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Hello, today, Mermaids, Pirates, and a boy who doesn't want to grow up.

No, not Peter Pan.

With me to reveal their choice of a good read are Jonathan Coe, author among other novels of

what a carve-up, The Rotters Club and out just this week, number 11. That's its title.

With Jonathan Radio 1 DJ Gem McKenney, currently presenter of the social action show The Surgery

and whose documentaries have explored subjects as various as feminism,

music in Mali and young people in violent relationships.

Jonathan, would you go first? What are you recommending that we read?

I'm recommending that we read second from last in the saccharis by David Nobs,

which is the first volume in an omnibus edition

called The Complete Pratt, because it's the first of his novels about a sort of fictional alter ego

he created called Henry Pratt, who is a young boy in this book, which follows his life

from the night of his birth, in fact, until he gets called up for his national service

in the early 1950s. He's growing up in a fictional, industrial South Yorkshire town called Thurmarsh,

and he's a bit ungainly, a bit podgy, a bit unsure of himself, very confused by the world around him,

as all boys growing up are, but not without kind of intellectual

pretensions, which makes it sound a bit like a sort of northern Adrian Mole, but I think there's

a bit more to it than that because there's also a kind of hardcore of tragedy in his life as well.

Both his parents die early on in the book in very different circumstances, at which

point under the influence of his socially climbing aunt and uncle, he's torn away from his roots

...