Shhhh, it's a library
We’d love to lend you any of the books on our shelves. The books we’ve loved, the books we’ve hated, the ones we wish we’d written and the ones we wish we’d burned. We’ve stolen our very best ideas from some of these books.
Click on a book to see what we think of it. From there, you can borrow a copy, or buy a brand spanking new one of your own.
If you do borrow something from our library, all we ask is that you send it back to us once you’re done. You can re-use the envelope it came in (that will make our Green Councillor Simon very happy). And do come back and leave a comment to tell us whether you thought it was riveting or rubbish.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Although, of course, you shouldn’t judge the book by it, we do love this cover – a nod to the great work of Hitchcock’s favourite designer Saul Bass. In this novel, Coe tries to find ‘a kind of mystery and romance and strangeness at the heart of the deeply ordinary’. It’s a great story – you pity and laugh at Maxwell Sim in equal measure, but in the end he takes you completely by surprise. If you like this, you might like Coe’s ‘The Rotter’s Club’ too.
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A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
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Barcelona Plates
Alexei Sayle
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Cops and Robbers
Janet and Allan Ahlberg
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Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
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Outliers - The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
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Pragmatics
George Yule
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Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
Joseph M Williams
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The Complete Henry Root Letters
William Donaldson
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The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative
Stephen Denning
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The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Christopher Booker
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The Stuff of Thought - Language as a Window into Human Nature
Steven Pinker
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The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Jonathan Coe
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Trust-based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships
Charles H. Green
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Words That Change Minds
Shelle Rose Charvet
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Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
Roy Peter Clark
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