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Metro
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
I started a book club to make friends — now I'm a professional bookworm
Sitting down at a café, 27-year-old Lucy Ellis is one of the few people that doesn't have her phone in her hand. Instead, she has a book, and she's waiting for company. When Lucy first moved to London, she struggled to make friends. Already a keen athlete, she didn't want to join a running group, and post-work pints are expensive — and come with a hangover. She started searching for book clubs, but when the only options available seemed to be overly-academic, she decided to create a more laid-back club of her own. Posting on Instagram in 2023, she told the world she was starting a book club, and asked people to join. Seventeen people showed up to the first meeting where they discussed Yomi Adegoke's The List. Since then, it's snowballed, and now, Lucy's quit her job to run a book club full time. It's fair to say that we're experiencing a reading renaissance. Between 2020 and 2024, Eventbrite saw a 350% increase in book-related gatherings, and 'book club' became one of the top 10 most searched terms on the site. New data from Tinder shows that we're seeing an uptick (16% over the last year) in mentions of 'reading' in dating bios, while uses of the term 'book boyfriend' increased by 77% between January 2024 and 2025. And, unit sales of print books rose for the first time in three years in 2024, with adult fiction leaping 4.8 %, according to Publishers Weekly. While celebrity book clubs by the likes of Richard & Judy and Oprah have been running for decades, now they being embraced by younger A-listers too. Last month, Dua Lipa relaunched her literary podcast, Service95 Book Club, uniting booklovers and fans with titles that promise to make them 'laugh, cry or rethink something you thought you knew.' BookTok continues to drive sales too. According to Forbes, 'TikTok is nowpublishing's most powerful marketing engine', adding that it now 'steers marketing plans, inspires collector editions, and often sets the stage for film and TV deals.' At the time of writing, the hashtag BookTok has accumulated more than 412 billion views. Growing up, Lucy says she was a 'huge bookworm' — but when she started working full-time, she began to neglect her hobby. Instead, she'd spend evenings staying up late with housemates or on dates. She started her book club purely as a way to encourage her to read more. 'I just wanted a reason to either meet new people, or get my friends together to do something that wasn't about going out and spending loads of money,' she tells Metro. The group has since grown in numbers, but the premise has remained the same. Meeting once a month, they've read an array of books: from Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna and Butter by Asako Yuzuki — all picks Lucy makes a couple of months in advance. For now, she's finalised the reading list up until August 2025. 'I'd pick a book I really wanted to read that I knew people might not have read yet,' she adds, noting that she usually goes for 'hot topic' type releases. Reading has had a positive effect on her mental health too, with Lucy saying it gives her 'purpose'. 'I spend less time doomscrolling,' she says, adding that fiction books have moved her into a positive headspace when she's been struggling. Now, Lucy says she's a 'professional bookworm'. Lucy's Book Club has almost 9,000 Instagram followers, and she's hosted conversations with authors including Roxie Nafousi and Jordan Stephens. 'It seems that us young people in London are craving community,' she wrote on LinkedIn. 'I'm so proud to be providing just that!' Amy Rowland, 40, is a journalist, and reviews book for magazines. While she's always enjoyed swapping book recommendations with friends, actually discussing the novel never seemed to happen. But last November, she joined a book club, started by her friend Sam, called Under The Covers. 'I often review women's fiction or crime, so I wanted to join a club, and get stuck into something that would push me out of my comfort zone,' Amy tells Metro. 'We recently read a book called Wellness. At 600 pages long it's a beast and I didn't think it was for me — but I loved every page of it. That's the beauty of a book club.' After being in the group for a few months, she was telling some friends about it, which sparked the idea to start their own club, The Plot Thickens… 'It's lovely, because I used to feel that I was reading these brilliant books, with no one to talk to about them. But now, all my friends are into reading.' They're only a small group of six the moment, but Amy says they're looking to open it out in the future. 'Someone is nominated each month to pick the book and do the organising,' explains Amy. 'We always try to find a venue that links to the book. For example, we recently read Last One At The Party, which is a bit dystopian, so we met at a restaurant in an underground bunker!' While Amy can't say for sure why book clubs are back in fashion, she has her theories. 