Staff Recommended Lockdown Reads 2020
Thank you to all the members of staff who contributed to this reading list.
If you read something from the list and you enjoy it, please do let me and that member of staff know, and then pass the joy on further!
During this pandemic can we please ask people to support their local independent bookshop, new or second-hand, or at the very least Waterstone’s. The sector was already struggling, and the lockdown will have made it so much worse. Amazon will survive but not all bookshops will! It would be heart-breaking not to be able to browse in these lovely shops. The local second-hand bookshop has been more than happy to drop off a bag of books on the doorstep during lockdown. Remember that these shops need support and we can help with it, book by book.
| Book Title | Author | Recommended By | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Volunteer | Jack Fairweather | Rosie Ball | How do you keep fighting in the face of unimaginable horror?
This is untold story of one of the greatest heroes of the Second World War. In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre — Auschwitz. It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying designs. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities to the West, culminating in the mass murder of over a million Jews. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust – yet his story was all but forgotten for decades. |
| Invisible Women | Caroline Criado Perez | Adrian Barnett | Imagine a world where…
· Your phone is too big for your hand If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you’re a woman. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the profound impact this has on us all. |
| The Inner Game of Work | W. Timothy Gallwey | Adrian Barnett | The Inner Game of Work teaches you the difference between a rote performance and a rewarding one. It teaches you how to stop working in the conformity mode and start working in the mobility mode. It shows how having a great coach can make as much difference in the boardroom as on the basketball court– and Gallwey teaches you how to find that coach and, equally important, how to become one. The Inner Game of Work challenges you to reexamine your fundamental motivations for going to work in the morning and your definitions of work once you’re there. It will ask you to reassess the way you make changes and teach you to look at work in a radically new way. |
| Quiet | Susan Cain | Adrian Barnett | How do you keep fighting in the face of unimaginable horror?
Our lives are driven by a fact that most of us can’t name and don’t understand. It defines who our friends and lovers are, which careers we choose, and whether we blush when we’re embarrassed. That fact is whether we’re an introvert or an extrovert. In Quiet, Susan Cain shows how the brain chemistry of introverts and extroverts differs, and how society misunderstands and undervalues introverts. She gives introverts the tools to better understand themselves and take full advantage of their strengths. |
| Judas | Peter Stanford | Richard Bellamy | In this fascinating historical and cultural biography, writer and broadcaster Peter Stanford deconstructs that most vilified of Bible characters: Judas Iscariot, who famously betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Beginning with the gospel accounts, Peter explores two thousand years of cultural and theological history to investigate how the very name Judas came to be synonymous with betrayal and, ultimately, human evil. |
| The New Mrs Clifton | Elizabeth Buchan | Camilla Beaty | As the Second World War draws to a close, Intelligence Officer Gus Clifton surprises his sisters at their London home. But an even greater shock is the woman he brings with him, Krista – the German wife whom he has married secretly in Berlin.
Krista is clearly devastated by her experiences at the hands of the British and their allies – all but broken by horrors she cannot share. But Gus’s sisters can only see the enemy their brother has brought under their roof. And their friend Nella, Gus’s beautiful, loyal fiancée, cannot understand what made Gus change his mind about their marriage. What hold does Krista have over their honourable and upright Gus? And how can the three women get her out of their home, their future, their England? |
| The Mist in the Mirror | Susan Hill | Camilla Beaty | One dark and rainy night, Sir James Monmouth returns to London after years spent travelling alone.
Intent on uncovering the secrets of his childhood hero, the mysterious Conrad Vane, he begins to investigate Vane’s life, but he finds himself warned off at every turn. Before long he realises he is being followed too. A pale, thin boy is haunting his every step but every time he tries to confront the boy he disappears. And what of the chilling scream and desperate sobbing only he can hear? His quest leads him eventually to the old lady of Kittiscar Hall, where he discovers something far more terrible at work than he could ever have imagined |
| The Scapegoat | Daphne du Maurier | Camilla Beaty | By chance, John and Jean–one English, the other French–meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking – until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It’s to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman’s shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles – as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing. |
| The Singing Sands | Jonathan Moor | Camilla Beaty | On sick leave from Scotland Yard, Inspector Alan Grant is planning a quiet holiday with an old school chum to recover from overwork and mental fatigue. Traveling on the night train to Scotland, however, Grant stumbles upon a dead man and a cryptic poem about ‘the stones that walk’ and ‘the singing sand, ‘ which send him off on a fascinating search into the verse’s meaning and the identity of the deceased. Grant needs just this sort of casual inquiry to quiet his jangling nerves, despite his doctor’s orders. But what begins as a leisurely pastime eventually turns into a full-blown investigation that leads Grant to discover not only the key to the poem but the truth about a most diabolical murder
It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying designs. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities to the West, culminating in the mass murder of over a million Jews. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust – yet his story was all but forgotten for decades. |
