Whether you’re prepping for a rainy staycation or a sunny overseas escape, holiday reads will be on your packing list, and the Collagerie team is here to help. From biogs to bestsellers, memoirs to manifestos, these are the books ticking our boxes…

The Book Club

Team Reads 23 - List - 1

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody. White lies... When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. Dark humour... But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. Deadly consequences… What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

Rebecca F Kuang

Ayobami Adebayo, the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Stay With Me, unveils a dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption. Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. His father has lost his job, so Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers and begging, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of family friends. When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Eniola's lives become intertwined. In this breathtaking novel, Ayobami Adebayo shines her light on Nigeria, on the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots, and the shared humanity that lives in between.

Ayobami Adebayo

This unputdownable debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one who wants to give it all away. Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully-guarded Stockton family, has never had to worry about money. Darley followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't (and really shouldn't) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one per centers - glittering parties, weekend homes and hungover brunches - Pineapple Street is a scintillating, escapist novel that sparkles with wit and wry humour. Full of recognisable, loveable if fallible characters (and a few appalling ones!), it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between.

Jenny Jackson

'I thought I had made myself clear,' Alfonso murmurs, barely opening his lips. 'I want something that conveys her… how to put this… her majesty, her bloodline. Do you understand? She is no ordinary mortal: treat her thus. Ensure, please, that the portrait reflects that, above anything else. I want everyone who looks upon this to know instantly what she is: regal, refined, untouchable.' Florence, the 1560s. Lucrezia, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and to devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of marriage to Alfonso d’Este, ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father to accept on her behalf. Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now make her way in a troubled court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate her appears before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble? As Lucrezia sits in uncomfortable finery for the painting which is to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferrarese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

Maggie O'Farrell

Team Reads 23 - Tiles - 2

From Rupi Kaur, the top ten Sunday Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes a revised hardback editon of her bestselling second collection of poetry. Illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms. Canadian poet Rupi Kaur’s poetry started as a series on Instagram before Kaur self-published a collected volume, milk and honey, which quickly became a US bestseller.

Rupi Kaur

In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose and my strength, but also to finding my voice in a world that didn't always see me. As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. They are bogarted, reinvented to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone who is searching for a way to understand and overcome a complicated past, let go of shame, and find acceptance. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be... you. Finding Me is a deep reflection on my past and a promise for my future. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.

Viola Davis

Team Reads 23 - Tiles - 3

'First I got myself born.' And so begins the tale of Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, bucket-loads of charm and a talent or two the world is yet to discover. We befriend Demon on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, the dizzying highs of true love, and the crushing losses that can accompany it. It's impossible not to fall hard for this hero who has just made your acquaintance, as you hurtle through these pages wishing you could reach into the pages save him from hardships or steer him to the rays of light that shine through even his darkest days. Inspired by the unflinching truth-telling of David Copperfield, Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon is the voice of new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind. This young man is about to steal all our hearts

Barbara Kingsolver

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises - some personal, some professional, some life-altering - Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Nicola Dinan

Team Reads 23 - List - 4

In March 2020 Lucy's ex-husband William pleads with her to leave New York and escape to a coastal house he has rented in Maine. Lucy reluctantly agrees, leaving the washing-up in the sink, expecting to be back in a week or two. Weeks turn into months, and it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the sea.Rich with empathy and a searing clarity, Lucy by the Sea evokes the fragility and uncertainty of the recent past, as well as the possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this miraculous novel are the deep human connections that sustain us, even as the world seems to be falling apart.

Elizabeth Strout

Can you stop a murder when it's already happened? It's every parent's nightmare. Your happy, funny, innocent son commits a terrible crime: murdering a complete stranger. You don't know who. You don't know why. You only know your teenage boy is in custody and his future lost. That night you fall asleep in despair. Until you wake, and it is yesterday. Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. Another chance to stop it. Somewhere in the past lie the answers, and you don't have a choice but to find them,

Gillian McAllister

Verified couple. Unverified rumours. Ola Olajide, a high-profile journalist at Womxxxnâ¯magazine, is marrying the love of her life in one month's time. Young, beautiful, successful – she and her fiancé Michael are the ‘couple goals’ of their social networks and seem to have it all. That is, until one morning when they both wake up to the same message: ‘Oh my god, have you seen The List?’ It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list - she’d retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time, Michael’s name is on it.

