Photograph by Sim Canetty-Clarke   What’s the best book you’ve ever read? Books that haunted you with joy or dread Books that have captured your inner eye Made you giggle or made you cry From opposite ends of emotional space A book you’d recommend to a mate Please, please take a minute or two To tell us the books that have done it for you!

To celebrate the National Year of Reading, we wanted to capture the city's reading choices and ultimately find the The Book for Birmingham. We asked you to nominate a book in one of the following categories: A book that made me laugh A book that made me cry A book I'd recommend to a friend A selection of books nominated by you. Readers nominated over 150 books and the shortlist was the 12 books which received the most nominations. This was a diverse range of books from Peter Kay’s The Sound of Laughter to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, competing against local favourites like Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, Michael Richardson’s Careless Talk and Mary Rochford’s Gilded Shadows.Twentieth Century classics are well represented with James Joyce’s Ulysses , Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 all making the list alongside more recent successes like A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, Victoria Hislop’s The Island and Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader.

The Winner We are please to announce that the winner of the people's vote is Mary Rochford’s Gilded Shadows. Read An Interview with Mary Rochford. About the Book: Set in the West of Ireland, Birmingham, Dublin and Nice, five of these stories explore our need to come to terms with the past. Three sisters, Aefe, Fionuala and Sorcha, struggle towards a recollection and resolution of the event which almost destroyed their family. Tom and Breda flee Derry for the safety of England and discover that history casts a long shadow. Bridget, haunted by the past, takes the first plane out of Birmingham and spends a life-changing week in Nice. The remaining seven stories which are located in Birmingham are laced with humour and deal with the universal desire to be loved and to belong. About the Author: Mary Rochford was born and grew up in Dublin. She has spent most of her adult life in Birmingham where she read English and History at the University of Birmingham for a B.A. (Hons). She obtained an M.A. Literary Studies at University of Central England and has worked as a lecturer in Further Education Find out more on Mary's website at www.maryrochford.co.uk For more details please contact the Reader Development Office on 0121 303 2895 or email reader.development@birmingham.gov.uk