Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self?

Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.'

So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash's world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi's care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.

For fans of Nora Ephron and Sorrow & Bliss, We All Want Impossible Things is a deeply moving, jubilant celebration of life and friendship at its imperfect, radiant, and irreverent best.

When a moment changes everything, how do you live the rest of your life?
1940s Colorado: Teenage Victoria Nash is the only woman in a family of troubled men.
When she meets Wilson Moon, a young drifter with a mysterious past, on a street corner, their connection is immediate. And dangerous.
But then tragedy strikes, and Victoria is forced to leave her home and face a decision that will change her life forever.
Loved deeply by readers, this is the epic coming-of-age adventure of Victoria Nash, determined to save her family’s generational peach farm from destruction, as she falls in love, faces devastating tragedy, and finally faces what she must do to survive.

an affair between a young Catholic woman and a married Protestant barrister drives this brilliant novel set in 1975 Belfast.

The Salt Path is a 2024 British biographical drama film directed by Marianne Elliott based on the book of the same name and one read in book club a few years ago. We revisit it here in our podcast.

The book was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2018 and won the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize.Just days before Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years is terminally ill, their home is taken away and they lose their livelihood. With nothing left and little time they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the South West Coastal Path.

This episode by host, Christina Young, talks about the top 3 books Gloucester Book Club read together in 2024, as voted for by book club members.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

In Memorian by Alice Winn

Waterstones Novel of the Year 2023

A gripping, heart-shattering love story between two soldiers in the First World War.

It's 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt's German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.

The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both.

As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness.

Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.

'Astonishing, touching, extremely funny. A brilliant evocation of a past era and an immensely readable story' - Sunday Telegraph

The Morrison siblings have been haunted by tragedy since the sudden death of their parents in an accident when they were young.

Kate found an escape from the legacy of their dark past in her passion for the natural world. Now a zoologist far away from the small farming community where she grew up, she thinks she's outgrown her three brothers, who were once her entire world.

But Kate can't seem to escape her childhood or lighten the weight of their mutual past.