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Sara is joined by celebrated broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, actor and comedian Gemma Whelan, stand-up comedian and actor Neil Delamere, and comedian, broadcaster and author Jo Brand. They share their favourite books here.

The cover says:

This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy in the seventies who wins a place at an esteemed English university. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides a disarmingly frank account of English education.

Yet beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power. When Jennifer, the fellow student he admires from afar, disappears the reader has to ask: is Engleby capable of telling the whole truth?

Gemma says:

I just got completely lost in it. It's about a young man called Mike Engleby who goes off to university as a sort of working class boy who ends up at what is presumed Cambridge, it's not dissimilar to Saltburn in terms of a working class boy, very clever, who goes somewhere he doesn't really fit in, but it's very lonely. He's a very isolated young man trying to make sense of this university world. But there's an arrogance and a sense of foreboding and a sense of curiosity about him that he's not quite what he says he is, and there's a lot of pretense and bravado, and he falls in love with a woman from afar, and she goes missing at a point in the book, and then he is questioned about her disappearance because he has one of her journals, but they never really get to the bottom of it. He goes off to London, he becomes a journalist, and so forges a successful career. But you get this sense of foreboding, this sense of someone not quite being who they say they are, all the way through, trying to bend, trying to fit in. And it's just a fantastic thriller that is just wonderful. And again, the sort of the clarity and the potency of the writing within a sentence rather than 10 pages. Obviously he's an absolute genius Sebastian Faulks. I just highly recommend it. I have such a rich memory of it, and I'm very thrilled to recommend it.

The cover says:

Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends who ordinarily would remain uncelebrated. It finds a value and specialness in them that is not immediately apparent and prompts the idea that maybe we could learn from the people that we overlook in life.

Leonard and Hungry Paul change the world differently to the rest of us: we try and change it by effort and force; they change it by discovering the small things they can do well and offering them to others.

Neil says:

It’s a great book… There's nobody bad in this book. It's really interesting. There's no antagonists. It's a portrait of male friendship in some ways. This isn't ‘lads, lads, lads’. This isn't friendship that you see sometimes in books forged by something that happened in war or some sort of trauma. It's forged on Yahtzee and Monopoly and stuff like this. They play board games. And the author, Rónán Hession, has talked about this. He wanted to write a book about quiet people, and quiet people's effect on the world when they make an effort to try and change the world. Hungry Paul doesn't have a mobile phone. He's in his 30s, but he has this mental stillness about him that is really, really appealing…

Some of it reads like stand up. Ronan has said that the narrative kind of unflowers: It's not like crash, band, wallop, plot, plot, plot, and because he's so funny in parts, you are always invested in what happens to all of them. It's really, really, really sweet, really, really charming. And I would highly recommend it. It's about ordinary people doing ordinary things but it's an extraordinary book.

The cover says:

In the stirring first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy.

Sir Trevor says:

I became attracted to this partly because of my work. I was there on the day he was inaugurated. There was such a feeling of, you know, that this is not really happening. And I was talking to one woman from the south of the United States who, almost with tears in her eyes, said to me, ‘I never thought this could happen’, and I knew exactly what she was talking about: Here you had a black man going into a white house built by slaves. So you had this moment of Obama and his family walking into the White House, and then the following day, it seemed as though reality dawned and a lot of America said, ‘My goodness, what have we done?’ And in the Senate, senior politicians said, ‘we must make sure this is a one term President, we must make sure this never happens again’. Extraordinary. It took about 24 hours, if you follow politics, as I do, it was quite extraordinary to see this transformation happening in just a few hours. He tells it beautifully, and he speaks beautifully. And I just thought he was the most extraordinary President and it cannot be undone, what he did, but there is still a long way to go.

The cover says:

Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It's a picturesque setting, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes.

Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, seems straightforward, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network-and back into the path of someone from his past. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking new literary crime novel, both sharply funny and achingly sad, by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.

Jo says:

It’s part of a series of what I would call a literary thriller… she has a protagonist who's a detective called Jackson Brodie, the usual sort of flawed, slightly hopeless, rubbish at relationships, all of which I identify with! This particular book is about 4th in the series but it’s one of those books you can read standalone... First of all she’s a brilliant writer, secondly, she's funny. it's an absolute pleasure to read, and I do like a thriller that's not too gruesome: I don't like five page descriptions of how people are murdered, but it's also not cosy crime either, it's kind of somewhere in the middle and because she's such a great writer, she can do in one sentence what someone else would do in 12. And because I'm so old I like the premise of the book because it moves between two separate areas of crime, one in the 60s and 70s and one in the present day, which you find out are linked in many ways by the time you get to the end.