Our book group choice for September 2020 is Everything Under by Daisy Johnson. The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most.

Our book group choice for August 2020 is The Crossway by Guy Stagg. In 2013 Guy Stagg made a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the journey after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him.

Our book group choice for July 2020 is Golden Child by Claire Adam. Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life.

Our book group choice for June 2020 is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her.

Our book group choice for May 2020 is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. The marathon dance craze flourished during the 1930s, but the underside was a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms—a dark side that Horace McCoy’s classic American novel powerfully captures.

Our book group choice for April 2020 is All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers.

Our book choice for March 2020 is Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

Our book group choice for February 2020 is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. The Radetzky March charts the history of the Trotta family through three generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Our book group choice for January 2020 is The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago.

Our book group choice for December 2019 is Educated by Tara Westover. Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”.