Dua Lipa is a Grammy-winning pop singer who runs the Service95 newsletter and its book club, which began in June 2023. Each month she picks one book and publishes an author interview and reading guides. Her picks lean literary, with some dystopian, fabulist and YA titles mixed in.
Malorie Blackman · 2001
Her favourite Blackman: pacey, romantic YA that gave her a first real step toward understanding racism and classism. A good one to hand a teenager, or to revisit as an adult.
Margaret Atwood · 1985
Frightening when she read it as a teenager, and more alarming on a re-read, because the fictional world mirrors reality. Come back to it if you last read it years ago.
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
Magic sits right next to the everyday here, and that is what captivated her. If you like your fantastical elements unexplained, start here.
Douglas Stuart · 2020
The love between Shuggie and his mother Agnes is what she singles out. It was also the book behind her first live book club interview.
Patti Smith · 2010
Patti Smith's memoir of 1970s New York, which Lipa found spellbinding. Pick it up if you want a city and an era more than a plot.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 1831
Adichie's way of balancing truth and fiction impressed her, because it makes clear what was at stake. Fiction that carries real weight.
Min Jin Lee · 2017
Lipa got absorbed in the characters and found it so readable that it leaves you wanting more. A big novel that doesn't feel like homework.
Eric LaRocca · 2023
A murder mystery with zombies, which she says makes you laugh and hurts at the same time. Not a combination you find often.
Roxane Gay · 2014
Reading these essays, she says, is like talking with a witty, brutally honest friend. The one nonfiction pick here for people who want opinions.
Jez Butterworth · 2009
A play she read at 15 that stayed with her. It blends English folklore, humour and melancholy, and it's the only script on the list.
Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey · 2020
A novel about two childless friends, which she finds both heartening and heartbreaking. Expect to feel both.