Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

From the Service95 Book Club archive this month, we’re bringing you Dua’s May 2025 interview with Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, on her novel Still Born. 

Set in Mexico City, friends Alina and Laura are united in their decision to be childfree, refusing to fall into a trap of the patriarchy. When Alina changes her mind, their friendship doesn’t fracture – it deepens, becoming more vital than ever.  

Alina’s life is upended when she receives a devastating medical diagnosis for her baby daughter. This is a story that doesn’t shy away from the complexities of raising a child with profound disabilities. But it also celebrates the transformative experience of caregiving, including for chosen family like Laura. 

In their conversation, Guadalupe and Dua discuss how giving birth is not the only way to be a mother, “you can also be an adoptive mother; you can also be a stepmother or a mother for a little while. Motherhood is also more like an attitude and not only a title that you get.” 

If you are dealing with any of the issues tackled in the book, please explore this story at your own pace. 

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For the Service95 Book Club this month, Dua is joined by award-winning poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar to discuss his debut novel – and Dua’s Monthly Read for September – Martyr!, a poignant and generous exploration of addiction, identity, art and exile.

At the heart of the novel is Cyrus Shams, a newly sober poet struggling to find his footing in life while reckoning with the loss of his mother decades earlier. Together, Dua and Kaveh explore Cyrus’ grief, addiction and search for a sense of place, as well as the real-life events woven into the novel and the power of fiction to bring the human consequences of history into focus. They also discuss Kaveh’s philosophy on art, his journey from poetry into fiction and his friendship with fellow author Tommy Orange, which shaped his writing rituals.

Whether you’ve read Martyr!, plan to, or still need convincing, this is a conversation worth listening to. Rich, illuminating and deeply human, it’s a conversation about life, death and how we make sense of everything that happens in between.

Join the club:

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From the archives: Dua Lipa’s April 2025 conversation with author Max Porter on his novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers.  

In this lyrical, surreal meditation on loss – in which a crow guides a father and his sons through the grief of losing their wife and mother – Max Porter tears up the rule book of what a novel should be.   

 

Throughout the episode, Dua and Max discuss his playful approach to novel writing – particularly its experimental form and the impact of Crow. “The thing about Crow is that he’s yours to make your own mind up about,” says Max. “Someone once said, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it, he’s a metaphor for grief.’ And that is one interpretation of him. He’s also real. He’s also a study of care. He’s also their babysitter. He’s also a study of domesticity. I hope he’s also a joke.”  

 

Expect a conversation about grief, love and what it means to care. And look out for a very special cameo partway through… 

 

  

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For her August Service95 Book Club interview, Dua Lipa is joined by author Madeline Cash to discuss her breakthrough debut novel, Lost Lambs. 

Set in an unremarkable American suburb, the story follows the Flynn family, who are on the brink of unravelling: parents Bud and Catherine are trying to make an open marriage work while their three daughters each test the limits of adolescence. Holding a funhouse mirror up to contemporary America, the novel is at once laugh-out-loud funny, hyper-real and thought-provoking. Dua and Madeline’s conversation follows suit.

Together, they explore the strange contradictions of modern life, from religion and conspiracy theories to beauty, identity and why so many of us continue searching for meaning even when our lives look exactly as we’re told they should. They also delve into Madeline’s meticulous world-building, the inspiration beneath her most eccentric characters and why the novel’s most absurd moments often feel closest to the truth.

Watch (or listen to) the full conversation to discover why Lost Lambs is Dua’s August Monthly Read for the Service95 Book Club. 

Join the club:
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From the Service95 Book Club archives, this episode from March 2025 sees Dua sit down with Tommy Orange to discuss There There – his powerful novel that follows 12 Native Americans whose lives converge at the Big Oakland Powwow.  Dua and Tommy trace the histories often omitted from America’s national story and talk about what fiction can do that history books alone cannot. Tommy reflects on the real-life events that inspired the novel, including the 1969 to 1971 occupation of Alcatraz and the Standing Rock protests, and how those moments found their way into his characters.  He describes personal experiences woven into the book through the character of Thomas Frank, and explains why he left the novels ending unresolved, handing the reader the job of imagining what comes next.  It’s a story of identity, belonging, inherited trauma and resilience – and a conversation you’ll think about long after hearing it.   Join the club:   

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]   

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews   

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For her July Service95 Book Club interview, Dua Lipa is joined by award-winning author and academic Lea Ypi to discuss Free, Lea’s internationally acclaimed memoir, which recounts her childhood in Albania during the collapse of communism.  

