Welcome back to Book Break! In this video I am talking paperback books. I have ordered myself
a huge exciting box here full of brand new paperback releases that came out this month,
or in the last few months, so if you are holding out for a paperback release, this is your reminder
of the books that are now ready for you to go out and buy. But I really want to know what
your guys opinions are on hardbacks versus paperbacks, because I feel like the internet
is completely divided, seemingly 50/50, on this, whether people prefer collecting the hardbacks
or they prefer reading the slightly floppier paperbacks. I think both are honestly amazing,
my book collection is a real mix of both because I constantly change my mind on which one I prefer.
So leave us a comment below letting us know if you prefer hardbacks or paperbacks, but for now I'm
going to open up this box full of paperbacks. Just making sure you can't see my address, no we're
good! Is this a well-framed shot? I don't think it is. And we're in. Oh my god look at this. What is
in here? The one right on top is The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. This is a whole new cover
design for the paperback. I love when the hardback and paperback have really really different covers.
In fact I have the hardback right here, so that is a direct comparison. Both absolutely stunning
covers actually but if you've been holding out for the paperback you can now get your hands on
this one. Warning this is a book set during a pandemic, which I know not everyone is in the
right mindset for, but I absolutely loved it. It's set in 1918 during the great flu and it's
set all over the course of a few days on the maternity ward at a hospital in Dublin. And we
have three main characters: a doctor, a nurse, and a volunteer, all working on this maternity ward,
which is an absolutely terrifying place to be! These are all expectant mothers who have all been
quarantined together to try and contain the flu. So we do have this terrifying pandemic setting,
but it's also a really beautiful hopeful book about the strength and resilience of women
in all of the many many different forms it can take. And The Pull of the Stars I actually learned
from this book is what the word influenza means. It's an italian word meaning fate or the pull
of the stars which is how they described this terrifying illness that we know of as the flu.
Okay next in my box of goodies is Amnesty by Aravind Adiga. So this one is set all in one day,
that's two books in a row set in pretty short time frames, this is set all in one day as our
main character whose name, let me remember, is Danny. Our main character is the sole witness
to a murder and so he is faced with this moral dilemma. Should he report what he's seen to the
police and try and help this crime be solved? But he is an undocumented immigrant, and if he goes to
the police he will be exposing himself and risking being deported. And again this is a really really
different cover to the hardback which I don't think I have here so I'll show you. This is what
the hardback cover looked like, brand new design right here. But then on the flip side, sometimes
you get an original cover design that just worked so well they have to keep it for the paperback.
So this is Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, the winner of the 2020 book prize. Shuggie Bain is
the main character of this very very sad book. He is a young boy growing up in Glasgow and the book
spans several decades of his life, growing up gay in a community that wasn't very accepting of that
and growing up with an alcoholic mother who he loves very much and who loves him very much, but
is really broken and really struggling. I've seen those “try not to cry” challenges going around on
YouTube and TikTok, particularly with books like A Little Life, I think this will definitely be one
that I will see turning up in those challenges. Seriously try not to cry because you won't manage.
Okay then I've got Fake Law: the truth about justice in an age of lies by The Secret Barrister.
So The Secret Barrister is a real barrister whose identity has been hidden so that they can reveal
real truths from behind the scenes of the law. So this is a book that feels really relevant in
the age of fake news, it's all about debunking the myths behind some of the biggest legal stories of
recent years that turn out to be completely false, based in ignorance of the law and sometimes based
in everything from incompetence to malice. So The Secret Barrister in this book is really
fighting against this kind of abuse of the law that allows the most powerful and ignorant people
in our society to corrupt justice. Okay going back in. Oh I've got here The Glass Hotel by
Emily St John Mandel. I absolutely loved this book, so really really recommend if you've been
holding out for the paperback. It's a really hard book to explain, genuinely I don't know where to
start, it jumps around between timelines, between different character perspectives,
almost between alternate realities. Let's see what they say on the back of this book because
they are bound to do a better job than I can do explaining it. So vincent is one of our main
characters. She is the beautiful bartender at this incredible glass hotel. One night at the hotel she
meets this very wealthy financier and begins their life together. And that same night when they meet,
someone scrolls a note on the glass window of the hotel saying “why don't you swallow broken
glass?” And on that night a man called Leon who is a shipping executive sees the words written on the
wall and is shaken to his core. And then we flash backwards and forwards from this night piecing
all together these different puzzle pieces, and we know that a decade after this night Vincent
will go missing from the deck of one of Leon's ships. So how do all these pieces come together?
You'll have to read it to find out. Okay then there is The Harpy by Megan Hunter. I think
I do have the hardback for this, so you can see here that the paperback cover is really
similar to the hardback but kind of looks more modern in a way, like they're very similar but
have different vibes. And I love how subtle those differences can be. Both of them of
course had this figure on the front so that's your clue that this book is going to be a sort of
dark fairy tale. It's about a woman called Lucy who discovers that her husband is having an affair
and so the couple agree that as payback for this she will be allowed to hurt him three times in
any way. He won't know when it's coming, he won't know what form it will take, and that is going to
be their way of rebalancing their relationship. But that description is really just scratching
the surface of what this book is. It’sreally about Lucy's mental and physical transformation that she
undergoes throughout the course of the novel, and her fixation on the mythical creature the harpy.
Oh next in here I've got Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes. I absolutely love this sparkly
paperback cover here. So this is a non-fiction by Natalie Haynes all about women in the Greek
myths. Natalie Haynes is of course the author of A Thousand Ships and Children of Jocasta,
she is just fantastic at her Greek myth retellings which all focus on women's roles in these stories.
And this is her non-fiction where she actually discusses the role of women in various Greek
myths. So as it says on the back here, modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men,
and they have often shown very little interest in women's narratives. And when they do those
women are often painted as monstrous, veangeful, or just plain evil. So Natalie Haynes is here to
correct that. The emptier this box gets the harder it gets to balance, but a couple more in here,
this is The Hiding Game by Naomi Wood. Again let's compare to the hardback cover which
has very different vibes. I love both, I think they're gorgeous, but I really really love how
fresh and bright and colourful this one is. So this is set in Germany in the roaring 20s
at the Bauhaus art school, and it's about three characters who meet at this school
and form a very intense close-knit friendship. But when one of the friends is betrayed, he makes this
terrible mistake which he will then try to hide from the other two for as long as he can. And
we then look back on this from many years later when the effects of this mistake and of the secret
have reverberated through the years. Okay last one in the box, the box is now empty.
I'm gonna tell you about this final book and then I will mention a few more books that I didn't
order today but that are also out in paperback you might want to know about. But first Writers
and Lovers by Lily King. Again huge cover change. This is the hardback and this totally new colour
scheme is the paperback. Again I absolutely love both. I don't know which is my favourite.
I really loved this book though. So this is about a woman in her early 30s called Casey
who is feeling really lost in life, and I found it very relatable being roughly that age myself, when
you're at that stage when you're no longer the youngest kind of adult, and also the differences
between you and your peers in the same age group can be so wildly different. Some people at that
age are married with children and some people like Casey are still working in a job as a waitress
which wasn't what she'd intended to do long term, but she's still in the process of figuring out
what she wants her life to look like. She's also recovering from the recent death of her mother,
so the book is very much about grief, and it's very moving. And it's about her meeting these two
men who offer her two different versions of what her future could look like. So there's a bit of
a love triangle element in there, but that's not the focus of the story, it really is about Casey
figuring out and defining her own future. I loved it. So just a couple more that I had to mention.
Just in case you missed it, did you know that in March the paperback of Becoming by Michelle Obama
came out? Just in case you really wanted to read it when everyone was reading the hardback
but you were holding out because paperbacks are your favourite, well now is the time, go and get
it. This is Michelle Obama's incredible story of becoming the fantastic inspirational woman that we
know her as today. And being the first lady is really just one of her many many achievements.
Two paperbacks that came out last month, in April. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.
Again a really really buzzed-about one. This is inspired by the book Passing by Nella Larsen. It's
about two sisters who are born in this all-black neighbourhood and who both leave home and try and
reinvent their lives, one of whom ends up passing as white. And it's about their different lives and
what happens when they reconnect later in life, but this reconnection is actually driven by their
daughters. There is also a trans character in there, so the author is really experimenting with
these different forms of passing. And the other book that came out last month was The Mirror and
the Light by Hilary Mantel which is the third and final book in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.
And that book was absolutely massive. So I can definitely see the benefits of carrying that
one around as a paperback instead. And finally a book that came out in paperback this month
is The Thursday Murder cCub by Richard Osman which is a cosy crime mystery. Absolutely the most
talked about book over the last year. I haven't read it so this is my reminder to myself it's out
on paperback, I better go and pick it up now! So that's just a tiny selection of some of the books
that have recently come out in paperback, but as I said I would love to know which
is your favourite - reading books in hardback or paperback? Let us know in the comments below. And
if you want to answer more questions like this I will link here to a playlist of loads of our other
similar videos where we compare title changes between countries, or whether you prefer the US
or the UK covers for books. Click through and let us know what you think and I'll see you next time!