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This Green and Pleasant Land by Ayisha Malik

Available in e-book and e-audiobook

Accountant Bilal Hasham and his journalist wife Mariam plod along contentedly in the sleepy, chocolate box English village they've lived in for ten years. Then Bilal is summoned to his mother's bedside in Birmingham. Mrs Sakeena Hasham knows she is not long for this world. She has a final request. Instead of whispering her prayers in her dying moments, she instructs her son: you must go home to your village, and you must build a Mosque. Mariam is horrified. The villagers are outraged. How can a grieving Bilal choose between honouring his beloved mum's last wish and preserving everything held dear in the village he calls home? But it turns out home means different things to different people.

Ayisha talks about the book

The Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer

We think of Queen Elizabeth I as 'Gloriana': the most powerful English woman in history. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear?

Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole

Available in e-audiobook

Who owns England? Behind this simple question lies this country's oldest and darkest secret. This is the history of how England's elite came to own our land - from aristocrats and the church to businessmen and corporations - and an inspiring manifesto for how we can take control back.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Available in e-book and e-audiobook

Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.

Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart, the roar on the other side of silence.

George Eliot Fellowship

Adventures on the High Teas by Stuart Maconie

Everyone talks about Middle England. Sometimes they mean something bad and sometimes they mean something good. But just where and what is Middle England? Stuart Maconie didn't know either, so he packed his Thermos and sandwiches and set off to find out.

Stuart Maconie reads from his book

Three Great English Victories by Bernard Cornwell

Available in e-book

Harlequin

1342. The English, led by Edward III, are laying waste to the French countryside. The archers, the common men, are England’s secret weapon. The French know them as Harlequins. Thomas Hookton is one of these archers. But he is also on a personal mission: to avenge his father’s death and retrieve a stolen relic. Thomas begins a quest that will lead him to finally where the two armies face each other at Crecy.

1356

The Hundred Years War rages on and the bloodiest battles are yet to be fought. Across France, towns stand alert to danger. The English army is invading again and the French are hunting them down. Thomas of Hookton, an English archer, is under orders to seek out a lost sword, said to grant certain victory. As the outnumbered English army becomes trapped near the town of Poitiers, Thomas, his men and his sworn enemies will meet in one great and bloody battle.

Azincourt

Azincourt, fought on 25 October 1415, on St Crispin's Day, is one of the best known battles of all time. This is the breathtaking story of this momentous battle and its aftermath. From the varying viewpoints of nobles, peasants, archers, and horsemen, Azincourt skilfully brings to life the hours of relentless fighting, the desperation of an army crippled by disease and the exceptional bravery of the English soldiers.

Bernard Cornwell website

Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah

Available in e-book

Life is not safe for Alem. His father is Ethiopian, his mother Eritrean. Their countries are at war, and Alem is welcome in neither place.
So Alem is excited to spend a holiday in London with his father - until he wakes up to find him gone. What seems like a betrayal is in fact an act of love, but now Alem is alone in a strange country, and he must forge his own path…

The Guardian book review

The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

Available in e-book

British author Arnold Bennett returns to his native stomping grounds -- the Potteries district of England's West Midlands region -- with this collection of insightful, darkly witty stories about the denizens of the fictionalized "Five Towns." From love gone wrong to mischief and misadventure, these sharply drawn tales run the gamut.

Arnold Bennett society

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Available in e-audiobook

Set in the Midlands and London over the last eight years, Jonathan Coe follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change and disruption in Britain. There are the early married years of Sophie and Ian who disagree about the future of Britain and, possibly, the future of their relationship; Sophie's grandfather whose final act is to send a postal vote for the European referendum; Doug, the political commentator, whose young daughter despairs of his lack of political nous and Doug's Remaining Tory politician partner who is savaged by the crazed trolls of Twitter. And within all these lives is the story of England itself: a story of nostalgia and irony; of friendship and rage, humour and intense bewilderment.

Jonathan Coe talks about his book

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

Available in e-book and e-audiobook

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.

Hallie tells us about her book

Review by the Guardian

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

Available in e-book

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

Highlights from Bill Bryson’s book