The Book Club Review

In this episode Kate is joined by Amanda Moulson, co-host of Curious Readers, to consider the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist. Ahead of the prize ceremony next week, which one do we think will win?
Perhaps like Amanda you have read them all, but if, like Kate, you're going to struggle to get to all six, which ones should you focus on? Which are the standout reads? Which are the books most likely to delight, surprise, and stay with you long after you've turned the final page?
We're covering all six books, and you’ll also find out what Amanda has on her TBR, the books she most loves recommending, and how a busy book podcaster organises her bookshelves.
Timestamps for the time-poor
00:00 Welcome and Prize Preview
01:31 Meet Amanda Molson
01:44 Quickfire Reading Habits
03:18 Bookshelf Organization
04:06 Favorite Recs and Current Reads
06:20 Kate’s Power Broker Detour
08:54 Patreon Readalong and Book Club
10:12 Women’s Prize Context and History

15:09 Shortlist Book 1 Flashlight
20:51 Shortlist Book 2 Dominion
25:23 Shortlist Book 3 The Correspondent
26:31 Sybil’s Dark Past
27:07 Audiobook Clip Letters
29:15 Cozy Yet Dark
30:22 Famous Author Replies
31:14 Sybil Effect Debate
32:49 Craft and Book Clubs
33:28 The Mercy Step Setup
34:40 Mercy Step Clip
36:35 Child Narrator Power
37:12 Small Press Spotlight
38:01 Kingfisher Obsessive Love
38:50 Kingfisher Clip Warning
40:40 Kingfisher Reactions
41:35 Heart the Lover Clip
44:07 Two Halves Romance
45:36 Illness and Mortality
47:33 Marketing and Triggers
49:04 Winner Predictions

