This fortnight, our Book and a Brew reading prompt is A Book With A Colour in the Title!

Here are 5 of our favourites:

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Last Christmas I had a strange experience, like one of those bizarre dreams you have when you’re unwell. I sat down to watch the film version of The Colour Purple, fully prepared for a hard-hitting, serious interpretation of this touchstone of American literature. Imagine my surprise (and, admittedly, horror) when I discovered it was a MUSICAL. I couldn’t take it seriously and didn’t get past the first 15 minutes!

Rather than subjecting yourself to a similar experience, why not read the novel instead? Told via a series of letters, sisters Celie and Nettie support each other through domestic and sexual abuse, pain, resilience and bravery. Racier than I expected, more intense than I anticipated, The Colour Purple is a powerful read that never quite leaves you.

Yellowface by R.F Kuang

Yellowface is one of my favourite books of the last two years. It really was a book I couldn’t put down! For 5 days, I read it everywhere – in the car (as a passenger, not the driver), in the kitchen whilst dinner was cooking, on my lunchbreak at work. I even woke up at 6:30 on a Saturday so I could read it undisturbed.

Yellowface is at heart, a simple story about theft. Juniper Hayward is a struggling writer, whose debut novel has flopped. Her best friend, the Asian-American author Atena Liu, is a literary darling, a prodigy who produces hit novel after hit novel. When Athena dies in a freak accident, Juniper discovers the draft version of Athena’s new book. She steals it, tweaks it and publishes it under her own name. It quickly becomes a sensation. It’s on every best seller list, and Hollywood comes calling.

There’s just one problem: Athena’s novel is about an obscure event in Chinese history. How could a white woman have written such an astute work? And thus the backlash begins.

Touching on casual racism, cancel culture, and the commercial side of writing a novel, this one really is a riveting read. To say more would spoil Yellowface’s many twists and turns, but suffice to say – you’re in for a wild ride.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

This sprawling, expansive novel by one of America’s greatest living writers, begins with an unspeakable tragedy – a terrorist attack at a museum, which leaves 13 year old Theo Decker an orphan. In the carnage that follows, he impulsively steals a priceless painting (The Goldfinch of the title). Over the ensuing years, Theo navigates New York high society, the suburbs of Las Vegas, and the criminal underworld as the painting draws him into a darker life than he could ever have foreseen.

Donna Tartt has written only three novels, each considered a masterpiece. She’s an incredible talent. I enjoyed this book more than I was expecting to – the length and scope intimidated me at first. What this novel does well is draw you into its world, in a way that mirrors the way the painting draws Theo in. We find ourselves caring deeply about the fate of its characters, and wondering where life took them after the novel ends. It’s a staggering work and a significant investment in time and commitment, but one which rewards the reader appropriately.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory is the queen of historical fiction, and this novel focuses on a lesser known queen from the Platagenet era of British history, Elizabeth Woodville. The mother of the famous Princes in the Tower (murdered as children, their killer is still to be unmasked, hundreds of years later), she was an ambitious woman who rose from a commoner to the consort of King Edward IV, by virtue of her looks. A chance meeting becomes love (or more accurately, lust) at first sight, Edward forces himself on her, she pulls a knife on him, and he agrees to marry her. They later have 10 children.

Detailing the preface to The Wars of the Roses, this one is a pot boiler, filled to the brim (as many of Gregory’s novels are) with scheming, ambitious women and ruthless, battle-hungry men.

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

This is one of my more recent reads. It’s a comic novel, but I can’t say I found much to laugh at. It’s wiser to read it as a satirical novel with shades of The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s very much in that vein.

Black Buck tells the story of Darren, a young Starbucks employee, who, following a chance meeting with a tech entrepeneur, who offers him a role at a promising New York start-up. There, as the lone Black salesman, he joins the ruthless, uncompromising, cult-like and downright nuts world of Tech sales. Prodigiously talented and soon prone to believing his own hype, we follow his journey as he quickly becomes unrecognisable to his family and friends, before terrible events soon bring him crashing back down to earth.

Other than a running joke in which White employees constantly tell Darren he looks like a different Black celebrity, there isn’t much to laugh about here. I read this one somberly, but then again coming from a former sales background myself (which I hated), I probably wasn’t the target audience.

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