From hidden family histories and state surveillance to protest and modern-day Albania, Dua and Lea explore how political systems continue to shape individual lives, collective memory and the country’s evolving identity, returning to the question at the heart of the book: what does it really mean to be free?  

Watch (or listen to) the full conversation here to delve deeper into Free, Dua Lipa’s Monthly Read for the Service95 Book Club.  

Join the club:  

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  

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From the archives this month: Dua’s February 2025 conversation with Irish author Paul Murray, on his novel The Bee Sting. 

An epic family saga set in contemporary Ireland, the novel follows the Barnes family through financial collapse, fractured relationships and the secrets that have shaped their lives across generations. 

Paul talks about growing up in 1990s Ireland, a country deeply influenced by the Catholic Church and its conservative values, and how that environment dictated what people could or couldn’t say about themselves. 

He and Dua discuss the loneliness of adolescence, the ‘friendships’ that define those years and the difficulty of leaving behind relationships that no longer serve you. 

They also get into the novel’s unforgettable ending and the case for ambiguity in storytelling. Paul draws on Twin Peaks and why David Lynch’s unanswered questions can sometimes be more compelling than definitive answers. 

Expect a conversation about family, identity, secrecy and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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For the Service95 Book Club this month, Dua is joined by writer, poet, playwright and musician Kae Tempest to discuss his latest novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, which is Dua’s Monthly Read for June. 

Together, Dua and Kae explore the novel’s core themes: forgiveness and atonement, the instability of home when both the person and the place have changed, and the difficult process of becoming fully ‘alive’ again after years spent disconnected from the world. At the centre of their discussion is Rothko, a character Kae describes as “dislocated from life”, alongside the novel’s wider cast, each carrying their own desires, wounds and ways of surviving. 

Kae also reflects on his immersive writing process, describing characters less as inventions than people he has spent years getting to know. The conversation moves through addiction, shame, creativity, identity and the role of art as a means of processing experience and remaining open to the world. 

Watch (or listen to) the full conversation here to dive deeper into Having Spent Life Seeking, Dua Lipa’s Monthly Read for the Service95 Book Club. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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From the archives this month, we revisit Dua’s conversation with Malorie Blackman, the former Children’s Laureate and author of the groundbreaking young adult series Noughts & Crosses.  

The novel follows Callum and Sephy, childhood friends growing up on opposite sides of a violently segregated society, where the ruling Crosses hold power over the oppressed Noughts.  

More than 20 years after its release, Dua and Malorie discuss Noughts & Crosses’ lasting impact and why its themes of inequality, identity and division remain so relevant today. Together, they explore the lived experiences and inspirations behind the novel, as well as touching on the role of language, prejudice and storytelling, as well as how fiction can challenge the way we see one another.  

Tune into the full conversation above. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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For her May Service95 Book Club interview, Dua Lipa is joined by one of Ireland’s most celebrated short story writers, Claire Keegan. 

Together, they explore Keegan’s powerful read So Late In The Day: a sharp, unsettling portrait of a man whose lack of generosity towards his fiancée gradually reveals the often quiet yet destructive nature of modern misogyny. 

Dua and Claire unpack the story’s subtle details, discussing how the author’s experiences as a woman living in Ireland helped to shape the narrative, and how – in a book that takes less than an hour to read – she captures an unsettling dynamic that resonates in relationships worldwide. 

There’s also a special bonus for dog lovers: keep watching for a charming appearance from a four-legged guest… 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Polish-German author Tomasz Jedrowski, author of Swimming In The Dark. 

 

Set in 1980, it’s a story of first love between Ludwig and Janus, told against the backdrop of communist Poland as the regime starts to crumble. 

 

This queer coming of age story explores a time and place where love, class and politics do not exist in isolation. The communist party looms large in this story, impacting both professional and personal relationships. 

 

Dua and Tomasz reflect on what might have been if their parents had not made the choices they did. Tomasz asks what life would have been like for a young gay man in Warsaw in his parents’ generation and Dua imagines growing up in Kosovo under the shadow of war. 

 

It’s an intimate and beautiful conversation that illuminates a turbulent period of recent history that many people today know little about.

 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com 

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In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, we’re passing the mic back to you. Dua put your questions to Jez Butterworth about her April Monthly Read, Jerusalem – and here, he answers them. 

Jez traces the play’s origins back to New Year’s Eve 2000, explains how it came to find its name and goes inside his writing process: what tends to come first, which scene he found most difficult to write and the unique rituals that shape his writing. 