51:23 Wrap Up and Patreon
52:25 Kate’s Recent Reads and Outro

Books mentioned
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate
Open Book by Jessica Simpson
A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken
The Power Broker by Robert Caro
We Are Green and Trembling Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse
The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson
Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
The Director by Daniel Kehlman
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
You'll find all the titles we mentioned in our Bookshop.org list. Buying books there helps support independent bookshops, and also supports The Book Club Review.
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When the Guardian drops a list of the 100 Greatest Novels in English it's time to drop everything to talk about it. Luckily pod-regular guest, journalist Phil Chaffee and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast, also had views, and were willing to get together on a Sunday evening to share them. You'll hear our hits, our misses, how many we’ve read, whether we should have read more and much musing on whether a list like this is the way to get people excited about reading. We explore the joys of the sub-lists – the contributor lists – all squirrelled away on a sub-section of the Guardian's website, that arguably provide more excitement and inspiration than the fairly canonical top 100. Which is the best Brontë? Which is the best Austen? Do we age into certain books? If you've read all seven volumes of Proust shouldn't that count for more than one entry? All this and much, much more. Enjoy – this was an absolute delight to make and I hope it makes you smile as much as it did me.
Have your say: get in touch on Instagram @bookclubreviewpodcast or email [email protected], or head to our website for full shownotes. What would be in your top-10?
Check out the Patreon for all kinds of extras, from our monthly book club to extra shows and Kate's reading diaries. Find it at patreon.com/thebookclubreview
The Guardian’s List of the 100 Greatest Novels published in English, copied below for ease of reference.
*underlined – the ones Kate has read
Middlemarch
Beloved
Ulysses
To the Lighthouse
In Search of Lost Time
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary
The Great Gatsby
Bleak House
Emma
Mrs Dalloway
Moby-Dick
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Persuasion
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Wuthering Heights
The Portrait of a Lady
Things Fall Apart
Midnight’s Children
The Remains of the Day
Lolita
Don Quixote
The Trial
The Brothers Karamazov
Pale Fire
Frankenstein
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The God of Small Things
David Copperfield
Wolf Hall
Great Expectations
The Handmaid’s Tale
Invisible Man
The Age of Innocence
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Song of Solomon
Heart of Darkness
The Magic Mountain
Housekeeping
Giovanni’s Room
The Golden Notebook
The Leopard
Vanity Fair
The Metamorphosis
A Fine Balance
Wide Sargasso Sea
My Brilliant Friend
The Golden Bowl
The Transit of Venus
Orlando
The Waves
Mansfield Park
The Sound and the Fury
Disgrace
Never Let Me Go
Howards End
The Rings of Saturn
Half of a Yellow Sun
White Teeth
The Good Soldier
The Color Purple
The Master and Margarita
The Man Without Qualities
Blood Meridian
Crime and Punishment
Jude the Obscure
Kindred
Our Mutual Friend
Austerlitz
Nervous Conditions
The Bluest Eye
Dracula
The Rainbow
A House for Mr Biswas
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Rebecca
Buddenbrooks
The End of the Affair
A Farewell to Arms
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Vegetarian
The Turn of the Screw
The Line of Beauty
Ragtime
The Left Hand of Darkness
Jacob’s Room
Life and Fate
Sentimental Education
Invisible Cities
The Known World
The Return of the Native
Pedro Páramo
Catch-22
The Road
The Go-Between
My Ántonia
Particular books we touch on in the show
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Orlando, The Waves and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The New Life by Tom Crewe
Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant
The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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What if the antidote to our increasingly frantic world isn't a grand gesture, but simply the act of paying attention?
This week, Kate and Laura are joined by actor, podcaster, and author Miranda Keeling – returning to the pod to talk about her wonderful new book, The Place I'm In, a collection of the small, luminous moments she's gathered from daily life. After her debut The Year I Stopped to Notice, Miranda is back with more of her 'noticings': fragments from parks, supermarket queues, and streets that remind us how much magic is hiding in the everyday.
Their book club read is the perfect complement: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Şavas – a soulful, quietly funny novel following Asya and Manu as they hunt for an apartment, trying on different futures for size in a city far from home. Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days in the park gathering footage – an anthropologist of the ordinary – and her project rhymes beautifully with Miranda's own.
Plus recommendations inspired by the art of the everyday.
You can find out more about Miranda and her work at mirandakeeling.com, and her podcast Stopping to Notice – over 200 five-minute episodes of binaural location recording – is the perfect companion listen.
Find all the books mentioned at our bookshop.org shop. And if you'd like to join Kate's monthly book club and reading community, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview.
Booklist
Ashes and Stones by Alison Shaw – a journey through Scotland in search of the women killed in the witch trials
Open Book by Jessica Simpson – Laura takes a nostalgic trip back through her twenties
No Such Thing as Monday by Sîan Hughes – a brilliantly written novel from the author of Pearl; up there with Eimear McBride ( A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing) and Maggie O'Farrell
The Anthropologists by Aysgul Savas
The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman's newsletter
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Flesh by David Szalay
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler
Memories of Distant Mountains (illustrated notebooks) by Orhan Pamuk
A Nobel Laureate's journals offer much colour but little drama, by Dwight Garner for the NYT (gift link)
Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading by Robert Douglas Fairhurst
The Place I'm In by Miranda Keeling
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A new local literary festival provided the perfect opportunity to record the very first Book Club Review live. Kate is joined by author and broadcaster Bee Rowlatt, whose books include the best-selling Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, which went on to be dramatised by the BBC, and In Search of Mary inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft. Bee also runs the Wollstonecraft Society, a human rights charity. Her debut novel, One Woman Crime Wave, is a novel that explores the realities of wealth, influence, and inequality in present-day London and offers plenty of talking points for book club discussion and debate. Join our festival audience to hear more about Bee's life and work and why Mary Wollstonecraft and her writing has never been more relevant.
Books mentioned
Find all the titles below in The Book Club Review's bookshop on Bookshop.org
Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship by Bee Rowlatt
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft
One Woman Crime Wave by Bee Rowlatt
An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly
Uprising by Tahmima Anam
Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter
Notes
Find out more about The Mary Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture (The Guardian)
Follow the Barnsbury Book Festival for news and updates
Patreon
Discover what's on offer over on The Book Club Review Patreon. In becoming a member you'll get extra shows and become part of a warm community swapping book recommendations and connecting over our shared love of books and reading. At the book club tier you can join our monthly book club and come and talk books with Kate in person every month. And as a paying member you're supporting Kate in making this independent podcast.

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The Book of Love vs The Dud Avocado: Fantasy, Paris & Book Club Verdicts
In this episode of The Book Club Review, we return to our book club roots with two wildly different novels: The Book of Love by Kelly Link and The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.
The Book of Love is the first novel from acclaimed American short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link. In a seemingly ordinary coastal town three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle. Vulture magazine named it ‘the escapist masterpiece of the year’ but what did Laura’s book club think?
Our second book-club pick is Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado – a fizzing, exuberant novel from 1958 about a young American woman let loose in Paris, determined to live life on her own terms. It gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living, a book that feels bracingly modern despite being nearly seventy years old. But did it make for a good book club read?
We've also got some listener feedback on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, we're catching up on recent reads, and the books we’re excited about next.
Get more from the pod on Patreon
Come behind the scenes and enjoy extra episodes, book club membership, community chat threads, readalongs, Kate's reading diaries and more, head to patreon.com/thebookclubreview
Booklist
You'll find all the books mentioned in the pod's Bookshop.org bookshop
Bookshop.org list
Slow Days Fast Company by Eve Babitz
Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
Other links of note
One Grand Books
Frances Ambler's substack
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