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Richard Osman, Ranvir Singh, Ben Miller and Alex Jones join Sara Cox to talk about their favourite reads.

The cover says:

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried?

It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn't explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage - the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand - she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it's not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.

Ranvir says:

This is about a very ordinary, very quiet, unassuming woman. She lives in a high rise flat, she's been married to this chap called Mark, she's a cleaner in the local university… But basically, it's the story of a very ordinary morning in a very mundane marriage and she's woken up by this stream of light that comes through a curtain rail that hasn't been fixed by her husband. So she wakes up resenting him for this small thing. And it's about the tiny things in marriages that speak to a bigger discomfort, but you can't say the bigger thing, so you say the small thing, because it's a way of sniping. So she wakes up and she snipes at him about this. But then, on a completely normal day, he disappears. He just disappears, leaves everything and disappears out of her life. Now the question is, how does she react to that? She literally does nothing, she goes to work, she carries on doing everything as completely normal. And eventually she sort of questions, why aren't I overreacting? Why aren't I calling the police? She's so still, and this carries on for a number of weeks until his mum finds out, and she's like ‘he's been missing for two weeks’.

So, then she is suspected of murder by the police. The police get involved. It's about the inner world of a very ordinary marriage when something very strange happens and it's about why he left, and about all the unspoken things that happen inside a marriage. And she says, Laurie says, in it, this felt normal to us. I don't know how other couples live. And you realise don't know how other couples live at all. And what's normal to them might seem extraordinary to you, and then it's about how what she discovers about her own life and her marriage, and about all the things she's accepted that she wishes she hadn't. I just found the ordinariness of it touched me.

The cover says:

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's ship The Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, The Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

Ben says:

It's just the best adventure story I think I’ve ever read, and I do love a bit of swashbuckling. So the background to this is that this is a non-fiction book, but it reads like the best adventure fiction you could ever hope for. It's the story of the War of Jenkins' Ear in the 18th Century British versus Spanish - the British come with this brilliant scheme: They're going to send a fleet of ships into the Pacific to steal the treasure on a Spanish galleon and there's a terrible shipwreck as they're going around the tip of South America. One boat load on The Wager get marooned on a really grim island where there's no animals at all, there's nothing to eat except celery. So they battle for survival on this island, two shiploads then make it back to the coast of South America.

The first shipload is hailed as heroes, and they say that they’ve survived a shipwreck and their captain's dead, and then the captain of the ship turns up in basically just a tub with a blanket for a sail, and says that they're all mutineers. And the story is then of exactly what went on on this island, and who's telling the truth and who is going to swing for treason.

The cover says:

Feyre is a huntress. And when she sees a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she kills the predator and takes its prey to feed herself and her family. But the wolf was not what it seemed, and Feyre cannot predict the high price she will have to pay for its death ...

Dragged away from her family for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding even more than his piercing green eyes suggest.

As Feyre's feelings for Tamlin turn from hostility to passion, she learns that the faerie lands are a far more dangerous place than she realised. And Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever.

Alex says:

I hate fantasy books normally… it's a bit erotic… It is basically about a huntress called Feyre, and she kills a wolf, and then somebody comes after her and wants redemption, because she's killed this wolf, and the person that comes after her takes her to this kingdom, which is full of fairies. They look like humans, and they can morph into animals as well. You have got to suspend reality. The man in charge of the fairy Kingdom is called Tamlin, and he's super hot, so Feyre then falls for him, and then he lets all the iciness go, and he becomes really hot, erotic, loves her. But it's a lovely love story as well. Something threatens the kingdom, she has to go and save him and his kingdom, and then dot, dot, dot there's a whole series… It's pure escapism. It took me by surprise, it was something completely different for me and actually, I've passed this on to many people, and I've got the next three waiting by my bed, so I'm completely invested. It’s a huge hit on TikTok. Loads of people love it. So, it must be doing something right. It’s really worth a go!

The cover says:

Keith Stewart is an ordinary man. However, one day he is called upon to undertake an extraordinary task.

When his sister's boat is wrecked in the Pacific, he becomes trustee for his little niece. In order to save her from destitution he has to embark on a 2,000 mile voyage in a small yacht in inhospitable waters. His adventures and the colourful characters he meets on his journey make this book a marvellous tale of courage and friendship.

Richard says:

It's one of those books from page one I just I loved it. It's about a very small town man in the 1950s called Keith Stewart, and he makes miniature machines and he writes a column in the Miniature Mechanic. He doesn't make much money from it, but he lives in Ealing with his wife, they’ve got no money, but that's his job, and he has a highfalutin sister who's married to a Navy Captain who can go off sailing. It turns out Mr Keith Stewart has to go on a journey around the world, and he has to try and retrieve something that his sister and brother-in-law have lost, and it's just amazing. He's going on huge aircraft, he's going across oceans… It’s just an incredible adventure story but with a man who's a very small man, who's a very reluctant hero.

But the beautiful thing about it is, wherever he goes, he's always getting a lift from somebody. Because wherever he goes [he is recognised] as Keith Stewart from the Miniature Mechanic. Engineers everywhere love him, pilots love him, mechanics love him… it's just a beautiful adventure about a character you care about, who's going on a journey that you care about. And just a reminder that in the back catalogues of so many authors there's these incredible books that you can just pick up and by pure luck you can come across a book that will live with you forever.