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  • Published: 13 March 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529943450
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99

Bookish

How Reading Shapes Our Lives





The highly anticipated sequel to BOOKWORM about how books of all kinds delight, guide, comfort and strengthen us throughout our adult lives

As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question: (how) do books prepare us for life?

Bookish picks up where Bookworm left off: at the cusp of teenage, when everything – including the way we read – undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Here, Mangan vividly recounts her metamorphosis from young bookworm to bookish adult, from the way GCSE curricula can impact our relationship with literature to the growing pains of swapping the pleasures of re-reading for those of book-hoarding. Revisiting the books of all genres - from thrillers and bonkbusters to historical sagas and apocalyptic zombie stories - that ferried her through each important stages of life – falling in love, finding a job, becoming a mother and navigating grief – Bookish is a coming-of-age in books. It's an ode to our favourite bookish spaces - from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to libraries, glorious big bookshops and our very own book rooms - and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times and help us find ourselves when we feel lost, but also help us connect with the people we love through shared stories.

  • Published: 13 March 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529943450
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99

About the author

Lucy Mangan

Lucy Mangan is a columnist for Stylist magazine and a features writer and reviewer for The Guardian, The Telegraph and many other publications. She broadcasts frequently on radio and occasionally on television, and is the author My Family and Other Disasters, The Reluctant Bride, Hopscotch and Handbags and Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

Also by Lucy Mangan

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Praise for Bookish

Lucy Mangan on books is like butter on toast: perfect.

Caitlin Moran

An affectionate, warm guide on the healing power of reading.

Independent

What Mangan does brilliantly is express the experience of reading and articulate the emotional connections we make with stories. She understands how books become entwined in our lives and help us make sense of the world.

Observer (Bookworm)

A bookworm’s delight. A joyous whistle stop tour through some books I’ve loved all my life as well as books I discovered through reading it. I devoured this book.

Sara Collins

Such a gorgeous writer… Funny, warm and charming… A beautiful, warm, comic voice. If you’re a passionate reader, this book feels like the best conversation ever with another of your kind. I was engaged, comforted, educated (about SO much). I laughed, and wanted to be part of your family, and made lists of all the books I need to buy, and was very moved.

Marian Keyes

Comforting, funny and moving - Bookish is wonderful to curl up with on good days and bad.

Sali Hughes

An unabashed paean to the pleasure of acquiring more books than you could ever possibly read in your life… a whirlwind tour through her [Mangan’s] voracious, encyclopedic adult reading habit… This is a book by someone whom reading is life

Spectator

Bookish… tackles the myriad complexities of adulthood…[Mangan] makes for a wonderfully incisive critic and can pick apart a George Orwell with the same perspicacity with which she can, say, a Jack Reacher, or the lesser-known Brontë sister, Anne

Observer

Readers won’t share all of Mangan’s preferences, but that’s part of the point – it’s enjoyable enough to eavesdrop on the pleasures of a committed bookworm… A book on books needs marginalia, and this one doesn’t disappoint

Times Literary Supplement

Brimful of recommendations, packed with insights and sprinkled with wry observations, Bookish is a delight

Simple Things
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