Recommending books is high risk – but it's also high reward

Recommending books is a tricky but satisfying business. It’s high risk, high reward. Every day I wake up to messages from my friends asking me to recommend “something I’d like” to them. That’s not even a clear directive but still, challenge accepted. And that was before the lockdown.

Now, I’m being asked for lists of books for people to read. So. I dutifully drag myself out of bed and go to my bookshelves. I spend a few minutes thinking about the person. What do we speak about, most of all? Is it politics, is it love? What makes them laugh? What makes them angry? Then I think about whether or not the content of some books might be challenging, or triggering.

I even provided this recommendation service to a woman who took the time to email my website, telling me, across seven fulsome paragraphs, why my novel Queenie was a terrible book, and how disappointed she was by my representation of a black British woman. She got, in return, a list of books about black British women that she might not hate so vehemently.

Woefully, nobody recommends any books to me, the great recommender, but as a gift to you all, here are the three books I tell absolutely everyone to read: Ordinary People by Diana Evans, How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs and Citizen by Claudia Rankine.