'In a time when we're all on our phones, mindlessly scrolling, it's nice to have something else for everyone to focus on — that's certainly the case for me. 'I also think that while the news is so heavy, everyone wants to escape and go into another world for a bit. 'I'm just glad book clubs are cool again,' Amy adds. 'I think everyone should be in one.' Kate Galloway is an occupational therapist with a degree in psychology — she's also a best-selling author. Kate says that reading is an 'analogue' way to switch off in our always-online world. 'It offers an antidote to the overstimulation we experience online,' Kate tells Metro. 'The constant scrolling, the short attention spans, the pressure to always be 'on'. Reading requires focus and presence, two things we're losing in a world of endless notifications,' she says. It's a sentiment echoed by psychologist Emma Kenny who notes that with print books there are 'no pop-ups, no infinite scroll'. 'We're exhausted,' says Emma. 'The Deloitte 2024 Connectivity Survey found that 53% of 18 to 40‑year‑olds are struggling to limit their screen time to levels they find comfortable. More Trending 'But reading requires sustained attention, narrative reasoning and the capacity for empathy. These all flourish when we follow a plot rather than a newsfeed. 'In a culture worried about polarisation and shortened attention spans, picking up a book is a quiet act of resistance.' Emma also notes the economic climate has a part to play. 'A £10 paperback offers hours of engagement for around the price of three take out coffees. 'That equation of value for money, plus the emotional payoff is hard to beat.' Do you have a story to share? Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@ MORE: I went from homeless to entrepreneur — these are my key tips to make your side hustle a success MORE: Phone thefts hit record high in London with 37 a day snatched in West End alone MORE: Porn sites to make major change to who can watch x-rated videos Your free newsletter guide to the best London has on offer, from drinks deals to restaurant reviews.
The Independent
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
This book brings the grim horrors of London's rental market to life
Houses were never left empty in this city,' observes Áine, the protagonist of Róisín Lanigan's debut novel I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There. Every potential London rental property, however dispiriting, seems to be snatched up in a panic moments after it is advertised. Usually, there is barely a day or so of grace period between the old tenants setting off in their rented vans, and the new ones arriving in theirs. So why, then, is the flat that Áine is viewing with her boyfriend Elliot eerily free from any sign of life? Why is it still on the market a fortnight after the listing appeared online? Why is the rent just about affordable, in this 'boujee' enclave of the capital, where stylish parents dress their equally stylish babies up like 'tiny Copenhagen-based fashion influencers'? There is something about the space that unnerves Áine; a sense of 'wrongness persisted despite the ticked boxes and the beautiful bay windows', Lanigan writes. Inevitably, though, the couple hand over the deposit and e-sign the contract. Yes, those bay windows are only single glazed but, as Elliot puts it, 'we're used to damp at this point, surely'. His words seem to sum up the bleak pragmatism of the serial renter, whose grim logic tends to go something along the lines of: we could do better, but we could certainly do worse. So many of us have lived out our own renting horror stories, experiences that are often deeply painful at the time, but eventually become a part of our personal mythologies, tales that we can later recount, often with a darkly funny spin, from a safe distance. The landlord with a habit of 'just popping in' unannounced, then proceeding to itemise every possible way you're ruining their glorious home. The upstairs neighbours who seem to rearrange their furniture every weeknight at approximately midnight, in bursts of insomniac feng shui. The rats that re-emerge from the pipes on a quarterly basis. The withheld deposits and the Kafka-esque email threads arguing with letting agents. As homeownership becomes an increasingly difficult, even fanciful prospect for younger millennials and Generation Z, the amount of time – and money – that we will spend renting seems to stretch out exponentially in front of us. Last year, the amount of rent paid annually by under 45s increased by £3.5bn, reaching a record total of £56.2bn. Against this backdrop, the various indignities and injustices that make up life as a tenant have provided rich material for some of the most memorable debut novels of the past few years. Oisín McKenna's Evenings and Weekends, released in 2024, follows a cluster of friends in their early thirties. Some of them are on the verge of being finally priced out of London after years of renting, while others see those would-be abandoners as somehow giving up – on their youth, on their friendships, on a hard-to-define sense of possibility that life in the capital has always promised. Jo Hamya's 2021 book Three Rooms was a brilliant evocation of what it's like to have your mental health slowly ground down by a house share situation, while another 2024 release, The Lodgers by Holly Pester, unpicks the disorientating experience of subletting, carving out your own life while surrounded by other people's things. Precarity is the prevailing mood in all of these stories. 