Bookworm

The Guardian columnist has composed an enthusiastic love letter to childhood reading, and the classic books that have shaped many young lives, as well as providing a resource and guide on how to build a children’s library

Guardian

Deft, warm and beautifully balanced. Made me smile. Made me glow. Made me think again and again.

Jason Hazeley, co-author of the adult Ladybird series

Anyone who has ever preferred books to life will recognise Lucy Mangan as a kindred spirit. Her moving, funny, honest and superbly-written memoir about how childhood reading shapes our personalities, memories and chances could not be more timely or more needed in an age of library closures, embattled Humanities teaching and Philistinism.

Amanda Craig

A wonderful romp through the pages of childhood, illuminated by wisdom, humour and enthusiasm.

Bernard Cornwell

Funny, nostalgic and super-interesting… Warm, witty and a must-read for every bookworm.

The Sun

Artfully evokes that particular magic of reading as a child… Deliciously unrepentant, Mangan’s Bookworm makes a timely case not just for how vital reading is, but also for rereading books as a child, and how reading remains consoling, fortifying and, sometimes, magical.

The Sunday Times

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. You don’t need to have enjoyed the same books as she has to recognise the pure, life-affirming joy of reading that Bookworm celebrates so eloquently.

The Observer

A witty and thorough history of reading for children from the 17th century to the present day. Fiercely unsentimental and often funny, it's a memoir that will strike a ringing chord with anyone who spent most of their childhood glued to a book.

Irish Times

To read Lucy Mangan’s memoir of growing up bookish is to be taken back to a time in life when reading wasn’t merely a gentle pleasure or mild obligation but an activity as essential as breathing.

Guardian

Funny and engaging.

Sue Barraclough, Irish News

Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid... We need this new memoir about her childhood of being a bookworm. It's enchanting.

The Spectator

Lucy Mangan's passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits.

Sunday Express

THE most wonderful, funny, clever, charming, evocative book.

India Knight

A book for people who love books, by a person who loves books. Bookworms unite (or just sit in our separate corners and read!)

Stylist

A delicously nostalgic treat that will make you want to pull out all those old favourites again

Good Housekeeping

Bookworm is for anyone who longed to be on Kirrin Island with the Famous Five, slip through a back of a wardrobe into Narnia or will always think fondly of the penis named Ralph in Judy Blume’s Forever

Red Magazine

A warm, witty story about stories and the way they shape us.

Lucy Brookes, CultureWhisper

Lucy Mangan’s passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits.

Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express

Enchanting.

Ysenda Maxton Graham, Spectator

Joyful and heart-warming.

Muddy Stilettos

Entertaining and hugely engaging… An entirely inspiring read.

Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

… like a heated but enjoyable discussion with a best friend bookworm.

Jacqueline Wilson, The Week

A love letter to the books we all read as children.

Mike Gayle, Metro

[W]ise and witty… all the time Mangan has the ability to be ceaselessly and apparently effortlessly funny

Books For Keeps

If you're a book lover of any form then you will almost certainly get something from this book… you will look fondly back on the books of your childhood too

Paul Cheney, Nudge

In Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm…childhood books are brought vividly to life, as are the remembered pleasures of first encountering them

Harriet Baker, Times Literary Supplement

I felt like this was written just for me, and I think everyone will feel this way

Jenny Colgan

Lucy Mangan's funny, warm Bookworm is personal and universal in the way that the very best books are

Aliya White, Den of Geek, **Books of the Year**

Beautifully narrated, Bookworm brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story

Psychologies

An enchanting, nostalgic, comfort read

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