Book recommendations: World Book Week Special!

Starting our #WorldBookWeek celebrations with some great books to read. Which ones would you like to read? Comment below & let us know! 

Be a Triangle by Lilly Singh
From the New York Times best-selling author comes an honest, funny, and inspiring handbook on learning to come home to your truest and happiest self.

"It's time to flip right side up. It's time for this book title to make sense. It's time to be a triangle."

Everyone knows that sometimes, life just sucks ― even world-famous actress, author, and creator Lilly Singh. In this book, Lilly provides a safe space where listeners can learn how to create a sense of peace within themselves. Without sugarcoating what it's like to face adversity ― including Lilly's intensely personal struggles with identity, success, and self-doubt ― she teaches listeners to "unsubscribe" from cookie-cutter ideals. 

With her signature blend of vulnerability, insight, and humor, Lilly instructs listeners to "be a triangle": You must build a solid foundation for your life, one that can be built upon, but never fundamentally changed or destroyed. As she puts it, we must always find a way to come home to ourselves ― "we must create a place, a set of beliefs, a simple set of priorities to come back to should life lead us astray, which it will." Like a wise, empathetic friend who always keeps you honest, Lilly pushes you to adjust your mindset and change the conversations you have with yourself. The result is a deeply humane, entertaining, and uplifting guide to befriending yourself and becoming a true "miracle for the world."

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
Welcome to Charon's Crossing.
The tea is hot, the scones are fresh and the dead are just passing through. When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own sparsely-attended funeral, Wallace is outraged. But he begins to suspect she's right, and he is in fact dead. Then when Hugo, owner of a most peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace reluctantly accepts the truth. Yet even in death, he refuses to abandon his life – even though Wallace spent all of it working, correcting colleagues and hectoring employees. He'd had no time for frivolities like fun and friends. But as Wallace drinks tea with Hugo and talks to his customers, he wonders if he was missing something. The feeling grows as he shares jokes with the resident ghost, manifests embarrassing footwear and notices the stars. So when he's given one week to pass through the door to the other side, Wallace sets about living a lifetime in just seven days.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means.

In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father.

And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him – and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can't exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin-de-siecle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara's understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love – partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens – and the pain that ensues when we cannot.