Behind the touching and inspiring, albeit briefly told, story of their successes at university and the coming together of the family in times of need one sense's the emotions and the trials that they must have gone through, the years of doubt and sadness, to arrive at her position of mature hindsight. This week's guests on Between the Covers choose four titles that put families, friendships and romances in the spotlight. This week Alan Davies, Samantha Bond, Sunetra Sarker and Ivo Graham share their favourite literary tips.

M. Coetzee's (which are perhaps more universal and realistic as they are at least in part fictional). On the other hand she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate. In 1991, she published Women In The House Of Fiction, a brilliant study of women's fiction in the 20th century. St Aidan's College altered its rules to allow access to women students who were also wives and mothers. All of her academic career was spent at the University of East Anglia, where she was Professor of English Literature from 1994.She edited The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999) which has become a standard work.

He taught her to read before she was 4 and she would take down the books from the shelves in his study and puzzle over the big words while he worked on his sermons. Although it’s very much a book of its time, it's one of the best ever books about being a music fan.It played a crucial role in the English poetic tradition, something that could be traced in the work of Milton, Shelley and, in a transatlantic version, the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Their loyalties were with the vicar – a lovely man, who used to tell them ghost stories at Scout meetings. The memoir opens with the following description: 'Grandfather's skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. Rebelling, as she tried to do when she was a teenager – truancy, mostly – was impossible with someone like Lorna for a mother.

And the publication of the 10th anniversary edition of Sage's book is very different from its first. Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her.

And there is some real fun to be had out of the three men in the boat, the Alice pastiche, and the way it’s played off against the dubiously real world of the early Nineties. Her grandfather, a philandering vicar, looms over the book, the taint in Sage's veins, but the other characters are equally vivid, not least her fat, furious grandmother. The period is evoked through a wickedly funny and deeply intelligent account: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather; through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna’s mother; to the brink of the 1960s, where Lorna’s pregnancy at 16 outraged those around her, an event her grandmother blamed on the fiendish invention of sex. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way?