A Good Read Folgen

The children's TV presenter and stand up comedian advocate for favourite books. Rhys Stevenson says the ending of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens made him pace up and down his kitchen, and Esther Manito fell in love with one particular character in Stepping Up by Sarah Turner. Harriett's choice is The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell, which also prompts passionate discussion about characters.Producer for BBC Audio Bristol is Sally Heaven

What does 'home' mean? The three book choices today reflect on what home means to different people. The crime writer Vaseem Khan chooses Deborah Moggach's much loved novel The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that sees a group of elderly English people going to live in a retirement home in India. As well as many hilarious misadventures the book also depicts the stark reality of getting old. Reverend Lucy Winkett of St James Church Picadilly in London chooses The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak the love story beween a Greek Cypriot man and a Turkish Cypriot woman in a country fractured by division in 1974. The story takes place mainly in contemporary London and examines the personal impact of displacement from one's homeland. And that's a theme that carried on in Harriett's choice which is We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo about a young girl who leaves her troubled homeland of Zimbabwe for a new life in America and finds herself better off materially but lacking the spiritual comfort of her home country.Producer: Maggie Ayre

Author and cultural critic Olivia Laing, whose books include The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody, is joined by fashion writer and curator Charlie Porter, of What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, and presenter Harriett Gilbert, to talk about the books they love.Olivia recommends Bad Blood by literary critic Lorna Sage - a memoir of her eccentric childhood and adolescence in 1940s rural Wales. Charlie loves Honey From A Weed by Patience Gray, a cookbook which exalts local knowledge and seasonal cooking, taking readers to a time and place far removed from modern life. And Harriett brings The English Understand Wool, a 2022 novella by American author Helen DeWitt, which takes unexpected twists and turns and which Harriett argues, merits reading more than once. Comment on instagram: @agoodreadbbc Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio