A year in the PLS Book Club
Launched earlier this year, the PLS Book Club has brought the PLS team together to promote good reading habits and explore a wide range of voices and perspectives.
As PLS sits at the heart of the publishing industry, our team felt inspired to increase the reading spirit in our activities. In fact, we learned that half of UK adults do not read regularly for pleasure, with around one in six struggling to read at all (The Reading Agency, 19 July 2024).
With the goal to promote more consistent and sustainable reading habits amongst the team, we launched the PLS Book Club in January. Additionally, this initiative aimed to create a meaningful opportunity for our team to connect and engage over books, ideas and relevant topics.
The PLS Book Club has allowed us to explore a broad spectrum of voices and perspectives. For example, we celebrated Irish women writers with our March read, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, before exploring ‘banned books’ in November with Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Throughout the year, we’ve tackled other interesting themes such as ‘Books in Translation’ and ‘Human Connection’, as well as spotlighting queer and neurodivergent authors.
The team brought different perspectives to our book discussions with each meeting benefited from meaningful conversations, bringing together opposing and unique opinions in an environment of equality and respect where every voice was heard.
We hope to have helped broaden our team’s reading habits and exposed them to the experiences, perspectives and social issues that matter most to us, creating a space for shared understanding and connection.
We look forward to continuing this in 2026, as we welcome the National Year of Reading, commissioned by the government to increase the number of active readers of all ages and promote reading as a meaningful, modern, and social activity. For more information, and to join us and millions of other readers, please go to the official website: https://www.goallin.org.uk/.
Our Readers’ Picks
By Esmé Lee, External Relations Manager at PLS
My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite
This YA novel was a thrilling and fun read which fed the book club's hottest debates: what does 'pretty privilege' mean and how does it challenge or uphold patriarchy? Can loyalty trump morality? And why is pop culture so obsessed with serial killers?
Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith
The PLS team is full of art-lovers and so, in pride month, we couldn't pass up on the opportunity to share this collection of stories paired with beautiful illustrations in our book club's first graphic novel. The stories follow four friends as they navigate the joys and challenges of day-to-day life as young, black, LGBT+ women.
Check out our full 2025 Book Club reading list below:
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- Jon by George Saunders
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- Scattered Showers by Rainbow Rowell
- The Sea Cloak and Other Stories by Nayrouz Qarmout (translated by Perween Richards)
- Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong
- My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
- The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
- Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