Yomi Adegoke

An eye-opening investigation into the science, economics, history and production of ultra-processed food. It's not you, it's the food. We have entered a new 'age of eating' where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, food which is industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we really know what it's doing to our bodies? Join Chris in his travels through the world of food science and a UPF diet to discover what's really going on. Find out why exercise and willpower can't save us, and what UPF is really doing to our bodies, our health, our weight, and the planet (hint: nothing good). For too long we've been told we just need to make different choices, when really we're living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible. So this is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.

Chris van Tulleken

A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever. For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Anthony Doerr

In 1970, Margaret Grundstein abandoned her graduate degree at Yale and followed her husband, an Indonesian prince and community activist, to a commune in the backwoods of Oregon. Together with ten friends and an ever-changing mix of strangers, they began to build their vision of utopia.Naked in the Woods chronicles Grundstein's shift from reluctant hippie to committed utopian-sacrificing phones, electricity, and running water to live on 160 acres of remote forest with nothing but a drafty cabin and each other. Grundstein, (whose husband left, seduced by "freer love") faced tough choices. Could she make it as a single woman in man's country? Did she still want to? How committed was she to her new life?Although she reveled in the shared transcendence of communal life deep in the natural world, disillusionment slowly eroded the dream. Brotherhood frayed when food became scarce. Rifts formed over land ownership. Dogma and reality clashed.Many people, baby boomers and millennials alike, have romantic notions about the 1960s and 70s. Grundstein's vivid account offers an unflinching, authentic portrait of this iconic and often misreported time in American history. Accompanied by a collection of distinctive photographs she took at the time, Naked in the Woods draws readers into a period of convulsive social change and raises timeless questions: how far must we venture to find the meaning we seek, and is it ever far out enough to escape our ingrained human nature?

Margaret Grundstein

The lives and work of diverse unsung heroes of design gathered in smart new book. Familiar histories of graphic design have placed women in the margins, their work unworthy of discussion and preservation. The good news is that with a little digging, we are confirming that women of many backgrounds and ethnicities have long been active in the profession: running presses in the British colonies, illustrating books in the studios of artistically cutting-edge Harlem, and drawing type in the drafting rooms of major type foundries. This collection of 15 fascinating illustratedessays reveals their stories, countering the history we've been fed and expanding the small canon of (overwhelmingly white) women in graphic design. Baseline Shift tells the stories of auteurs, champions of social justice, and the uncelebrated women who used design to make change, do business, and to make a living. It is essential reading for students and practitioners of graphic design as well as those with an interest in women's history.

Briar Levit

Spanning a lifetime of love and loss, crossing borders and oceans, Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt, co-authored by her son Harry Whittaker, draws Lucinda Riley's Seven Sisters series to its stunning, unforgettable conclusion. 1928, Paris A boy is found, moments from death, and taken in by a kindly family. Gentle, precocious, talented, he flourishes in his new home, and the family show him a life he hadn't dreamed possible. But he refuses to speak a word about who he really is. As he grows into a young man, falling in love and taking classes at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris, he can almost forget the terrors of his past, or the promise he has vowed to keep. But across Europe an evil is rising, and no-one's safety is certain. In his heart, he knows the time will come where he must flee once more. 2008, the Aegean The seven sisters are gathered together for the first time, on board the Titan to say a final goodbye to the enigmatic father they loved so dearly. To the surprise of everyone, it is the missing sister who Pa Salt has chosen to entrust with the clue to their pasts. But for every truth revealed, another question emerges. The sisters must confront the idea that their adored father was someone they barely knew. And even more shockingly: that these long-buried secrets may still have consequences for them today.

Lucinda Riley & Harry Whittaker

Team Reads 23 - Tiles - 5

Ann Tran is already at a crossroads when she gets the call that her beloved grandmother, Minh, has died. Ann has built a seemingly perfect life. She lives in a beautiful lake house and has a charming professor boyfriend, but it all crumbles away with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Hu'o'ng. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who's always held them together. Running parallel to this is Minh's story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House's attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life and her family. Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.

Thao Thai

You'd think you would be allowed to relax over Christmas, but not in the world of the Thursday Murder Club. On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast. When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise – including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club – as our gang face an impossible search and their most deadly opponents yet. With the clock ticking down and a killer heading to Cooper’s Chase, has their luck finally run out? And who will be 'The Last Devil To Die'?

