Last month one of my book clubs spent forty minutes on the question of whether the main character would have made a good flatmate. It was a lovely evening and we said almost nothing about the book. I came home and thought: next time I am bringing questions. Years ago I wrote nine tips for a successful book club, and tip number five was exactly this, have some questions ready. I never wrote them down. So here they are, fifty of them, sorted by what you might want to talk about. They work for a novel, a memoir or a biography.

Questions to open the evening

1. What did you expect from this book before you started, and did it deliver?
2. Where were you when you read most of it?
3. Did you read it in one go or in small portions?
4. Which page or scene made you decide to keep going?
5. Was there a point where you nearly gave up?
6. If you had to describe the book in one sentence to a friend, what would you say?
7. Did the cover or the title promise something the book did not keep?
8. Who would you give this book to, and who would you keep it from?
9. What is the first word that comes to mind now that you have finished?
10. Did you look anything up while reading?

Questions about the people in the book

11. Which character did you understand best, and which one not at all?
12. Who would you have liked more of?
13. Did anyone change over the course of the book, or did only your view of them change?
14. Was there a character you disliked at first and warmed to later?
15. Which decision in the book would you have made differently?
16. Is the narrator telling you the whole truth?
17. Who holds the power in this story, and does that shift?
18. Would you have been friends with the main character?
19. Did any of the relationships feel familiar from your own life?
20. If one character could read this book, how would they react to the way they are shown?

I asked question sixteen when we read James by Percival Everett, and it kept us busy for the rest of the night.

Questions about how it is written

21. How would you describe the voice of the book: warm, cold, funny, distant?
22. Did the length feel right?
23. Was there a sentence you wanted to write down?
24. How did the book handle time: did it jump, slow down, go in circles?
25. Did the structure help the story or get in its way?
26. Would the book work told from another point of view?
27. Was anything left out on purpose, and did that work?
28. How did the first page and the last page talk to each other?
29. Did the book trust you as a reader, or did it explain too much?
30. Is this a book you read for the plot or for the sentences?

Question thirty is the one that split my other club down the middle over Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Half of us did not miss a plot at all.

Questions about the world outside the book

31. What does the book say about the time it was written in?
32. Would it be a different book if it were set where you live?
33. Did it change your mind about anything, even slightly?
34. Which part of the book felt most true, and which least?
35. Did it remind you of another book, a film or a conversation?
36. What would you want to ask the author?
37. Did you learn something you did not expect to learn?
38. Is there a theme the author never names but that is clearly there?
39. Who is this book really for?
40. Would you have read it if nobody had chosen it for you?

Questions for the end of the evening

41. What will you remember about this book in a year?
42. Would you read something else by the same author?
43. Did the discussion tonight change how you feel about the book?
44. What did someone else say tonight that surprised you?
45. If the book had one more chapter, what would be in it?
46. What should the next book be, given how this one went?
47. Did the ending feel earned?
48. Who deserved a better ending?
49. Is this a book to keep, to lend or to give away?
50. On a scale from “I was polite about it” to “I have already bought a copy for someone”, where are you?

You do not need all fifty. I take five or six, write them on the back of an old bookmark and let the others pick. Oddly, the questions I think are weakest often open the best conversations. Which questions get your book club talking?

Every couple of months a friend in London asks me the same thing: is there anything funny and German about dating that she could actually read? And every time I go through my shelf and come back with the same answer. Yes, plenty, but you would need to learn German first. So here is the list I keep sending her, in the hope that a translator or a publisher stumbles over it one day. These are five books about dating, written in German, and as far as I can tell not one of them has an English edition yet. I have checked, and I will check again before this goes live.

1. Isobel Markus: Dating-Roman

Two women in their mid-forties, one flat in Berlin, seven dates in one week. One of them is looking for someone who simply fits, the other one wants the opposite of commitment, and both of them learn more about themselves than about the men across the table. Markus writes in short, quick scenes that feel like being told the story over a glass of wine, and the book was picked as WDR 5’s book of the week in the summer of 2024. It was published by mikrotext, a small Berlin press, which is probably one reason nobody abroad has noticed it yet.

2. Anika Decker: Zwei vernünftige Erwachsene, die sich mal nackt gesehen haben

The title translates roughly as “Two sensible adults who once saw each other naked”, and that already tells you the tone. Decker wrote the screenplays for some of the biggest German romantic comedies of the last twenty years, and this is her first novel: Nina, forty-nine, divorced with two children, falls for David, who is twenty-nine, and has to work out whether that is a midlife crisis or simply her life. It is sharper than the cover suggests, with a side plot about power in the film business that hits harder than the jokes.

