Books to talk about

To celebrate World Book Day, Library staff have chosen some of their favourite 'hidden gems'; books that may not be as well known as they should be - until now.

Add your own by emailing cityinfo@plymouth.gov.uk.

If you want to read a book that we don't have, you can order it using our requests service.

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The Four Men by Hilaire Belloc

Find or reserve a copy of The Four Men

An account of an imaginary walking tour across Sussex in 1902, it covers discussions of many topics and invokes a gentler age in which roads were for walking.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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It is a re-imagining, rather than re-telling, of a number of familiar and not-so familiar fairy tales. Carter was a true wordsmith and paints vivid pictures with words in this book of short stories which are by turns dark, thought-provoking, erotic, funny, and (it must be said) somewhat unsettling.

Masterful writing and despite the subject matter definitely not for children!

The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly

A snobbish and mediocre young literary man from Oxford, with a comfortable regular income, spends the summer on the Riviera with an artists' and writers' colony.

Mariana by Monica Dickens

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The story of a young English girl's growth towards maturity and happiness in the 1930s.

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

Helen Garner is an Australian writer, and well-known in her home country as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. It’s a slender novel, hardly more than a novella, which centres on the lives of one household in urban Melbourne.

Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg

Best known in this country as a writer who writes about writing, her early books Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones encouraged many would-be writers.

Wizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind

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As you can tell from the title it's a fantasy book with magic, evil, a big sword and all that in it, but he's a good writer

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

A work of genius. Siddhartha tells the story of a Brahmin on a quest for self-discovery through suffering trials of temptation of luxury, wealth and sensuality, and adventures.

The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill

Interesting and gripping novel in which two stories about ancient gemstones, survival, and obsession interweave.

Skallagrigg by William Horwoog

Skallagrigg links Arthur, a boy abandoned many years ago in a grim hospital in northern England, with Esther, a young girl suffering from cerebral palsy, and Daniel, an American computer-games genius.

Blood Sisters by Barbara Keating

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East Africa, 1957. On the eve of Kenyan independence and the closing days of British colonial rule, three convent girls make a pact never to part. But it will prove a difficult oath to uphold, and the tension mounts early on. Coming from different backgrounds, the girls' parents hold very different views on the changing Kenya.

Durable Fire by Barbara Keating

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The sequel to Blood Sisters confronts catastrophic loss and delirious happiness, savagery and degradation, limitless beauty, soaring hope and redemption.

Relentless by Simon Kernick

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John Meron, a happily married father of two who's never been in trouble, receives a phone call that will change his life forever: his friend Jack Calley, a high-flying city lawyer, is screaming down the phone for help. As Meron listens, Calley is murdered. His last words, spoken to his killer, are the first two lines of Meron's address.

It by Stephen King

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Probably the best book I have ever read is Stephen King's It. It's such a big story, you can re-read it again and again, he is a quality writer!

Summerstoke Affair by Caroline Kington

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In the village of Summerstoke, as autumn beckons it seems the fireworks party is not the only thing set to go off with a bang. Country life is anything but peaceful in this rural romp of passion and intrigue.

Babi Yar - Anatoly Kuznetsov

Published in 1969, the novel is a biography charting the massacre of 33000 Jews during the German occupation of Soviet Russia in World War Two. Kutznetsov witnessed the events as a fourteen year old boy and kept details in a notebook accounting for a novel that is personal, tragic and painful.

Never the bride by Paul Magrs

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Brenda has come to Whitby to run a bed and breakfast and find some peace and quiet. But the oddest thing in Whitby may well be Brenda herself. What with her terrible scars or the fact that she takes two different shoe sizes, Brenda should have known that people as, well, unique as she is, just aren't destined for a quiet life. See also the sequel Something Borrowed. I can't wait for the next one.

Murray Whelan series by Shane Maloney

A great series of contemporary Australian crime novels set largely in Melbourne against a background of fictional Labour Party electorate offices and ministries. The hapless Murray Whelan is a single dad, unlucky in love, and blighted in the assignments given him by his ambitious and inept boss. The series – of six to date - begins with Stiff, set in 1984, and each novel stands alone although they move sequentially through time and through Murray’s political career.

Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk

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A Nobel prize-winner would hardly seem a candidate for a lost gem but this came out rather quietly last year, like a postscript to the lauded Istanbul. More a scrapbook of vignettes and anecdotes than a memoir, Pamuk muses on his favourite authors, how he arranges the 12,000 volumes in his library and malicious Turkish barbers amongst other things…

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

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Set in the early 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War and before the emergence of rock 'n' roll, 'The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets' is the engrossing story of Penny and her eccentric family.

The Vegetable Garden Displayed published by The Royal Horticultural Society

A 1972 publication full of detailed black and white photographs showing the novice how to develop a vegetable garden. Dated, but in a good way, little old guys in suits and flat caps demonstrate gardening on old-style allotments, never seeming to get muddy. The strength of the book is that it actually shows how to do things (like earth up your potatoes or make a drill to sow seeds) which many of the newer glut of vegetable-growing books often don’t.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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Set in the present day, with flashbacks, An Equal Music is a story about deafness, the perils of excessive love, the curious matter of nationality and how it affects lives and relationships.

The Lost City by Henry Shukman

A ‘quest’ novel in which a young ex-serviceman travels to Peru in an attempt to find an ancient undiscovered city in a remote and dangerous forest. Much more than an adventure, this is a sensitive and complex novel.

On the Beach by Neville Shute

Australia is one of the last places where life still exists after nuclear war starts in the Northern Hemisphere. One year on and an invisible cloak of radiation has spread almost completely around the world.

Duende: A journey in search of flamenco by Jason Webster

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Duende is the moment in flamenco when passion and technique collide. Jason Webster's greatest desire is to learn flamenco guitar, so he travels to Southern Spain to live the flamenco life. A fascinating and sometimes harrowing account of this time of his life.

Rivethead - Ben Harper

A memoir of life on a car assembly line. Ben Hamper takes the reader into the world of the shoprats and rivetheads, nicknames for people who work building cars. Laugh out loud funny.

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