'We're influenced by what we experience, and even in terms of where we sit down to write, housing and renting have inevitably become a major concern,' Lanigan recently told The i. ' Fiction being written in s***, damp flats that suck up all your money is never going to be bucolic.' What feels particularly striking about her debut, though, is the way that she leans into, well, the outright horror of it all. In I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There, Áine starts to experience her own nightmare rental as a Gothic novel, albeit one littered with the trappings of millennial life. At home, she begins to feel as if she's being watched, observed by an audience that is 'threatening. Almost malevolent.' Black mould starts to seep out from behind the basement door and splatter the walls of their living space. Wails emerge from the upstairs flat. Post doesn't arrive for weeks, then turns up all at once, on a Sunday. Fruit turns rotten and mushy within hours of being unpacked from the supermarket. Áine's recurrent cough comes back with a vengeance. In isolation, any one of these happenings might feel like a banal annoyance. But as they slowly accumulate, they start to leave Áine oppressed, disorientated and increasingly at odds with Elliot. Like so many young couples, they've leapt into cohabitation a little earlier than they might've liked in order to save money and avoid re-entering the fray of Spare Room; it's a decision catalysed by flatmates moving on and leases coming to an end. Moving in together only seems to have thrown the cracks and uncertainties in their relationship into stark relief. It doesn't help that Elliot is resolutely rational, while Áine has more of an affinity with supernatural stories, having grown up hearing family tales about banshees and the like. Even Laura, her best friend and former flatmate, takes Elliot's side when it comes to the potential haunting. 'I don't think you can get a Foxton's discount for demonic possession,' she says, dripping in snark. Lanigan has a knack for punctuating the lurking sense of dread with bursts of dark humour, which prevent Áine's Gothic nightmare from straying over into melodrama. The narration, too, is often enjoyably deadpan, which chimes perfectly with the futility of the renting cycle, such as when Áine ponders how she had 'never moved into a place that was clean, never left a place without cleaning it, and never received a deposit back without an extortionate cleaning fee deduction'. What Lanigan has lighted upon is that there is something inherently ghostly about the whole rental process. Every new home that we move into, once the last one has become unaffordable, is occupied by the spectres of tenants past, each with their own hidden history. Their old mail clutters up the letterbox, their old cutlery still knocking around in the drawers. They're even, in a way, lurking around in the air or the carpet: Áine becomes preoccupied with 'how dust was made of other people's skin, and it felt weird not knowing whose skin she was coughing up now'. Model tenants, those perfect renters you pretend to be when meeting with an agent for the first time, the ones who are clean and social but don't like to party, are expected to exist like ghosts, too – or at least to be somehow incorporeal, leaving a property unmarked, as if it has never been lived in by actual humans carrying out actual lives. So your bedroom is splattered with abstract flourishes of black mould? You're probably just breathing too much, in the house you pay to live in. Lanigan's characters receive a barrage of emails reminding them of everything they're doing wrong in their cursed property, as if cooking with a pan lid on can stop the supernatural spread of the damp. Which brings us to 'normal wear and tear' – a notoriously subjective term for most landlords. No wonder Áine cringes every time that Elliot bashes his work rucksack into the exact same spot on the wall, leaving a mark that, she fears, will eventually be factored into a hefty deduction from their deposit. She surreptitiously searches online for tips on how best to remove stains from magnolia paint. Of course their walls are magnolia – it's the universal shade of the soulless, liminal rental home. The very blankness and beigeness is a reminder of your lack of stake in this place, of your impermanence. That sense of impermanence, of never feeling at ease in the place that's ostensibly your safe haven, slowly causes Áine to fall apart. Her disintegration might be heightened, but it's horribly recognisable all the same. I Want To Go Home … might be a ghost story, yet it is also a visceral, sometimes unbearably realistic exploration of how renting can take a truly frightening psychological toll – scarier even than looking up property prices on Rightmove.
