A wide-ranging, unpredictable and refreshingly original meditation on a huge but widely ignored subject: the relationship between the living and the dead… Exhilarating… This is a lovely book: beautifully written, never lapsing into self-conscious ‘poet’s prose’, always a joy to read. I wish I had written it myself.

Cemetery tales, filled with fascinating details and told with a poet’s skill… Delightfully morbid… Sprackland roves about history, language, biology, architecture, entomology, iconography and much else in her quest for meaning… [and] the astonishing twist…should justify your reading These Silent Mansions in its entirety.

Shot through with delightful digressions… There is a spare beauty to Sprackland’s prose… These Silent Mansions is a strange and mercurial book; hard to pin down, but even harder to forget.

Sprackland has the poet’s knack for atmosphere and a magician’s ability to conjure up other worlds. She is like a ghostly time traveller… Sprackland is particularly agile, though, at exploring the ways in which a graveyard reflects its community and how, with modern life, we are losing this sense of connection.

Part social history, part personal meditation and wholly enchanting - as attentive to local and moving details as it is to the fact of mortality itself.

Award-winning poet Sprackland takes a wonderfully wistful tour of her favourite cemeteries... A fascinating read.

To opened ground and graven stone Jean Sprackland brings a poet’s scrutiny and the archivist’s insatiable curiosity. She disinters the humanity buried in the humus; and how, as fungus and algae make the lichen bloom, the living and the dead must share the several geographies of time and memory, identity and story. These Silent Mansions, like silence “beyond silence listened for”, rings remarkable and true.

A deeply pleasurable blend of poetic anthropology… Against the inevitable forces of erasure, this small book serves as an act of defiance.

Each of these stories is told with Sprackland’s keen eye for detail... It is beautifully written as I have come to expect with all of her books, she has immensely powerful prose.

Part memoir, part nature study and part social history, Sprackland returns in this sensitive and unusual book to the graveyards of the towns and villages where she has lived… [Sprackland] connects us to the forgotten lives of those whose names, like Ebenezer and Chastity, are now eaten by moss and lichen…[and] discovers the tales…[of] collective history.

This gentle journey around England’s graveyards is anything but morbid. Jean Sprackland, who is also an award-winning poet, is less interested in death than in the stories that the departed have left behind: the lives and deeds remembered in stone and the way that churchyards help us situate ourselves in time and space… Wise, compassionate and involving.

Sprackland gets her bearings from graveyards. She does not really feel that she has touch down somewhere properly unless she has established more than a nodding acquaintance with the dead…in order to discover what part of her older self might have survived.

Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and unusually sparing in personal detail... the memories...are so vivid that they make the places, and the stories they contain, seem very real.

Full of heroism, desire and drama

Fry really brings the tale to life, adding his own wry humour to the mix . . . Well worth a read

A story thousands of years old, only Fry could rewrite this so captivating as ever

Fry takes us from the founding myth of Troy, through its most famous inhabitants and the infamous war, to the razing of the city by the vengeful and victorious Achaeans

Sad, painful, warm, revelatory and utterly fascinating. I think we would live in a slightly kinder and better country if everyone read this book.

This is a fiercely important book with a big beating heart-Mohsin Zaidi has delivered to us a deeply personal story that is an urgent manual for our times.

A Dutiful Boy is a must read that will undoubtedly move you

[A] powerful read

Deeply affecting and often funny, A Dutiful Boy is an honest picture of what it is like to grow up day and Muslim in twenty-first-century Britain

A beautifully written book, a lovely story, life-affirming.

One of the most eloquent and inspiring memoirs of recent years... A Dutiful Boy is real-life storytelling at its finest

Mohsin Zaidi...in a compassionate, compelling and humorous way, tells his story of seeking acceptance within the gay community, and within the Muslim community in which he grew up

A powerful portrayal of being able to live authentically despite all the odds

Zaidi's affecting memoir recounts his journey growing up in east London in a devout Muslim household. He has a secret, one he cannot share with anyone - he is gay. When he moves away to study at Oxford he finds, for the first time, the possibility of living his life authentically. The dissonance this causes in him - of finding a way to accept himself while knowing his family will not do the same - is so sensitively depicted. One of the most moving chapters includes him coming home to a witch doctor, who his family has summoned to "cure" him. This is an incredibly important read, full of hope.

A beautifully written book, a lovely story, life-affirming

Zaidi's account is raw, honest and at times quite painful to read. It's so vivid that it feels almost tangible, as though you're living the experiences of the author himself.

This heartfelt and honest book is beautifully written and full of hope

We're obsessed with Emily Maitlis in this house

Emily Maitlis is a particular hero of mine . . . I know I'm in for a treat with Airhead

Emily Maitlis is one of my favourite interviewers and I want to read her tales of interviewing people such as Donald Trump, Theresa May and Simon Cowell

A fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into modern television news

It's a brilliant, often funny, behind-the-scenes account of her working life, written by one of Britain's best television broadcasters. It proves she's far from an airhead!

She gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most engaging interviews she's conducted in recent years - with all the wrangling, arguing, pleading and last-minute script writing they involved. Insightful, funny and engrossing, we love it.