2017 MOST BORROWED BOOKS
It’s always intriguing to find out what London Library members have been borrowing and the list of Most Borrowed Books for 2017 continues to shed interesting light on your reading habits.
The top 20 Non-Fiction List includes seven books written by London Library members, while four members feature in the top 20 Fiction list (remarkably one of those members is Henry James whose Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, is the 15th most borrowed fiction book for 2017.)
As in previous years, we’ve excluded multi-volume works, collected works and journals, but here’s the Fiction and non-Fiction top 20:
Fiction
- Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (2017)
- The Sellout, Paul Beatty (2015)
- The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes (2016)
- Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout (2017)
- Days Without End, Sebastian Barry (2016)
- The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis (2017)
- All the Light we Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (2014)
- The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (2016)
- Conclave, Robert Harris (2016)
- My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout (2016)
- The Power, Naomi Alderman (2016)
- Exit West, Mohsin Hamid, 2017
- Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift, 2016
- The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry, 2016
- The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, 1881
- Golden Hill, Francis Spufford, 2016
- Autumn, Ali Smith, 2016
- First Love, Gwendoline Riley, 2017
- Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, 2016
- Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz, 2016
Non-Fiction
- Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation, James Stourton (2016)
- Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, John Bew (2016)
- East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Philippe Sands (2016)
- Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra (2017)
- The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars, Adrian Tinniswood (2016)
- Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel (2016)
- Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman, Minoo Dinshaw (2016)
- The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, David Goodhart (2017)
- The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World, Michael Lewis (2017)
- Victorians Undone: Tales of Flesh in the Age of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes (2017)
- A Very English Scandal, John Preston, 2016
- Bosch and Bruegel, Joseph Leo Koerner, 2016
- Who Lost Russia?, Peter Conradi 2017
- The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, 2015
- The Marches, Rory Stewart, 2016
- The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray, 2017
- Inglorious Empire, Shashi Tharoor, 2017
- Martin Luther, Lyndal Roper, 2016
- At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell, 2016
- Man of Iron, Julian Glover, 2017
CELEBRATING WOMEN WRITERS
Every few weeks we display some of the books written recently by London Library members in our Mason's Yard window. This month - coinciding with the celebrations to mark International Womens' Day - we're proud to unveil a selection of recent works by female London Library members.
Here's the list of what's on display:
Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes
Diane Atkinson
Marking the centenary of female suffrage, this definitive history charts women's fight for the vote through the lives of those who took part, in a timely celebration of an extraordinary struggle
Bloomsbury, February 2018
The White King
Leandra de Lisle
In this portrait -- informed by newly disclosed manuscripts, including letters between the king and his queen -- Leanda de Lisle uncovers a Charles I who was principled and brave, but also fatally blinkered.
Chatto & Windus, January 2018
The Century Girls
Tessa Dunlop
A celebration of the one-hundred years since British women got the vote, told, in their own voices, by six centenarians: Helena, Olive, Edna, Joyce, Ann and Phyllis.
Simon & Schuster, February 2018
Jenny Lind: the Story of the Swedish Nightingale
Sarah Jenny Dunsmure
Jenny Lind was a household name in 1850, renowned not just as a singer but also for her charity and virtuous life. In this fascinating biography, Jenny Lind’s great grand-daughter uncovers an extraordinary story.
Red Door Publishing, 2015
Christmas: A Biography
Judith Flanders
Acclaimed social historian and best-selling author Judith Flanders casts a sharp and revealing eye on the myths, legends and history of the Christmas season.
Picador, October 2017
The Reading Cure
Laura Freeman
A beautiful, inspiring account of hunger and happiness, about addiction, obsession and recovery, and about the way literature and food can restore appetite and renew hope.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February 2018
Life and work of Thomas Chippendale Junior
Judith Goodison
Chippendale senior's work has been well documented. Chippendale junior's work has never, until now, been thoroughly researched. The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale Junior repairs the omission.
Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017
Leonard Rosoman
Tanya Harrod
Drawing on the artist's substantial and fascinating archive, design historian Tanya Harrod puts into context the many strands of the work of British artist Leonard Rosoman(1913–2012).
Royal Academy of Arts, 2017
European Slver in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen
Kathryn Jones
The Royal Collection contains one of the finest ensembles of pre-twentieth-century European silver in the world. Kathryn Jones, Curator of Decorative Art at the Royal Collection Trust, catalogues more than 350 works in this volume.
Royal Collection Trust, 2017
Highland Retreats
Mary Miers
The story of how incomers adopted the North of Scotland as a recreational paradise and left an astonishing legacy of architecture and decoration inspired by the romanticized image of the Highlands.
Rizzoli International Publications, Incorporated, 2017
Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire
Kay Redfield Jamison
In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of "An Unquiet Mind" brings a fresh perspective to the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2017
Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels
Jocelyn Robson
The true story of Grace Oakeshoot, an Englishwoman who faked her own death by drowning, leaving a marriage and a successful professional life in England to flee with her lover and re-invent herself in the New Zealand, in the early 1900s.
Springer, 2016
The Burning Time
Virginia Rounding
The Story of the Smithfield Martyrs and the hundreds of men and women in Tudor England who were put to the fire for their faith.
MacMillan, 2017
The Black Watch
Victoria Schofield
Following on from "The Highland Furies", in which she traced the regiment's history to 1899, Victoria Schofield tells the story of The Black Watch in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Head of Zeus, 2017
A Little History of British Gardening
Jenny Uglow
This lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for decking and ornamental grasses today.
Chatto & Windus 2017
The Odyssey
Emily Wilson
Homer's epic bought to life by Emily Wilson, the first woman to bring out a translation of the work in its entirety.
WW Norton, 2017
