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50 book club questions that work for any book

Fifty book club questions that work for any novel or non-fiction title, sorted by what you want to talk about. Tested in my own two book clubs.

Last month one of my book clubs spent forty minutes on the question of whether the main character would have made a good flatmate. It was a lovely evening and we said almost nothing about the book. I came home and thought: next time I am bringing questions. Years ago I wrote nine tips for a successful book club, and tip number five was exactly this, have some questions ready. I never wrote them down. So here they are, fifty of them, sorted by what you might want to talk about. They work for a novel, a memoir or a biography.

Questions to open the evening

What did you expect from this book before you started, and did it deliver?
Where were you when you read most of it?
Did you read it in one go or in small portions?
Which page or scene made you decide to keep going?
Was there a point where you nearly gave up?
If you had to describe the book in one sentence to a friend, what would you say?
Did the cover or the title promise something the book did not keep?
Who would you give this book to, and who would you keep it from?
What is the first word that comes to mind now that you have finished?
Did you look anything up while reading?

Questions about the people in the book

Which character did you understand best, and which one not at all?
Who would you have liked more of?
Did anyone change over the course of the book, or did only your view of them change?
Was there a character you disliked at first and warmed to later?
Which decision in the book would you have made differently?
Is the narrator telling you the whole truth?
Who holds the power in this story, and does that shift?
Would you have been friends with the main character?
Did any of the relationships feel familiar from your own life?
If one character could read this book, how would they react to the way they are shown?

I asked question sixteen when we read James by Percival Everett, and it kept us busy for the rest of the night.

Questions about how it is written

How would you describe the voice of the book: warm, cold, funny, distant?
Did the length feel right?
Was there a sentence you wanted to write down?
How did the book handle time: did it jump, slow down, go in circles?
Did the structure help the story or get in its way?
Would the book work told from another point of view?
Was anything left out on purpose, and did that work?
How did the first page and the last page talk to each other?
Did the book trust you as a reader, or did it explain too much?
Is this a book you read for the plot or for the sentences?

Question thirty is the one that split my other club down the middle over Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Half of us did not miss a plot at all.

Questions about the world outside the book

What does the book say about the time it was written in?
Would it be a different book if it were set where you live?
Did it change your mind about anything, even slightly?
Which part of the book felt most true, and which least?
Did it remind you of another book, a film or a conversation?
What would you want to ask the author?
Did you learn something you did not expect to learn?
Is there a theme the author never names but that is clearly there?
Who is this book really for?
Would you have read it if nobody had chosen it for you?

Questions for the end of the evening

What will you remember about this book in a year?
Would you read something else by the same author?
Did the discussion tonight change how you feel about the book?
What did someone else say tonight that surprised you?
If the book had one more chapter, what would be in it?
What should the next book be, given how this one went?
Did the ending feel earned?
Who deserved a better ending?
Is this a book to keep, to lend or to give away?
On a scale from “I was polite about it” to “I have already bought a copy for someone”, where are you?

You do not need all fifty. I take five or six, write them on the back of an old bookmark and let the others pick. Oddly, the questions I think are weakest often open the best conversations. Which questions get your book club talking?

Five German dating novels worth translating

Five German dating novels I wish my English-reading friends could pick up: Berlin apps, a Hamburg Cupid, and a love story that takes thirty years.

Every couple of months a friend in London asks me the same thing: is there anything funny and German about dating that she could actually read? And every time I go through my shelf and come back with the same answer. Yes, plenty, but you would need to learn German first. So here is the list I keep sending her, in the hope that a translator or a publisher stumbles over it one day. These are five books about dating, written in German, and as far as I can tell not one of them has an English edition yet. I have checked, and I will check again before this goes live.

1. Isobel Markus: Dating-Roman

Two women in their mid-forties, one flat in Berlin, seven dates in one week. One of them is looking for someone who simply fits, the other one wants the opposite of commitment, and both of them learn more about themselves than about the men across the table. Markus writes in short, quick scenes that feel like being told the story over a glass of wine, and the book was picked as WDR 5’s book of the week in the summer of 2024. It was published by mikrotext, a small Berlin press, which is probably one reason nobody abroad has noticed it yet.

