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What I'm Reading...

Like most booksellers, I read LOADS of new fiction and non-fiction. I only review books I've both finished and enjoyed (life's too short to comment on those I didn't, plus I'm from the Midwest and we are pathologically nice.) Here's some recent faves...

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Funny, filthy, caustic, clever: Nussaibah Younis’ debut is an eye-opening journey into the world of ISIS brides, white saviours, dysfunctional aid organisations and complicit regimes. When a British academic is recruited to travel to Iraq as part of a UN effort to ‘rehabilitate’ ISIS brides, she quickly finds herself mired in bureaucratic lunacy and compromised in every possible way. A high-speed read with important things to say about intolerance of every stripe: generational, religious, moral, political, emotional. FUNDAMENTALLY lays bare the uncomfortable truth that in order to help others, some times we must first help ourselves. 

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Astonishing, damning and highly entertaining (if it weren’t so utterly depressing) kiss-and-tell memoir about Facebook’s senior leadership from 2011-2017, written by a former insider. Wynn-Williams confirms everything you ever thought about Mark Zuckerberg: a geeky narcissistic man-child who operates in a near-total moral vacuum; and Sheryl Sandberg: a calculating, work-obsessed bully with anger management issues (whose book Lean In should really have been called Lean On.) CARELESS PEOPLE exposes with terrifying clarity just how powerful a political tool Facebook has become (and how it will continue to wreak havoc unless we manage to rein it in); and chronicles the misogyny, entitlement, casual indifference and ‘lethal carelessness’ at the heart of one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. Required reading.

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Weidenfeld & Nicholson’s beautifully packaged reissue of Laurie Colwin’s 1978 comic novel HAPPY ALL THE TIME: four young people in New York meet, fall in love, become friends and at some point discover that a life lived with love & friendship is far better than one lived without. Clever, funny, eccentric: like a mashup of Sally Rooney, Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Von Arnim, set half a century ago. With an introduction by the fabulous Katherine Heiny. 

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Poignant tale of fathers and sons and male friendship which demonstrates that out of tragedy and loss can bloom care, compassion and selflessness. Tom Lamont's GOING HOME is a beautifully captured portrait of evolved male humanity which proves that love reaches across both generations and blood ties and binds us to each other. Perfect chaps' book club fodder.

© 2025 by Betsy Tobin

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