With 2025 drawing to a close, we’re turning the page on another year of the Creative Access book club. Our community of mentees, interns and alumni came together to discuss five books this year, spanning fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. In 2025, we sent out 158 copies across genres: from coming of age in the city streets of Oslo to hunting demons in late 19th-century Singapore. All in all, that’s 217,408 pages read by the CA community in 2025, all by authors from backgrounds historically under-represented in publishing. As ever, a huge thank you goes to our partners in publishing for supporting our book club, whether that’s supplying copies or providing spaces to host our community!
Here’s everything we read in 2025:
- The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey (Pushkin Press)
- Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski (Penguin Random House)
- Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal (Serpent’s Tail, Profile Books)
- The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus (Orion Publishing, Hachette UK)
- Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-reum (Bloomsbury Publishing)
This year, we worked with five different independent and major publishers – from Pushkin Press, Profile Books and Bloomsbury Publishing to Penguin Random House and Hachette UK – to provide copies for those who attended across the year. Our tea-fuelled Zoom sessions brought together our community from across the UK, getting us through slow summer nights and cosy winter evenings – while discussions hosted in sparkling publishing offices were made complete by the smell of books and a much-appreciated snack selection.
The Creative Access book club met in December to share thoughts on Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-reum at the Bloomsbury offices.
In October, we gathered on Zoom to discuss The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus.
“It’s a raw, beautiful and poetic piece,” one attendee told us after our chat at Penguin Random House about Lovrenski’s brutal yet tender coming of age, Back in the Day. Intimate, winding discussions of Saraswati, the debut novel by Creative Access alum Gurnaik Johal covered identity, romance and oral storytelling with qisse or Punjabi folktales. Raymond Antrobus’ transformative memoir, The Quiet Ear, opened up discussions on D/deafness and class, culture and education; while The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey had us battling mystery, mythology, and misadventure in turn-of-the-century Singapore. Last but certainly not least, Hwang Bo-reum’s Every Day I Read offered a reflective, slightly meta, deep dive into the vital importance of reading for pleasure (spoiler: the Creative Access cat community couldn’t agree more!).
And finally, a huge thank you goes to our publishing partners! Providing copies, spaces to gather, and stories to celebrate makes the Creative Access book club possible, so a big shoutout is very much deserved. The same, of course, goes for our Creative Access community of readers, who always come ready to chat and bring the stories to life beyond the page. We can’t wait to see what 2026 will bring.
We’re always looking for new book club partners. As well as discussing the book, we can organise a giveaway across our socials and make sure you get plenty of coverage across our community. If you’d like to nominate a title by an author from an historically under-represented community (and you can post out 25-35 copies to attendees) please get in touch at theo@creativeaccess.org.uk.