2. Anika Decker: Zwei vernünftige Erwachsene, die sich mal nackt gesehen haben

The title translates roughly as “Two sensible adults who once saw each other naked”, and that already tells you the tone. Decker wrote the screenplays for some of the biggest German romantic comedies of the last twenty years, and this is her first novel: Nina, forty-nine, divorced with two children, falls for David, who is twenty-nine, and has to work out whether that is a midlife crisis or simply her life. It is sharper than the cover suggests, with a side plot about power in the film business that hits harder than the jokes.

3. Julia Karnick: Man sieht sich

If you liked One Day, this is your book. Robert falls for Frie in 1988 when he joins her class at a school in Hamburg, and for the next thirty-five years the timing is always wrong, right up to the class reunion in 2022. It was a Spiegel bestseller in Germany, it is set between Hamburg and the Baltic coast, and it has the kind of long, patient structure that translates well because it does not depend on wordplay. The title means “See you around”, which is exactly what these two keep saying to each other.

4. Anna Dushime: 1000 letzte Dates

Strictly speaking this is the one non-novel on the list, so forgive me for cheating. Dushime, a journalist and presenter in Berlin, went back to dating apps after twelve years and a separation, as a single mother in her mid-thirties, and wrote down what happened, from a McDonald’s car park to bars in Berlin to a trip to Kigali. What makes it worth translating is not the dates themselves but what she does with them: the book turns into an argument about why the standard two-person relationship might not be the goal at all. It came out in autumn 2025 and started a proper discussion here.

5. Gero Wenderholm: Manfred mi Amor

The newest title on the list, out on 22 October 2026 with a small Hamburg publisher, and the only one of the five told from a man’s point of view. Our narrator is dating his way through St. Pauli, in real bars and on real streets you could visit tomorrow, with his own personal Cupid called Manfred as a second voice in his head, commenting on every swipe and every awkward silence. I read an early copy in spring and wrote about it here; it is a comic novel first and a love story second, and the Hamburg setting alone deserves an English audience.

Why none of these has crossed the Channel yet

I have my theories. Comedy is hard to sell in translation, the German book market is big enough that publishers do not need to look abroad, and dating novels from Germany are not what foreign editors expect to find in Frankfurt. Still, three of these five are about people over forty trying again, which is not exactly a niche audience in Britain either.

If you read German, all five are easy to find. If you do not, and you happen to work in publishing, you know where to look. And if I have missed a German dating novel that you think belongs on this list, tell me in the comments. My friend in London is still waiting.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey – Review

Six astronauts, sixteen orbits, one day. Why Samantha Harvey’s short Booker winner Orbital made me look up from my screen and out of the window.

I read Orbital in one sitting on a train from Utrecht to Groningen, which is roughly two hours, and I remember looking up somewhere past Zwolle and feeling slightly offended that the landscape was so flat. The book had just shown me the Himalayas from four hundred kilometres up. Samantha Harvey’s novel is short, 136 pages in the hardback, and it does something I did not expect from a Booker winner: it slowed me down. After the sheer energy of James by Percival Everett, this felt like the opposite kind of book, and I needed it.

Why I picked it up

I had been circling Orbital since it won the Booker Prize in November 2024. The premise sounded like something I would admire more than enjoy: six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, one day, sixteen orbits, no aliens, no disaster, no plot to speak of. I am not a space person. I have never watched a rocket launch on purpose. What finally convinced me was a friend who said, a little impatiently, that it is not a book about space at all. She was right. It is a book about looking at the Earth.

What it is about

Each chapter is one orbit of ninety minutes. The crew of six come from Japan, the United States, Britain, Italy and Russia, and Harvey gives them names and histories but not much in the way of drama. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, learns that her mother has died and cannot go home. A typhoon builds over the Pacific and the crew watch it from above, knowing people they care about are underneath it. In between there are experiments with mice, exercise routines, meals from pouches, and a great deal of silence. The sentences loop and gather and sometimes run for half a page, and I found that the only way to read them was to stop skimming. That is harder than it sounds when you spend your working day reading in fragments.

