Each week our wonderful staff share the books that they've been enjoying.

Yasmin is reading The Wren in the Holly Library by K.A. Linde

I just finished this recently and let me tell you, reading this one in public was hard. The smut is fantastic, with a great gothic, broody man to swoon over – very much a "I've been alive for 500 years and never let anyone close to me" type personality. I think this would be a great read for fans of Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros! It's advertised as a Beauty and the Beast retelling, but with lots of magical creatures, adventure and very sexy things which I had to read on a public train in front of other people . . .

I loved it, and I need book two desperately! 

Baz is reading The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

The Radetzky March is an intimate epic, an expansive novel that tracks shifts in the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. At the same time its lens is narrow and focused, its attention wholly devoted to two men, a father and son, two beautifully rendered characters.

I loved Roth’s wry, blackly comic style and his compassion for his tragic military men. His simultaneous distance from and closeness to his characters, the cool head that betrays a barely restrained sentimentality, was so well-balanced throughout.

It’s a magnificent family saga that sort of does everything you could ask for in a novel. A big heavy-hearted dazzler, and one of my favourite reads this year. The comparisons to Tolstoy are not unwarranted.

Kim is reading Reading the Room by Paul Yamazaki

I read Reading the Room, a Bookseller’s Tale in one sitting this week. This book is put together from a series of interviews with Paul Yamzaki, the long time book buyer at legendary City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. It’s an enriching and invigorating read for those of us in the game, it will also be appreciated broadly by readers and bookstore lovers who have a curiosity about bookselling.

Yamazaki is generous and radical; his start in bookselling was orchestrated to secure an early release from jail, and this slim volume is packed with fascinating anecdotes about his life and the industry. I completely agree with his claim that the worst thing we can do as booksellers is underestimate the reader.