Richard Osman

Team Reads 23 - List - 6

Emmett returns home to pick-up his little brother Billy, tie-up his late father's estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he's served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start - and that means heading out to the sparkling west. Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own - to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. However, as soon as they've loaded Emmett's bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him. Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy's plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome. Bursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller.

Amor Towles

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under - but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil - can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written - is there still time to find a happy ending?

Paul Murray

Art is Magic is artist Jeremy Deller's attempt to tie up the key works of his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired his work. Much has been written about Deller over the decades but this is the first time he has pulled together all of his cultural touchstones. It is divided into three sections: a visual guide through his favourite work, in-depth reflections on his life and art and, finally, a scrapbook of images to explain what drives him (from Rod Stewart to bats, the perfect jukebox to neolithic axe heads). The book features work from across Deller's life and art - much of it never seen before. These include his inflatable Stonehenge for the Glasgow International festival, the Miners' Strike (his Battle of Orgreave film), bats (a subject in at least three of Deller's works), Andy Warhol (whom he met in 1986), the links between the Industrial Revolution and Heavy Metal, and hen harriers pecking out the eyes of a Tory MP (featured in his mural against grouse shooting created for the Venice Biennale). Art is Magic gives us the most rigorous account of Deller and his work to date. Something for everybody.

Jeremy Deller

Unlock your limitless potential, create lasting, transformative change, and turn your dreams into a reality with the much-anticipated follow up to the Sunday Times bestseller and social media sensation Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life. This book takes you deeper into your inner healing journey and expands your understanding of each of the unique seven steps to manifestation. Roxie Nafousi provides practical techniques to teach you how to harness your potential and confidently step into your power. Each chapter is filled with exercises for you to complete that are designed to cultivate self-awareness, reflection and growth, and therefore empower and enhance your manifesting process. Roxie says, 'this book is designed to really help people up-level their manifestation practice by empowering them with the tools they need to heal in profound ways, raise self-awareness and unlock the most authentic and magnetic version of themselves that exist. I also listened to the questions people had after reading the first book and I answer them all in Manifest: Dive Deeper. What makes this book so special though, is the wide range of self-exploratory exercises which makes this both a book and a workbook combined!'

Roxie Nafousi

Team Reads 23 - Feat - 7

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways - in flight from society and its judgment - have landed and built a home. Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.

Paul Harding

From the author of the beloved The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry comes a heartwarming tale of human connection, creativity and collaboration as two children who meet in a hospital go on to pursue their dreams and identities through the production of video games.

Gabrielle Zevin

This is the ultimate manual for living better and longer.For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of ageing that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late, prolonging lifespan at the expense of quality of life. Dr Peter Attia, the world's top longevity expert who is featured on Chris Hemsworth's National Geographic documentary LIMITLESS, believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity.This isn't 'biohacking,' it's science: a well-founded strategic approach to extending lifespan while improving our physical, cognitive and emotional health, making each decade better than the one before. With Outlive's practical advice and roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.

Peter Attia & Bill Gifford

Since early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in to her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style. Their questions range from the painfully - and sometimes hilariously - relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between. Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures in love, friendship and dating, Dolly leads us by the hand through the various labyrinths of life, proving that a problem shared is truly a problem halved.

Dolly Alderton

"Urrea's touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through . . . He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense of what he feels necessary to capture about life itself." -Financial TimesIn 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiance in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.Taking as inspiration his mother's own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women's heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valour in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea's "gifts as a storyteller are prodigious" (NPR).

Luis Alberto Urrea

Team Reads 23 - List - 9 

At a moment in which basic rights are once again in danger, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Olivia Laing

Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover. One man, many lives. Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic. From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century.

William Boyd

Guinevere Turner

From the number one author and creator of the hit Netflix drama Stay Close, a page-turning thriller that will keep you guessing until the very last page. David and Cheryl Burroughs are living the dream - married, a beautiful house in the suburbs, a three year old son named Matthew - when tragedy strikes one night in the worst possible way. David awakes to find himself covered in blood, but not his own - his son's. And while he knows he did not murder his son, the overwhelming evidence against him puts him behind bars indefinitely. Five years into his imprisonment, Cheryl's sister arrives - and drops a bombshell. She's come with a photograph that a friend took on vacation at a theme park. The boy in the background seems familiar - and even though David realizes it can't be, he knows it is. It's Matthew, and he's still alive. David plans a harrowing escape from prison, determined to do what seems impossible - save his son, clear his own name, and discover the real story of what happened that devastating night.

The Book Club

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