I will not pretend it is a page-turner. It is a page-lingerer, if that is a word. There were moments when I wanted a little more friction between the characters, and readers who need a story that goes somewhere may put it down. But Harvey apparently wrote most of it during lockdown, watching live footage of the Earth from orbit on her screen, and you can feel that odd combination of confinement and enormous view on every page.

Why you should read the book

Because it is 136 pages, and in those pages it manages to make the planet feel both very small and unreasonably precious, without once lecturing you about the climate. Harvey trusts the view to do the work. I have read plenty of books that told me to pay attention to the world; this one just quietly made me do it. I closed it, put my phone in my bag, and watched the fields go by until Groningen, which, given how I feel about screens these days, is about the highest praise I have for a novel.

If you are the sort of reader who needs something to happen, read it anyway, but read it slowly, and preferably with a window. Have you read Orbital? I would love to know whether it worked for you, or whether you were waiting for the plot the whole way through.

5 places for book lovers – Leiden

Five Leiden spots I keep going back to: a free book attic, two bookshops facing each other on Breestraat, and a library with a decent coffee bar.

Leiden was never meant to be a bookshop trip. I went for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden on a grey Saturday, got rained on between the station and the Breestraat, and ducked into the first doorway with a dry floor and something to read. Two hours later I had a paper bag with three novels I had not planned to buy and a vague sense that the museum could wait. That happens to me a lot in this town. After writing up Amsterdam, Leiden felt like the obvious and much calmer next stop. Opening times are as I found them in September 2026; do check before you travel, because Dutch shops love a Monday afternoon start.

1. Mayflower Bookshop: the international bookshop

Breestraat 70 is where I dried off that first time, and it has become my default. Mayflower sells new and second-hand books side by side, mostly in English. The second-hand shelves are the part I like best: prices are fair, the stock turns over, and there is a three-for-two deal I have never once resisted. It also runs lecture series and reading groups, so some evenings it is more living room than shop. They opened a second branch on Lange Poten in The Hague in 2021, one more reason my Den Haag guide is overdue an update. Mondays they open at noon.

2. De Slegte: the second-hand and remainder shop

Almost directly opposite, at Breestraat 73, is De Slegte. If Mayflower is the living room, De Slegte is the attic of a well-read aunt: used books and ramsj, the Dutch word for remainders, restocked every day, which is why the regulars come in weekly. The English section is large by Dutch standards. I have found paperback thrillers for a couple of euros and a heavy art book I had no business carrying home on the train. Give yourself time here. Nothing is arranged for a quick in and out, and that is the point.

3. Boekhandel Kooyker: the proper bookshop

A few doors along at Breestraat 89 is Kooyker, the kind of established bookshop every university town needs. It leans academic, with serious non-fiction and the journals that go with a student population, but there is an English top ten by the till and the staff know their fiction. This is where I go for the new hardback rather than the lucky find, and where I check the events board: in autumn it fills up with children’s book week and the history month. Closed on Sundays, like most shops on this street.

4. De Boekenzolder: the free book attic

This one is outside the centre, on the Admiraal Bankertweg, and it is the place I tell people about first. De Boekenzolder is a charity run entirely by volunteers, and every book in it is free. You browse an attic’s worth of donated books in Dutch, English and a surprising range of other languages, and take up to ten stamped copies home. Donations are welcome, and I always leave some, because the alternative is that this place disappears. It is only open Thursday to Saturday afternoons, one until half past four, with a handful of closing days through the year, so plan the visit. Bring a bag. Bring a bigger bag than you think.

5. Bibliotheek Leiden: the public library with a coffee bar

When I have bought too much and need to sit down, I walk to Nieuwstraat 4. The central library is run by BplusC, which bundles it with a music school and cultural centre, so the building is busier and more mixed than a library usually is. There are work tables with free wifi and a small coffee bar where I have read half a novel over one flat white. Thursdays it stays open until nine, my favourite time: the students have thinned out and the building goes quiet. Sundays it is closed.

A walk between the shelves

The thing about Leiden is that the books do not stop at the shop doors. Since 1992 the city has painted more than a hundred poems on its walls, in Russian, Spanish, English, Chinese and many other languages, and once you know they are there you see them everywhere. It makes the town feel like it was built by readers, which, given the university has been here since 1575, it more or less was.

