9. What PGS Staff Are Reading This Summer

 Lloyd Ansell

I am going to read Poor by Katriona O'Sullivan. It is a true story. Like young girls everywhere Katriona O’Sullivan grew up bright, enthusiastic, curious. But she was also surrounded by abject poverty and chaos, and after she became pregnant and homeless at 15, what followed was five years of barely surviving. Yet today Katriona is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education for girls like her. 

What set Katriona on this unexpected path were the mentors and supporters who truly saw her. The teachers who showed her how to wash in the school toilets or turned up at her door to convince her to sit at least one GCSE. The community worker who encouraged her to apply for training schemes. The friend who introduced Katriona to Trinity College’s access program while she was a cleaner. Simple acts that would help her turn her life around. Told with warmth, clarity and compassion – compassion for her parents, for her younger self, for others – Poor is both an astonishing personal testimony and an impassioned plea for the future of our children.

James Robinson

I treated myself to a wander round my local bookshop recently, in an effort to feel better about the shamefully small amount of literature I have consumed this year. Godwin by Joseph O’Neill is a bit of a treat, a study of the dark heart of football interwoven with an exploration of workplace politics, as a writer embarks on a wild goose chase to find the ‘African Messi’. Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad has been recommended to me twice over (once by Dawn Sands, followed by Carol Webb), and indeed it sounds right up my street, an actress returning to Haifa for the first time in years to visit her sister, before being drawn into a production of ‘Hamlet’ in the West Bank. It sounds like the political and the theatrical and mixed thrillingly.

‘Notes on an Execution’ by Danya Kukafka sounds fascinating, a page-turner and a literary thriller that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life. Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppleganger’ takes the potentially comedic scenario of Klein being continually mistaken for journalist, writer and rabid conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and spins something profound around online lives, identity, virtual branding, and why politics can no longer be trusted. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, another hot tip from Dawn Sands, is a doorstep of a book and one of those bittersweet, beautifully observed family epics, where secrets and lies lurk round every corner, that I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into. Finally, ‘Fire Weather’ by John Vaillant was actually a present to my wife, which I have now appropriated for myself. It approaches a week in the life of an apocalyptic forest fire in Canada in 2016 like a real-life thriller, whilst reflecting on the bigger picture, that there is an inescapable reason why the world is getting hotter, and why more things are burning, at far hotter temperatures than they ever have done. That should do me!

Steph Burkinshaw

I'm having a historical non-fiction summer. When I heard about Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Dr Cat Bohannon on a podcast, it sounded fascinating: explaining how mammals developed into humanoids with a particular focus on the maternal role. It has been described as the evolutionary equivalent to Invisible Women (which I loved).

I find the comedian David Mitchell very funny: he is also a brilliant writer and his new book, Unruly, covers one of my favourite subjects: royal history. He covers monarchs from King Arthur to Elizabeth I; he points out that relatively few of them were powerful or admirable, rather they were mostly "lucky sods and narcissists", with "inadequate self control, excessive beheadings and middle management insurrection".

I am a recovering Philippa Gregory fiction fan. She has written so many novels about queens and aristocrats, but her latest book, Normal Women, breaks new ground: it is non-fiction and chronicles the lives not of the powerful but of ordinary people: shepherdesses, beggars, housewives, highwaywomen and hermits, among others.

I will also be enjoying my usual range of romantasy (which is a thing).

Rebecca Champion

This summer I am reading: Charlotte Gray, I have been meaning to read this for a long time as part of Faulks’ French trilogy. I loved Birdsong many years ago and always intended on diving into this one. I love a story against the backdrop of WW2 so this will be right up my street!

Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley. I read another of hers a few years ago, ‘Free Love’, and loved the themes and ideas the book presented. I have a feeling it could be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster!

Imaginary Friend by Steven Chbosky, this was actually something I stumbled across in the Sixth Form Library and thought it looked fabulous!

Babel by RF Kuang, this was a novel that came as a ‘must read’ in the Waterstone’s best sellers book pile. I know Oxford very well and am thoroughly looking forward to reading a book set in the city.