3. Julia Karnick: Man sieht sich

If you liked One Day, this is your book. Robert falls for Frie in 1988 when he joins her class at a school in Hamburg, and for the next thirty-five years the timing is always wrong, right up to the class reunion in 2022. It was a Spiegel bestseller in Germany, it is set between Hamburg and the Baltic coast, and it has the kind of long, patient structure that translates well because it does not depend on wordplay. The title means “See you around”, which is exactly what these two keep saying to each other.

4. Anna Dushime: 1000 letzte Dates

Strictly speaking this is the one non-novel on the list, so forgive me for cheating. Dushime, a journalist and presenter in Berlin, went back to dating apps after twelve years and a separation, as a single mother in her mid-thirties, and wrote down what happened, from a McDonald’s car park to bars in Berlin to a trip to Kigali. What makes it worth translating is not the dates themselves but what she does with them: the book turns into an argument about why the standard two-person relationship might not be the goal at all. It came out in autumn 2025 and started a proper discussion here.

5. Gero Wenderholm: Manfred mi Amor

The newest title on the list, out on 22 October 2026 with a small independent publisher, PMLakeman-Verlag, and the only one of the five told from a man’s point of view. Our narrator is dating his way through St. Pauli, in real bars and on real streets you could visit tomorrow, with his own personal Cupid called Manfred as a second voice in his head, commenting on every swipe and every awkward silence. I read an early copy in spring and wrote about it here; it is a comic novel first and a love story second, and the Hamburg setting alone deserves an English audience.

Why none of these has crossed the Channel yet

I have my theories. Comedy is hard to sell in translation, the German book market is big enough that publishers do not need to look abroad, and dating novels from Germany are not what foreign editors expect to find in Frankfurt. Still, three of these five are about people over forty trying again, which is not exactly a niche audience in Britain either.

If you read German, all five are easy to find. If you do not, and you happen to work in publishing, you know where to look. And if I have missed a German dating novel that you think belongs on this list, tell me in the comments. My friend in London is still waiting.

Leiden was never meant to be a bookshop trip. I went for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden on a grey Saturday, got rained on between the station and the Breestraat, and ducked into the first doorway with a dry floor and something to read. Two hours later I had a paper bag with three novels I had not planned to buy and a vague sense that the museum could wait. That happens to me a lot in this town. After writing up Amsterdam, Leiden felt like the obvious and much calmer next stop. Opening times are as I found them in September 2026; do check before you travel, because Dutch shops love a Monday afternoon start.

1. Mayflower Bookshop: the international bookshop

Breestraat 70 is where I dried off that first time, and it has become my default. Mayflower sells new and second-hand books side by side, mostly in English. The second-hand shelves are the part I like best: prices are fair, the stock turns over, and there is a three-for-two deal I have never once resisted. It also runs lecture series and reading groups, so some evenings it is more living room than shop. They opened a second branch on Lange Poten in The Hague in 2021, one more reason my Den Haag guide is overdue an update. Mondays they open at noon.

2. De Slegte: the second-hand and remainder shop

Almost directly opposite, at Breestraat 73, is De Slegte. If Mayflower is the living room, De Slegte is the attic of a well-read aunt: used books and ramsj, the Dutch word for remainders, restocked every day, which is why the regulars come in weekly. The English section is large by Dutch standards. I have found paperback thrillers for a couple of euros and a heavy art book I had no business carrying home on the train. Give yourself time here. Nothing is arranged for a quick in and out, and that is the point.

3. Boekhandel Kooyker: the proper bookshop

A few doors along at Breestraat 89 is Kooyker, the kind of established bookshop every university town needs. It leans academic, with serious non-fiction and the journals that go with a student population, but there is an English top ten by the till and the staff know their fiction. This is where I go for the new hardback rather than the lucky find, and where I check the events board: in autumn it fills up with children’s book week and the history month. Closed on Sundays, like most shops on this street.

4. De Boekenzolder: the free book attic

This one is outside the centre, on the Admiraal Bankertweg, and it is the place I tell people about first. De Boekenzolder is a charity run entirely by volunteers, and every book in it is free. You browse an attic’s worth of donated books in Dutch, English and a surprising range of other languages, and take up to ten stamped copies home. Donations are welcome, and I always leave some, because the alternative is that this place disappears. It is only open Thursday to Saturday afternoons, one until half past four, with a handful of closing days through the year, so plan the visit. Bring a bag. Bring a bigger bag than you think.