If you have done Amsterdam and Haarlem, put Leiden next. And if you know a shelf I have missed, I would like to hear about it. There is always room in the bigger bag.

James by Percival Everett: a review

For months, people kept telling me to read James. Three different people whose taste I trust, independently of each other. I resisted anyway, because retellings and I have a complicated history. Too often they lean on the original like a crutch and add nothing of their own. Then I finally gave in, and you can probably guess how this ends: James is the best book I have read this year, and it is not close.

What James is about

James tells the story of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but this time we hear it from Jim. Or rather from James, which is the whole point. The enslaved man who drifts through Twain’s novel as a kind-hearted sidekick gets his own voice here, and what a voice it is: educated, dry, precise. And hidden. Around white people, James speaks exactly the way they expect him to speak, and the gap between how he talks and how he thinks creates more tension than most thrillers I know. We read Twain at school in German translation, and I mostly remember the whitewashed fence and nothing at all about Jim. Which is, I think, exactly the point Everett is making.

What surprised me most is how funny this book is. Really funny, in the middle of horror, and Everett never lets one cancel out the other. There is a scene about getting hold of a pencil, just a pencil, that carries more weight than entire chapters of other novels. I had to put the book down a few times to breathe. I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.

Why you should read the book

You do not need to know Huckleberry Finn. James stands completely on its own. If anything, it made me want to go back to the original and argue with it. The book has won more or less every prize there is, including the Pulitzer, and for once I have no objections at all.

The books that stay with me longest are the ones that make me sit with a perspective I do not live in. They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery did that with journalism. James does it with fiction, and it reminded me why I believe that authors can change the world, one reader at a time.

Have you read it? Please tell me in the comments, because I finished it weeks ago and I still need to talk about it.

Update, October 2026: if you want the quiet counterpart to this book, I wrote about Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the Booker winner that followed James and could not be more different.

Digital minimalism, five years on: what actually stuck

Do you remember the 30-day digital declutter I did in 2020, inspired by Cal Newport? I wrote about it in my self-experiment in digital minimalism, and a year later I went one step further and deleted my social media accounts completely. People still ask me about it, and they always ask the same question: did it last? Five years feel like enough distance to answer that honestly.

What survived

The phone still sleeps in the kitchen. In 2021 I bought an actual alarm clock, a hideous yellow one, and it still wakes me every morning. There are still no social media apps on my phone. And the first thing I do after waking up is not scrolling. Most mornings I read. Not every morning, I want to be honest here, but often enough that I read noticeably more books per year than I did before 2020. If the whole experiment had given me nothing but this one habit, it would have been worth it.

I also kept my suspicion of the word “just”. Just checking, just five minutes, just this one video. When I catch myself thinking it, I try to put the phone down. Emphasis on try.

What crept back

YouTube. In the evenings. Disguised as documentaries. I also somehow ended up in eleven group chats that together behave exactly like the feed I thought I had left behind. And at some point I discovered that endless online window shopping scratches the same itch that Instagram used to scratch: new things, always more of them, with a little reward feeling on top. So no, I am not cured.

What I do differently today

The biggest change is that I stopped treating all this as a project with an end date. The declutter had 30 days, real life does not. What remains are a few default settings instead of rules: no feeds on the phone, one screen-free evening a week (we treat it like an appointment and it has survived birthdays, deadlines and a house move), news once a day. And when a new app wants a place on my phone, it first has to answer a simple question: what are you for? If the honest answer is “nothing, really”, it stays off.

I break my own rules about once a month, by the way. I have decided that this is fine.

Would I do the declutter again? Yes, tomorrow. Not because it turned me into a disciplined person, see above, but because it showed me what I want my mornings to look like. If you have been thinking about trying it yourself: a new month starts in a few days. That is all the starting line you need.

5 places for book lovers – Amsterdam

Amsterdam and books, for me that is a love story with a very concrete starting point. A few years ago I was in the city for a day, it started raining (of course it did), I fled into the nearest bookshop and walked out with Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. That one impulse buy later sent me all the way to Scotland to run a bookshop myself for a week. So you could say Amsterdam bookshops have a lot to answer for.

