifting.

Susie Nicklin

Leïla Slimani won the 2016 Prix Goncourt with this page-turning thriller exploring race, class, parenting, appetite, poverty—opening with two shocking murders.

Susie Nicklin

Powerful and breath-taking, this is an astonishing debut. Tackling difficult issues such as incest, rape, and brutality, it nevertheless stars and exceptional heroine, Turtle Alveston, whom you won’t forget.

Susie Nicklin

One event and how it affects the cast of characters in a rural community. Wonderful lyrical writing, evoking the constant rhythms of the natural world. Utterly beautiful.

Cathy Slater

Set in 1831, young Hester White is struggling to rise above a life of poverty and despair. A chance encounter with an aristocratic woman changes her life, and her destiny. Together they discover a wicked underworld. A debut novel to enjoy!

Cathy Slater

At the end of his life, a normally taciturn man tells his grandson about the adventures, love and sorrow of his life during the heart of the 20th century. It is funny, moving, and expertly crafted.

Rachel Varughese

Ranging from two lines to ten pages long, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s sharply crafted poems have the raw vulnerability reminiscent of the confessional poet Anne Sexton. These poems acutely capture the physical ache of desire and experience.

Rachel Varughese

Matt Haig takes readers on a fun jaunt through history, while also thoughtfully addressing the age-old question: what makes a life worth living? He weaves light and depth together so skilfully—it is a real joy to read!

Rachel Varughese

Five times Jackson Lamb spells numerous obscene explosions in the dingy top-floor office of Slough House. It also spells the fifth Jackson Lamb novel and more magic from the inimitable Mick Herron, with wit, suspense, intrigue, and twists and turns of a bunch of seriously challenged “spies”.

Philip Maltman

The heart-wrenching true story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar—(in)famous for writing the controversial play and film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Hard hitting and highly recommended!

Harry Coath

The engaging thing about Imogen Hermes Gower’s first novel is its feeling of authenticity. However bizarre the tale, the atmosphere and the characters glow with an 18th century light which casts many a foreboding shadow!

Philip Maltman

Murakami writes on jazz and love in prose as smooth as coffee. It will make you want to quit your job and open a bar in downtown Tokyo.

Gabriel Nicklin

Rankin does it again! Rebus comes out of retirement for one last case…Great holiday reading and a must for crime aficionados.

Harry Coath

A hilarious and illuminating account of Sleater Kinney’s rise during the ‘Riot Grrrl’ feminist punk movement of the early 1990s. Touch, but bursting with attitude.

Gabriel Nicklin

Ruth Ozeki came to Dulwich Books four years ago and weaved her spell in a fine event – this novel is one of the few that an be given the accolade: more than a novel! Magical, moving, complete.

Philip Maltman

If mix epistolary prose, art theory, playful erotic stalking, history, and gender politics, you could get the extraordinary ‘I Love Dick,’ Chris Kraus’s first novel and a feminist classic!

Philip Maltman

A moving, stunning, visceral account of one man’s search for the truth about his father’s disappearance whilst leading a rebellious opposition to the Gaddafi regime. Powerful and tragic.

Susie Nicklin

Safran Foer takes us into the heart of a failing marriage, intimacy, parenthood, youth, midde and old age, and from there expands the canvas to the attempted destruction of Israil through earthquake, flood, cholera, and invasion. Funny, tender, poignant, and wise – a masterpiece.

Susie Nicklin

H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of a hawk's taming and her own untaming.

It was on Obama’s reading list for the summer of 2016 and we can see why – the winner of the Samuel Johnson prize in 2014 and the Costa Book of the Year 2015, an instant classic.

Susie Nicklin

A stark and unflinching novel by a spellbinding storyteller, about religion, love and violence in the modern world.

In a town of temples by the sea, the anxieties and emotions of young and old, male and female, are challenged through the persona of Nomi searching out hypocrisy and history.

Philip Maltman

Everyone is Watching is a novel about the men and women who have defined New York. Through the lives and perspectives of these great creators, artists and thinkers, and through other iconic works of art that capture its essence, New York itself solidifies.

Walt Whitman, Edmund White, Robert Mapplethorpe in a début collage of notes, diaries, letters, transcripts – a polyphonic and subtle novel.

Susie Nicklin

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition -- he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted?

Francis Spufford’s much maligned and misunderstood hero takes us on an eighteenth-century journey into language and parochial New York society both of which sparkle and surprise as does the plot!

Philip Maltman

New Year’s Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe – our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.

Reading the Savage Detectives led to my reading nearly all of Bolaño. This is searingly surreal and at the same time movingly poetic and tragically real…

Philip Maltman

Traditional ploughland is disappearing. Seven cornfield flowers have become extinct in the last twenty years. Once abundant, the corn bunting and the lapwing are on the Red List. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare is running for its life.

By the end of The Running Hare you will care as much as the author does about the sanitisation of the countryside, and the story of his attempt to attract hares to his cornfield reads like fiction – you’ll be rooting for him. Memorable and thought-provoking.

Annie Horwood

Just Kids is Patti Smith’s account of life in Manhattan between 1967 and 1975. The book centres on Smith’s relationship with the late Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a love story, a manifesto for young creatives, a catalogue of Smith’s many influences, and a remarkable portrait of New York counter-culture. A genuinely inspiring read.

Harry Coath

Trans tells the story of Juliet Jacques’ gender reassignment. It’s a moving story of someone’s attempt to find an identity – and a body – that they can live with.  But it’s also a fascinating history of how thinkers have theorised the experience of trans and non-binary people.  It challenged many of my ideas about gender.

Harry Coath

This is a brilliant, incantatory, hallucinatory tour de force of feminist writing. It balances control and appetite, desire and anhedonia, maintaining a high wire tension for three breathtaking acts.

A young wife’s decision to become a vegetarian is the starting metaphor, but the book is about much more than this. Focusing a forensic gaze on women’s roles as mother, wife, sister, daughter, Kang exposes the brutality and the beauty of self-determination and physical sovereignty.

The blossoming of creative talents outside conventional relationships and the subsequent punishments imposed by society & self are ruthlessly skewered. Tender, violent, shocking, sensual – a must-read.

Susie Nicklin

As the trees nearby were pollarded the length of a very long street, I was gripped by their stark beauty. When I started reading Pollard I was gripped again by a linguistic beauty which suggested that the writer not only knew the forest where her main character escapes to, but had enlisted and indeed credited a chorus of trees to help her become one with nature. In so doing Laura Beatty addressed the complexity and beauty of nature whilst at the same time dealing with the harsh reality and difficult lives of her characters. It is still my Top Recommendation.

Philip Maltman