5. Bibliotheek Leiden: the public library with a coffee bar

When I have bought too much and need to sit down, I walk to Nieuwstraat 4. The central library is run by BplusC, which bundles it with a music school and cultural centre, so the building is busier and more mixed than a library usually is. There are work tables with free wifi and a small coffee bar where I have read half a novel over one flat white. Thursdays it stays open until nine, my favourite time: the students have thinned out and the building goes quiet. Sundays it is closed.

A walk between the shelves

The thing about Leiden is that the books do not stop at the shop doors. Since 1992 the city has painted more than a hundred poems on its walls, in Russian, Spanish, English, Chinese and many other languages, and once you know they are there you see them everywhere. It makes the town feel like it was built by readers, which, given the university has been here since 1575, it more or less was.

If you have done Amsterdam and Haarlem, put Leiden next. And if you know a shelf I have missed, I would like to hear about it. There is always room in the bigger bag.

Amsterdam and books, for me that is a love story with a very concrete starting point. A few years ago I was in the city for a day, it started raining (of course it did), I fled into the nearest bookshop and walked out with Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. That one impulse buy later sent me all the way to Scotland to run a bookshop myself for a week. So you could say Amsterdam bookshops have a lot to answer for.

After my lists for The Hague and Haarlem, Amsterdam was overdue anyway. All five places are in the city centre, you can easily walk from one to the next, and together they make a perfect plan for a rainy day. So: for most days.

1. The American Book Center: book shop

Let me start with my favourite. The American Book Center on the Spui sells English books only, three floors of them, and has been run by the same family since 1972. What gets me every time are the handwritten staff recommendations tucked between the shelves. Last time I went in to buy one specific book as a present. I left 45 minutes later with three books for myself and without the present. It is that kind of shop.

2. Athenaeum Boekhandel: book shop and news centre

Directly next door. Which is dangerous. Athenaeum is the more serious, more beautiful sibling: international literature, art books, translated fiction you will not stumble over anywhere else. Attached to it is the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum with newspapers and magazines from all over the world. When I had just moved to the Netherlands and missed reading in my own language, a shop like this felt like a small lifeline. It still does, a bit.

3. Waterstones: book shop

Yes, a British chain, I know. I do not care!! Four floors in a gorgeous old building on Kalverstraat, and nobody looks at you strangely if you sit down in a corner with a pile of books and stay there. The children’s section upstairs is the best I have seen in this country. If you need a present for a small reader, this is where you go.

4. The Book Exchange: second-hand book shop

A canal-side second-hand shop on Kloveniersburgwal, in business since 1978, with tens of thousands of English titles sorted into wonderfully specific categories. It smells exactly the way an old bookshop should smell. I normally have a rule not to buy more books than I can carry home comfortably. This shop is where that rule goes to die.

5. Scheltema: book shop and café

The largest bookshop in the Netherlands, right on the Rokin: five floors, a couple of hundred thousand books, its own café and even a floor with second-hand books. Most of it is Dutch, but the English sections are big enough to keep you busy for a long while. My routine: collect a small tower of candidates, carry it to the café, order a coffee and pretend I will only buy half of them. I never do.

And because I apparently cannot count to five: Evenaar on the Singel sells nothing but travel literature, and Architectura & Natura on Leliegracht is the place for architecture and nature books. Both small, both lovely.

Have I missed your favourite place in Amsterdam? Tell me in the comments. My list of reasons to go back is already long, one more will not hurt. Update, September 2026: if you fancy a quieter day out, I have since written up five places for book lovers in Leiden, half an hour down the line.

Have you ever had so many interests that choosing just one felt impossible? Or felt guilty for starting things and not finishing them, for wanting to learn Portuguese and take a pottery class and finally read Tolstoy and also maybe learn to bake proper bread? If yes, then Barbara Sher wrote this book for you.

Refuse to Choose! is built around a concept Sher calls the “Scanner” – a person who is genuinely excited by many different things and does not want to commit to just one path. For most of our lives, people like this are told they need to focus, to specialise, to pick something and stick with it. Sher’s argument is: no. Actually, the scanning mind is not a problem to be fixed. It is a feature, not a bug.

I picked this book up because I recognised myself in the description immediately. I have started approximately four different creative projects this year alone, I read across every genre, and I have a running list of things I want to learn that is frankly embarrassing in its length. Reading Sher felt like someone finally looking me in the eye and saying: you are not broken. You are just wired differently.