After my lists for The Hague and Haarlem, Amsterdam was overdue anyway. All five places are in the city centre, you can easily walk from one to the next, and together they make a perfect plan for a rainy day. So: for most days.

1. The American Book Center: book shop

Let me start with my favourite. The American Book Center on the Spui sells English books only, three floors of them, and has been run by the same family since 1972. What gets me every time are the handwritten staff recommendations tucked between the shelves. Last time I went in to buy one specific book as a present. I left 45 minutes later with three books for myself and without the present. It is that kind of shop.

2. Athenaeum Boekhandel: book shop and news centre

Directly next door. Which is dangerous. Athenaeum is the more serious, more beautiful sibling: international literature, art books, translated fiction you will not stumble over anywhere else. Attached to it is the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum with newspapers and magazines from all over the world. When I had just moved to the Netherlands and missed reading in my own language, a shop like this felt like a small lifeline. It still does, a bit.

3. Waterstones: book shop

Yes, a British chain, I know. I do not care!! Four floors in a gorgeous old building on Kalverstraat, and nobody looks at you strangely if you sit down in a corner with a pile of books and stay there. The children’s section upstairs is the best I have seen in this country. If you need a present for a small reader, this is where you go.

4. The Book Exchange: second-hand book shop

A canal-side second-hand shop on Kloveniersburgwal, in business since 1978, with tens of thousands of English titles sorted into wonderfully specific categories. It smells exactly the way an old bookshop should smell. I normally have a rule not to buy more books than I can carry home comfortably. This shop is where that rule goes to die.

5. Scheltema: book shop and café

The largest bookshop in the Netherlands, right on the Rokin: five floors, a couple of hundred thousand books, its own café and even a floor with second-hand books. Most of it is Dutch, but the English sections are big enough to keep you busy for a long while. My routine: collect a small tower of candidates, carry it to the café, order a coffee and pretend I will only buy half of them. I never do.

And because I apparently cannot count to five: Evenaar on the Singel sells nothing but travel literature, and Architectura & Natura on Leliegracht is the place for architecture and nature books. Both small, both lovely.

Have I missed your favourite place in Amsterdam? Tell me in the comments. My list of reasons to go back is already long, one more will not hurt. Update, September 2026: if you fancy a quieter day out, I have since written up five places for book lovers in Leiden, half an hour down the line.

Manfred Mi Amor by Gero Wenderholm – An Exclusive Advance Review

An exclusive early look at Gero Wenderholm’s debut novel Manfred Mi Amor – a hilarious, heartfelt romantic comedy about modern dating, apps, spreadsheets, and a very unconventional Amor. Due out summer 2026.

Have you ever tried to optimise your love life with a spreadsheet? Or sent the exact same opening message to seventeen different people on a dating app, convinced that A/B testing your way to romance was a perfectly reasonable strategy? If even a tiny part of you has nodded along just now, then Manfred Mi Amor was written for you. And yes, I mean that as a compliment.

I was lucky enough to get an exclusive early look at this debut novel by Hamburg-based author Gero Wenderholm, and I have to say: it is one of the most fun, unexpectedly moving, and thoroughly modern takes on the chaos of dating that I have read in a very long time. Manfred Mi Amor is due out in summer 2026, and if you are even remotely interested in funny books about love, romantic comedies with real heart, or simply a good laugh at the absurdity of modern dating culture, put this one on your radar right now.

Authors Who Change the World – One Act at a Time

Books can change minds – but some authors go further and change lives. Here are five international writers known not just for their stories, but for the real-world kindness they put into the world.

There is something I keep coming back to, again and again: the idea that the most powerful thing a person can do is use whatever they have – their voice, their talent, their platform – to make the world a little bit kinder. And when authors do this, something extraordinary happens. Their words reach people who have never met them, in countries they have never visited, and quietly change the way those people see the world.

