Sometimes we read to learn something new - about ourselves or the world or our place in it - and other times it’s nice for a book to just wash over you. Here's Madeleine's list for herself, and you, this holiday season.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

Most of my eagerness to read this novel stems from how much I love the friendship between best friends Dolly Alderton and Caroline O'Donoghue (if you haven't listened to their mini podcast series Sentimental In The City...obsessed). There was so much praise for The Rachel Incident when it debuted last year; set in the early 2010s and described as "funny, nostalgic and sexy", it's the story of Rachel and James, two twenty-somethings who met at a bookshop, became best friends, and spent one unforgettable year screwing everything up...

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Regardless of what you ultimately think of the story, there's no question Intermezzo is Rooney's best work to-date. She's so clever at writing stories that feel both enormous and intensely intimate. The story is told from the vantage point of two grieving brothers, a change from her usual female protagonist, who are both in age-gap relationships and think they have little in common. It challenged me in almost every way and I loved it.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

My first experience with Curtis Sittenfeld's work was her collection of short stories, You Think It, I'll Say It, and I haven't read anything of hers since, but this sounded like the perfect beach read. It follows Sally, a thirty-something divorcee and comedy sketch writer on a Saturday-Night-Live-type show who lives an isolated life due to the nature of her job, until a celebrity heart throb guest-host starts flirting with her… Romantic Comedy is described as “Curtis Sittenfeld at her most sharp, daring and compassionate best.”

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

A New York Times best-seller and one of Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2024", The Wedding People was one of this year's surprise hits, and sounds like the kind of novels bookworms will devour in a single afternoon these holidays. It follows a melancholic young woman who finds herself accidentally crashing a lavish wedding at a posh Rhode Island inn.

Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord

If you're a fan of journalist and Vogue dating columnist, Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak is her own love story told in reverse: Reeling from a broken heart, Lord revisits the past - from the moment she first fell in love, the shared in-jokes and intertwining of a long-term relationship, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and The Teaching Of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As one of Maggie’s favourite books, we include the celebrated writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in our Reading Guide every year. At the beginning of the pandemic, seven years after Braiding Sweetgrass was first published, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time and sold 500,000 copies globally. At its core, the book lays out the lessons humans can take from nature, including the values of reciprocity and ceremony.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I'm a little embarrassed to say I still haven't read Didion's most famous work. And despite one of my girlfriends telling me "it's not really a beach read" - by which she means it's heavy in its depiction of grief - I'm committed to at least starting it this summer. The book chronicles the weeks and months that followed Didion's loss of her beloved husband while her daughter was in hospital in a coma, and who later died just before she began the press tour for the book. The Year of Magical Thinking is "A portrait of a marriage - and a life - in the good times and bad. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself."

Margo Has Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe

One of my favourite bookworms Pandora Sykes had this book on her stack of favourite books from 2024 on Instagram, which is where it first caught my eye. The story centres on Margo Millet, a young woman thrust into the chaos of adulthood and motherhood at just twenty - with an infant in her arms, no job, and an eviction notice looming, the story depicts with honesty and humour the realities of single motherhood and addiction.

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