Malala Yousafzai, David Miliband, Katherine Rundell, Jack Thorne and Margaret Busby have each recommended a book as part of a crowd-sourced reading list tied to Hay festival and the National Year of Reading. The selections range from a novel about theatre in the West Bank to a study of revolution, with one pick that made Rundell laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times.
Yousafzai chose Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, a novel in which a British-Palestinian actor travels to the West Bank to see family and becomes involved in a local production of Hamlet. She said she was moved by the rehearsal scenes, and added: “I have loved going to the theatre ever since I saw my first musical (Matilda in London, when I was 15 years old) – and I love reading about it, too.”
The former Pakistan schoolgirl activist’s choice sits alongside Miliband’s recommendation of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi, which was published in 2021. Rundell picked Black Bag by Luke Kennard, saying it made her laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. The novel follows a young out-of-work actor who takes a job with a professor of psychology and is made to wear a black bag during lectures so the academic can gauge students’ changing attitude to strangeness.
That premise is not pure invention. Black Bag is based on a real-life experiment from 1967, when researchers tested how people responded to an unusual sight. The idea gives Kennard’s book a comic edge, but also a slight unease that helped make it stand out among the recommendations.
Thorne chose Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising and said he thinks the right age to read it is 11. Busby recommended The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by CLR James, first published in 1938. The list is built to encourage reading rather than crown winners, and that is part of its appeal: the books are personal choices, but together they also map the tastes of writers and public figures trying to pull new readers in. For anyone scrolling through summer reading suggestions or checking Times-style cultural picks, the result is a reminder that the best recommendation is often the one that sounds like it came from a person who genuinely loved the book.
