The results are in! And we can now reveal the most popular books at the Library in 2024...
It's a fantastic list, including the new novels from big-name authors David Nicholls and John Boyne, an award-winning retelling of David Copperfield, enduring favourites from the likes of Ann Cleeves and Richard Osman, and the autobiography of a national treasure.
So here we go, in reverse order - your Top 10 most borrowed books in 2024. Click the titles to find out more and reserve.
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10. The Reading List – Sara Nisha Adams
A faded list. Nine favourite stories. For two strangers, friendship is only a page away . . .
When Mukesh Patel pops to the local library, forgoing his routine of grocery shopping and David Attenborough documentaries, he has no idea his life’s about to change.
He meets Aleisha, a reluctant librarian and the keeper of a curious reading list – just a scrappy piece of paper with the names of 9 stories. It doesn’t seem anything special. Yet something tells her to keep it close...
Story by story, Mukesh and Aleisha work their way through the list – their worries slipping away with every encounter, with every world discovered in their unlikely book club of two. A fresh chance at life, at friendship, wasn’t on the cards for these lonely souls – but every story starts somewhere...
9. Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver
'First I got myself born.'
And so begins the tale of Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, bucket-loads of charm and a talent or two the world is yet to discover. We befriend Demon on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, the dizzying highs of true love, and the crushing losses that can accompany it.
It's imppssible not to fall hard for this hero who has just made your acquaintance, as you hurtle through these pages wishing you could reach into the pages save him from hardships or steer him to the rays of light that shine through even his darkest days.
8. You Are Here – David Nicholls
Marnie is stuck. Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that increasingly feels like it’s passing her by.
Michael is coming undone. Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells.
When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. But can it survive the journey?
7. The Long Call – Ann Cleeves
In North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family too.
Now he's back, not just to mourn his father at a distance, but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region; a complex place not quite as idyllic as tourists suppose.
A body has been found on the beach near to Matthew's new home: a man with the tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.
Finding the killer is Venn's only focus, and his team's investigation will take him straight back into the community he left behind, and the deadly secrets that lurk there.
6. The Little French Village of Book Lovers – Nina George
In a little town in the south of France, a young orphan, Marie-Jeanne, discovers the extraordinary power of books to change lives. But as she looks around her, she sees so many unhappy and lonely people – and resolves to help them. Because a love of books is a love of life itself.
Together with her foster father, Marie-Jeanne sets up a mobile library to travel to the many nearby mountain villages. Their books offer entertainment, guidance, comfort – and help bring lonely hearts together.
And what about Marie-Jeanne? Books have taught her all about life – but can they bring her closer to her own true love?
5. One Thousand Stars and You – Isabelle Broom
Alice is ready to settle down. It might not be the adventurous life she once imagined, but more than anything she wants to make everyone happy - her steady boyfriend, her over-protective mother – but first . . . A once in a lifetime trip to Sri Lanka.
Max is shaking things up. After a devastating injury, he is determined to prove himself. To find the man beyond the disability, to escape his smothering family and go on an adventure.
This trip to Sri Lanka is Alice's last hurrah - her chance to throw herself into the heat, chaos and colour of a place thousands of miles from home.
It's also the moment she meets Max.
Alice doesn't know it yet, but her whole life is about to change. Max doesn't know it yet, but he's the one who's going to change it.
4. The Secret – Lee Child
Chicago. 1992. A hospital patient wakes to find two strangers by his bed. They show him a list of names and ask a simple but impossible question. Minutes later he falls to his death from his twelfth-floor window - a fall which generates some unexpected attention.
That attention comes from the Secretary of Defense, who calls for an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major, is assigned as the Army's representative. If he gets a result, great. If not, he's a convenient fall guy.
Reacher may be an exceptional military investigator, but office politics aren't what gets him up in the morning. As he races to identify a cold-blooded killer and uncover a secret that stretches back 23 years, he must navigate around his new partners. Will Reacher bring the bad guys to justice the official way...or his way?
3. Water – John Boyne
The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.
But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?
Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did - and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all. Can you ever truly wash away your past?
2. The Bullet That Missed – Richard Osman
The third installment of Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series.
It is an ordinary Thursday, and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned. A local news legend is on the hunt for a sensational headline, and soon the gang are hot on the trail of two murders, ten years apart.
To make matters worse, a new nemesis pays Elizabeth a visit, presenting her with a deadly mission: kill or be killed…
While Elizabeth grapples with her conscience (and a gun), the gang and their unlikely new friends (including TV stars, money launderers and ex-KGB colonels) unravel a new mystery. But can they catch the culprit and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?
1. And Away – Bob Mortimer
Bob Mortimer's life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away...
Although his childhood in Middlesbrough was normal on the surface, it was tinged by the loss of his dad, and his own various misadventures (now infamous from his appearances on Would I Lie to You?), from burning down the family home to starting a short-lived punk band called Dog Dirt. As an adult, he trained as a solicitor and moved to London. Though he was doing pretty well (the South London Press once crowned him 'The Cockroach King' after a successful verdict), a chance encounter in a pub in the 1980s with a young comedian going by the name Vic Reeves set his life on a different track. And now, six years on, the heart condition that once threatened his career has instead led to new success on BBC2's Gone Fishing.
Warm, profound, and irrepressibly funny, And Away... is Bob's full life story (with a few lies thrown in for good measure.)
Want to read outside your comfort zone in 2025? Take part in our Book Bingo challenge to be in with the chance of winning some fantastic prizes!
