Kaja recommends: The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The Glass Room is a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced, and there are occasional moments of illuminating brilliance, when the novel becomes like the Glass Room of the title. "It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls ... It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt."

Beth recommends: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Set in post-war Italy, The English Patient focuses on four survivors coming to terms with the devastating effects of war, with each other, and with themselves – Hana, a nurse, whose love for the charred ‘Englishman’ in her care shifts to a more fulfilling kind with a brown-skinned Sikh sapper; Carravagio, a small-time thief and intelligence agent who ‘lost his nerve’ when his thumbs become a casualty of the war; Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh fighting for his Imperial masters; and the blackened remnant of the English Patient, kept alive by his thoughts of Katharine, a love others call adulterous.

Mike Cella recommends: Hellraisers by Robert Sellers

Biographer Robert Sellers angles his spotlight on four of cinema's most celebrated rakes: Warren Beatty, who devoured women like a child falling on chocolate cake at a birthday party; Marlon Brando, a binge-eating method actor who refused to learn his lines; Jack Nicholson, who deserved the nickname the Great Seducer; and Dennis Hopper, a volatile study in drug-induced paranoia prone to brandishing loaded pistols on set. Full of gossipy anecdotes, it can at times read like a bumper issue of Nuts magazine – all blokey sarcasm and tittering innuendo – but it does manage to give nice insights into what drove these men. There are some woeful lapses in taste, and it has all the depth of a paddling pool, but that aside, Hellraisers is great fun.

Kelly recommends: Lolita by Valdamir Nabakov

"Lolita is the sad story of Humpbert Humpbert, a man with the overwhelming desire to love a young girl. Humpbert falls in love with Lolita, a pre-teenaged girl, at first sight and marries her mother to have full access to Lolita. His plan is almost thwarted by her mother's discovery of Humpbert's pedophilac tendancies. However, Mama's accidental death proves the catalyst for the unlikely pair of lovers to set off on a cross-country trip where Humpbert indulges his most secret fantasies. The book details the relationship, ever-changing, always taboo, between Humpbert and Lolita, a relationship that, by its very nature, seems doomed to ultimate failure. "