The practical second half of the book is full of “Scanner Daybook” exercises, different “Scanner types” (yes, she sub-categorises, which I loved), and strategies for managing the particular frustration of being endlessly curious in a world that rewards depth over breadth. Some of the exercises felt a little long for my taste, but the underlying ideas are genuinely useful.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: the goal does not have to be mastery. Sometimes curiosity is the point. Sometimes you pick something up, learn what it has to teach you, and then put it down again. And that is completely fine.

Who should read it: Anyone who has ever been told they need to pick one thing and stick with it. Anyone who feels guilty about their many half-finished projects. Anyone who needs permission to be interested in everything.

★★★★☆

And if you ever need the opposite advice, Eat That Frog is the book about doing one thing at a time.

At the beginning of January, I shared 15 non-fiction books I want to read this year and I thought it would be a good idea to also share a list of fiction books that are on my list. My list is a mixture of recently published books I received for Christmas and books that are at least 5 years old. I like to read books that were published at different times – it makes me understand how literature has changed over the course of the years and which topics and themes once used to be popular and how contemporary literature helps to make a change. So here are nine novels I want to read this year.

• 

• 

• 

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Blurb: “Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by her mother to live with their devout grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother endure the ache of abandonment and prejudice. At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age – and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness for others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.”
ISBN: 978-0-345-51440-0

2. Howards End by E.M. Forster

Blurb: “On its publication in 1910 Howards End was instantly and widely recognized as a classic. “The word Forsterian is demanded,” wrote one reviewer. Another adjudged its author “likely to be one of our glories”, while a third considered that “if he never writes another line, his niche will be secure”. These forecasts have been amply justified.”
ISBN: 978-0-140-43175-9

3. The Circle by Dave Eggers

Blurb: “The Circle runs everything – all your internet activity in one easy, safe and visible place. No wonder it is now the world’s most powerful and influential company. So when Mae Holland lands a job at its glittering California campus, she knows she’s made it. But the more her ideals and ambitions become aligned with those of the Circle, the closer she comes to discovering a sinister truth at the heart of an organization seeking to remake the world in its image”.
ISBN: 978-0-241-97037-9

• 

• 

• 

4. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

Blurb: “1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Claire is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She’s also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie’s parents banish her to Europe to have her “little problem” taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.
1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she’s recruited to works as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she’s trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the “queen of spies”, who manages a vast network of secret agents under the enemy’s nose.
Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. That is until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn’t heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth … no matter where it leads.”
ISBN: 978-0-06-265419-9

5. The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho

Blurb: “A community devoured by greed, cowardice and fear. A man persecuted by the ghosts of his painful past. A young woman searching for happiness. In one eventful week, each of them will face questions of life, death and power, and each of them will have to choose their own path. Will they choose good or evil?”
ISBN: 0-00-711604-7

6. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman

Blurb: “In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighbourhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back onto the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of a constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding for his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth – where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov’s childhood – Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian’s story of loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront life’s capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).”
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1137-5

• 

• 

• 

7. Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce

Blurb: “London 1941. Amid the falling bombs Emmeline Lake dreams of becoming a fearless Lady War Correspondent. Unfortunately, Emmy instead finds herself employed as a typist for the formidable Henrietta Bird, the renowned agony aunt at Woman’s Friend magazine. Mrs Bird refuses to read, let alone answer, letters containing any form of Unpleasantness, and definitely not those from the lovelorn, grief-stricken or morally conflicted.
But the thought of these desperate women waiting for an answer at this most desperate of times becomes impossible for Emmy to ignore. She decides she simply must help and secretly starts to write back – after all, what harm could that possibly do?”
ISBN: 978-1-5098-5392-2

8. Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Blurb: “Herman Melville’s short stories, somewhat neglected during his lifetime, today are considered to be among the small masterpieces of American fiction. His imagination is inventive, ironic, and extraordinarily attuned to our times. His settings and themes are various: the limits of artistic creation; the opposition of innocence and evil; fear of isolation; the inviolate sanctity of the human heart; the fearfulness of and fascination with the “enchanted isles”; the ferocity of the white whale; Calvinist hell-fire and damnation.”

9. The Stars’ Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry

Blurb: “For Ned, 1980 seems a blissful year. Handsome, charming, popular and talented, his life is progressing smoothly, effortlessly, happily. And when he meets the lovely Portia Fendeman his personal jigsaw appears complete. But timing is everything in life, and his life is about to change forever.”
ISBN: 978-0-099-47155-4

Which books do you want to read this year? Have you read any of the books from my list?