Recommended Reads for December

Here we are – the final month of the Mid Sussex Reading Challenge 2020! This year may have gone slightly differently than expected, so we’d like to thank everyone who has stuck with us, and also congratulate all our challenge followers on persevering despite uncertain and difficult circumstances.

As we approach the end of the challenge, we’d like to invite everyone who took part to celebrate with us in our free end-of-year event on Wednesday 16 December at 7:00pm. We’ll be chatting about books and reading with bestselling author Cathy Rentzenbrink, and it’s completely free – find out everything you need to know and register for your space here.

The final challenge theme is:

Our library staff have pulled together a bumper list of book recommendations, so if you’d like some inspiration, why not try:

General Fiction
Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend
Seni Glaister – Mr Doubler Begins Again
Yann Martel – Life of Pi
Andrea Levy – Small Island
Juliet West – Before the Fall or The Faithful
Carlos Ruiz Zafon – The Shadow of the Wind
Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
Paul Beatty – The Sellout
Ian McEwan – Atonement
Zadie Smith – NW
Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch
Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
Cormac McCarthy – The Road
Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall

Crime & Thriller
Julia Crouch – Her Husband’s Lover
Isabel Ashdown – Beautiful Liars
William Shaw – The Birdwatcher or Salt Lane
Elly Griffiths – The Stranger Diaries
Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Paula Hawkins – The Girl on the Train
Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons
Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl

Children’s & Teen Books
J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows
Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games
John Green – The Fault in Our Stars
Markuz Zusak – The Book Thief

Non-Fiction
Graham Bartlett – Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Rebecca Skloot – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Helen MacDonald – H is for Hawk
Reni Eddo-Lodge – Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

If any of these take your fancy, you can reserve any of these books to collect from your local library by visiting our library catalogue.

What are you reading in December? Let us know by posting in our Facebook group, tweeting us @WSCCLibraries using the hashtag #MidSussexReadingChallenge or sending in a book review.