TV shows, films, books and music to help you through another lockdown
- Published
With most of the UK back under lockdown, we'll be shut indoors and looking for entertainment and escapism over the coming weeks. So here's a selection of TV shows, films, books and music that could help make lockdown life a bit more bearable.
TV shows
image copyrightITV
Films
image copyrightNetflix
Books
image copyrightCosta Book Awards
- Costa Book Awards winners - The five category winners were announced on Monday, before the overall Costa Prize victor is revealed on 26 January. Ingrid Persaud's Love After Love was named best first novel; fellow Trinidadian Monique Roffey won best novel for The Mermaid of Black Conch; Lee Lawrence won the biography prize for The Louder I Will Sing: A Story of Racism, Riots and Redemption, tracing his fight for justice after his mother was shot by police in Brixton in 1985; Eavan Boland posthumously won the poetry award for The Historians; and Natasha Farrant won the children's prize for Voyage of the Sparrowhawk.
- A River Called Time by Courttia Newland - The seventh novel from Newland, who also co-wrote Steve McQueen's recent Small Axe film series, is set in an alternative London where the privileged live in a giant Ark, and in a timeline in which slavery and colonialism never happened. Published on Thursday 7 January.
- Memorial by Bryan Washington - This novel, which explores a gay relationship, is January's most buzzed-about debut, and follows Washington's short story collection Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was recommended by Barack Obama. Published on Thursday 7 January.
- The Stranger Times by CK McDonnell - A comic novel about a Manchester-based newspaper covering the paranormal, where the subjects of their stories come very close to home. Published on Thursday 14 January.
image copyrightEmma Farrer
- As Good As It Gets by Romesh Ranganathan - Among the pre-Christmas rush of celebrity memoirs, this is a highly relatable book covering the problems with parenting, the difficulties of ageing and his obsession with hot sauce. Other memoirs came from Claudia Winkleman, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Ant and Dec and Philip Schofield, plus there was Jasper Rees's engaging and detailed biography of Victoria Wood.
- The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman - The Pointless co-host's debut novel, a cosy mystery about four elderly friends in a retirement village who investigate unsolved murders, was the UK's biggest-seller over Christmas.
- The Body by Bill Bryson - With coronavirus prompting renewed interest in health and wellbeing, this is a detailed account of how we function as human beings, written with more humour and personality than a traditional science book.
Music
image copyrightGreentea Peng