The journalist and BBC news anchor is a judge for The British Book Awards 2025, the winners of which are announced on 12 May. Her debut novel "Finding Belle" is out this week.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë, 1847
This was the first "proper" book I read, when I was eight years old. Then, I was rapt by the story of Jane's childhood and the cruelty and deprivation she suffers. In my teens I came to understand the more adult themes of love, betrayal and integrity. I have read it every decade of my life since.
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The Complete Poems
John Keats
I am a proud trustee of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and have always been a great fan of Keats's poetry. His work embodies what it is to be young, with its ardent, yearning language. "The Odes... – To Autumn, to a Nightingale", and "on a Grecian Urn" – are particularly fine.
Middlemarch
George Eliot, 1871
George Eliot's masterpiece. She produces an entire world in a small English provincial town, and writes with great perception and generosity about her characters. She deals with issues of status, pretensions, social class and women's place in society – but the novel has sparkling moments of comedy too.
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003
Pulling myself out of the 19th century – this clever and moving novel feels very close to my heart. It's about the complexities of migration, and how the Indian parents in the novel relate to their American-born son. It's hard to believe this was Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel, it's so assured.
Giving Up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel, 2003
This is a haunting and painful memoir by a writer I revere. Hilary Mantel writes of living with a debilitating condition that went undiagnosed for years, and of how writing – and her extraordinary imagination – became a form of compensation.
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