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Richard & Judy’s Summer Bookclub: our books

We are so thrilled that three Bookends books have been selected by Richard and Judy to be part of their Summer Bookclub that launched last week. We thought we’d pull together their reviews but don’t miss all the great extra content that’s up now on the WH Smith blog.

Small Great ThingsJodi Picoult

Small Great Things

Richard says: ‘This is a serious and thought-provoking book, but also a warm and utterly fascinating read.’

Judy says: ‘Small Great Things is Jodi Picoult at her scintillating best. Typically, this accomplished writer takes a complicated, controversial and timely social dilemma and fleshes it out with her characters; so you get both the moral implications of a genuinely worrying situation, plus the warmth and anxieties of the individuals living a nightmare.’

Read Richard and Judy’s interview with Jodi Picoult

This Must Be The Place – Maggie O’Farrell

Judy says: ‘As you turn the pages, you realise that everything is inextricably and satisfyingly interlinked. Ultimately, This Must Be The Place is all about love.’

Richard says: ‘Maggie O’Farrell is…a novelist blessed with the ability to hold her readers in the palm of her hand – in this case for nearly 500 wonderful, character-filled, event-charged pages. She does it with heart-catching writing that arches across time zones, continents and decades.’

Read Richard and Judy’s interview with Maggie O’Farrell

The Trespasser – Tana French

Richard says: ‘French writes with terrific pace and confidence, and after the opening pages readers will be rooting for Conway and Moran. This is wonderfully readable, pacey, page-turner of a novel. We both loved it.’

Judy says ‘I found it easy to empathise with Tana French’s central character in The Trespasser, Detective Antoinette Conway. Conway is the only female officer on Dublin’s hard-bitten murder squad, and the target of endless cruel practical jokes and jibes.  And then it comes. The big one. A murder so rich in criminal possibilities it could make Conway’s reputation. If she can solve it.’

Read Richard and Judy’s interview with Tana French