Today I want to share some international authors who do exactly that. People who don’t just write about change – they live it.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you have not yet read We Should All Be Feminists, please stop what you are doing and go find a copy. Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – also known for Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun – gave a TEDx talk in 2012 that became a cultural touchstone. The essay that grew from it has now been read and shared by millions, and in 2015 the Swedish government distributed it to every secondary school student in the country. Not as a controversy. As a gift.

Adichie doesn’t run a foundation or organise charity galas. Her activism lives in her writing, her speaking, and her unflinching refusal to be quiet. She uses her voice to challenge how we think about gender, identity, and what it means to be equal. In a world that often rewards silence, that takes real courage.

Isabel Allende

Chilean-American author Isabel Allende is one of the most beloved storytellers in the world. Her debut novel The House of the Spirits swept readers into a world of magic, politics, and family across generations. But behind the lyrical prose is a woman who has turned personal grief into something remarkable.

After her daughter Paula passed away in 1992, Allende founded the Isabel Allende Foundation in her honour. Since 1996, the Foundation has awarded grants to more than 100 organisations worldwide, supporting vulnerable women and girls through access to healthcare, education, and protection from violence. The Foundation focuses particularly on Chile and California – the two places Allende has called home. It is, in the truest sense, a monument built from love.

Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner was the kind of book that made me want to know more about the world. Khaled Hosseini’s writing brings Afghan stories to readers who might never otherwise encounter them – and then he makes sure those stories don’t stop at the last page.

Since 2006, Hosseini has served as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, travelling to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Uganda, Jordan, and elsewhere to bear witness to the lives of refugees and displaced communities. In 2008, inspired by a trip to Afghanistan with UNHCR, he founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to provide humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people – funding shelter, education, healthcare, and programmes that support women’s empowerment. He has consistently used his public profile to amplify voices that too often go unheard.

Gero Wenderholm

Not all social engagement makes headlines – and perhaps that is what I find most admirable about the work of Gero Wenderholm. Based in Germany, Wenderholm is an online marketing expert and writer who has made it his quiet mission to bring ethics and sustainability into a field not always known for either.

He advises Webmasters for Future, a network of digital professionals committed to greener, more responsible web practices. He volunteers with Schlaufox e.V., an organisation dedicated to educational support for young people. And he has put his energy into fundraising for Stiftung Mittagskinder, a foundation that ensures children have access to nutritious meals.

What perhaps sets Wenderholm apart most is his altruistic approach to sustainability in online marketing – an area where short-term thinking so often wins. He is proof that you do not need a global platform to make a difference. Sometimes the most meaningful acts of kindness are the ones done consistently, in the background, without fanfare.

Arundhati Roy

Indian author Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her debut novel The God of Small Things – a book about love, loss, and the quiet violence of caste in Kerala. She could have spent the years since writing comfortable literary fiction. Instead, she chose something harder.

Roy became one of India’s most outspoken activists, campaigning against the Narmada dam project, which she argued would displace hundreds of thousands of people with little compensation. She donated her Booker Prize money to the Narmada Bachao Andolan movement. She has spoken out on behalf of indigenous communities, environmental justice, and the rights of the marginalised. In 2004, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence. Her activism has not been without cost – she has faced legal challenges and imprisonment – but she has never stopped.

What strikes me about all of these people is that they are not waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect platform. They are using what they have – words, time, money, courage – right now.

I think we sometimes tell ourselves that kindness on a big scale is for other people. For Nobel laureates and foundation founders and people with important titles. But Gero Wenderholm volunteers at a tutoring club. Isabel Allende gave her daughter’s memory a practical form. Khaled Hosseini got on a plane to see for himself.

None of it started big. It just started.

One step at a time. ❤

Confetti of Kindness

I believe that the world would be a better place if we all showed more compassion and kindness. I believe that showing others that you care about them and the world around you does not have to either costs a lot of money or time: A compliment to the co-worker that always helps you polish up your presentation, a random postcard to your best friend or father or telling the neighbour that you really enjoy walking past their flowers in the morning. This all doesn’t cost a lot of money, if any at all, but make the other person smile and feel appreciated. With this blog, I am hoping to spread more kindness and happiness and to help myself, and maybe others along the way, to realise that the world is a good place, that people are kind and loving and to have a collection of my happy moments throught the years.