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20 November 2023

The best authors can create great stories from any setting. This week on Between the Covers, the guests’ selections transport us from King Henry VIII's court to a sanatorium for TB patients in New York; we explore London’s dating scene in a ‘gay Bridget Jones’ and call in at Smile Mart, a 24-hour Tokyo convenience store with a weird and wonderful employee.

In this week's episode of Between the Covers, Adam Kay, Alex Jones, Omari Douglas and Sandi Toksvig each reveal one of their all-time favourite reads.

Episode three - Favourite books from our guests

Adam says: I'm not the world’s most highbrow reader. I read books mostly on holiday, to get away from real life; books that make me laugh, smile, and engage me.

This book... I think Bridget Jones is spot-on, it’s a gay Bridget Jones. I don’t think I’ve read a sort of gay rom-com book before and I really liked it. It’s about London, dating - mostly disasters. It’s funny, it absolutely whips along.

And Justin Myers, who writes it, he’s on various social media things as “The Guyliner” and he reviews people’s dates. He’s a very funny guy, and I just really enjoyed it, and I thought some other people might too.

Alex says: This one is a ‘high-energy romp’ through Tudor times. And of course Philippa Gregory is one of our foremost historical writers, so she knows what she’s doing. It’s basically about Mary Boleyn, who is the lesser-known sister.

Mary turns up at the Court back in 1521 and of course falls for Henry VIII, and he falls for her because he was a bit “grimy”, wasn’t he? It is about their relationship and her basically being side-stepped for Anne, who we all know about. It’s basically the sisters’ fight to win the love of the King.

My sister introduced me to this book; she’s a big, big reader and she said, ‘Al, just take a break and read this’, and I went into the bath and I started it and I was still in the bath three hours later, like a prune I was. I loved it. It completely immerses you in the world of the Tudors.

My children don’t thank me - they’re like, ‘not Hampton Court again, mama!’ Because I’m obsessed. But it feeds your soul. It’s proper fiction.

Omari says: I can’t even remember how I came across the book, but I read it in one sitting because it’s short, which I like.

It is about a woman called Keiko. At the beginning of the novel you are introduced to her childhood, and she has a strong awareness of feeling different to everyone around her. She really struggles to connect socially; and, as she grows up, her parents are worried and then as she gets older, they’re worried that she’s not finding a relationship: ‘Why aren’t you thinking about having children?’

When she’s 18, she gets a part time job in a 24-hour convenience store [in Tokyo]. And, in this place, she suddenly finds her purpose. She finds such comfort and solace in the mundanity, and making sure that everything’s presented really well in the store.

And I think it’s just a story about a woman finding purpose in a world where she’s constantly told that she's not right or ok, and not conforming. I was totally transfixed by the environment that this story depicts, just the language and the way that this mundane, almost clinical, convenience store is made into this fantastical world. It’s amazing.

• Convenience Story Woman on Radio 4’s A Good Read

Sandi says: I am blown away by it, I have not been able to stop reading it. It is the untold story of the nurses who helped cure tuberculosis - the ‘great white plague’, as it was known, in the first half of the 20th Century. In the US alone it killed six and a half million people. It was terrible.

In 1929, black nurses [in southern states of the USA] were not allowed to work in white hospitals. There were the most horrific Jim Crow laws, where there was segregation between the black and the white communities.

White nurses did not want to work on the tuberculosis wards, and so black nurses were offered a job and training, and they came [north] and worked in this particular hospital in Staten Island where the tuberculosis patients were isolated. And they did this for years and years, risking their own lives, but because of the work they did tuberculosis was eventually cured.

This is a fabulous story. This is everything that I love: it is untold history; it’s looking at the world from a different perspective; it’s women whose names have been forgotten until now.

Thank you for letting me bring this book because that’s what this show does: it allows you to say, ‘there’s this thing that might change your life by reading it’... this is a story that needs telling and is being told.