What is The Reader Bookshelf?
The Reader Bookshelf is a carefully curated collection of literature for adults and children, exploring a different theme each year. The Bookshelf includes a diverse range of stories, plays and poems.
This year’s theme The Home We Carry explores how the sense of ‘home’ we carry with us is different for everyone – it could be a community, a memory, a place or a person, an absence, or our journey’s end.
Why 'The Home We Carry'?
We can look for it, long for it, thrive in it or flee from it – ‘home’ isn’t a place, it’s a constellation of feelings, ideas and associations we carry round with us always. It looks different for every different person – it could be a community, a country, a room or a bed; it could be a person, or a memory. For some, home is an absence; for others, it’s their journey’s end. In 2026, The Reader have gathered the best literature to help us find a shared language for the home we carry.
In every Shared Reading group we try to create a place of welcome, where anyone can find their place and belong to something good. At the home of Shared Reading in Liverpool’s Calderstones Park, this place of belonging takes physical shape, whether in the bustling café, beautiful garden spaces or the rooms where people gather for some of the most meaningful events in their lives.
Throughout the year, The Reader will be offering events and resources to guide you through an enriching reading experience with the Bookshelf. You can also buy some of the books from this year’s Bookshelf in our independent Bookshop & Cafe or our online store.
We hope you’ll join us as we read though our Reader Bookshelf this year, and discover what ‘home’ means to you.
Adult's Bookshelf
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Stand By Me by Wendell Berry
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Children's Bookshelf
Trash by Andy Mulligan
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Glasgow Boys by Margaret McDonald
King of the Sky by Nicola Davies
The Very Noisy House by Sally Nicholls
Home by Carson Ellis
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Blue Umbrella by Emily Ann Davison
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Runaways by E.L. Norry
The Skull by Jon Klassen
Don’t Ask the Dragon by Lemn Sissay
Wellbeing Workshop: Homegoing
Saturday 23 May, 1.30pm – 4pm
Come along for a relaxed Shared Reading session of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing before heading out for a stroll through the stunning springtime nature surrounding us in Calderstones Park.
BookDeep Read: Great Expectations
Friday 19, 26 June, 3, 10, 17 & 24 July, 1pm – 3pm
Join us over six weeks for a chance to discuss this classic from The Reader Bookshelf 2026, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. We’ll start at the very beginning and stop at key points of the novel to reflect on and explore what the text makes us think and feel.
BookWellbeing Workshop: Braiding Sweetgrass
Saturday 27 June, 2pm – 4.30pm
Enjoy relaxed Shared Reading full of indigenous wisdom led by our experienced practitioners before enjoying the beauty of Calderstones Park in the summer.
BookWellbeing Workshop: Lila
Saturday 25 July, 2pm – 4.30pm
Explore the mystery of existence in a practitioner-led Shared Reading session before strolling through the stunning Calderstones Park in the summer.
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