Watch (or listen to) the full conversation to go deeper into Jerusalem, Dua Lipa’s April read for the Service95 Book Club. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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For the April edition of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with playwright Jez Butterworth to discuss his modern masterpiece, Jerusalem. If you’ve never read a play before, this is the place to start. 

With its raw, visceral portrait of myth, rebellion and a nation wrestling with its own identity, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest British plays of the 21st century. 

In this special video, Jez Butterworth reads a powerful excerpt from the play featuring Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron dispensing life advice to his young son Marky – a rare father-son moment filled with folklore and the wild inheritance of blood and belonging. “It was, at that point in 2009, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted to write… It was a massive challenge for me,” says Jez of the passage.  

Jerusalem blurs the line between truth and myth, capturing Rooster’s attempt to pass down something larger than himself; an inheritance of wildness, belonging and belief. 

If you haven’t already, be sure to catch Dua and Jez’s full interview, too, available to watch now here. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – ⁠[email protected]⁠ 

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For April, Dua has chosen Service95’s first play: Jerusalem by award-winning British playwright Jez Butterworth. He’s widely regarded as one of the leading voices in contemporary theatre – with this conversation with Dua showing exactly what that reputation is built on. 

Here, Dua and Jez trace the creative forces behind Jerusalem, which unfolds across a single day in a fictional rural English village and centres on the anarchic Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron as he resists eviction from the woodland clearing he calls home.  

The conversation begins with the real figures and encounters that shaped the play’s characters, before turning to Jez’s instinctive approach to writing and the ideas that underpin Jerusalem. Together, they consider the play’s elusive staying power; as Jez puts it, it lingers like “a great song that you can never work out the meaning of”. 

Jerusalem is an exploration of belonging: who is permitted to remain, and who is forced out. 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

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From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on her multi award-winning novel Half Of A Yellow Sun from August 2023.  

Dua says: “The story takes place in 1960s Nigeria, both before and during the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War. If this is a period of history you are not familiar with, don’t worry, you are not alone. Chimamanda skilfully balances truth and fiction, giving a gripping sense of what was at stake for those who lived through the war and granting this travesty the attention it deserves.” 

Together, Dua and Chimamanda explore the cast of characters, delving into themes of class, colonialism, politics and conflict. They also discuss how the novel’s parallel love stories – between Olanna and Odenigbo, and Kainene and Richard – remind us that love, jealousy, infidelity and forgiveness are as present in war as they are in peace. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble 

Join the club: 

📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews 

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In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, she passes the mic to members of our community, inviting them to ask Roxane Gay, author of Dua’s Monthly Read for March, Bad Feminist, the questions they’ve always wanted to know.  

Roxane talks about the writers who shaped her, how she protects her mental health when her work puts her in the crosshairs and why firm boundaries make honest writing possible. Perhaps most importantly, Roxane answers one of the weightier questions of our time: can literature ignite a revolution?  

Get in touch:       

📩 Email us – [email protected]       

📲 Follow @service95bookclub and @service95 on Instagram for updates       

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at service95.com        

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For the March edition of the Service95 Book Club’s Monthly Read, Dua Lipa sits down with one of the most prominent feminist voices of this generation, Roxane Gay, to discuss her widely celebrated book of essays, Bad Feminist. 

In this exclusive video, Roxane Gay reads an essay from the book, Peculiar Benefits. “It’s an essay I wrote when I was trying to think through my relationship to privilege. And how, at times, people are often reluctant to claim privilege, because they are marginalised in other areas of their life,”says Roxane.   

Plus, if you haven’t already, be sure to watch Dua and Roxane’s full conversation, which is available to watch now... 

Get in touch: 

📩 Email us – [email protected]      

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates      

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
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For March’s Monthly Read – and in time for International Women’s Day – we are thrilled to be featuring Bad Feminist by American writer, professor, editor and social commentator Roxane Gay. 

In this podcast episode, Dua picks some of her favourite essays from Roxane’s 2014 collection, which spans everything from pop culture and politics to race, body image, sexual violence and the complicated expectations placed on women. The pair unpack how the landscape of feminism has shifted in today’s climate but also (and perhaps more importantly) how so much of Roxane’s commentary feels just as relevant today as it did when she first wrote it: 

“One of the saddest things about Bad Feminist is most of the essays are still timely.” 

Please be warned, this episode is heavy, with discussions of child sexual violence and rape. But it is an incredibly important conversation, confronting today’s relentless news cycles: from the ongoing uncovering of the Epstein files to the wider state of global media reporting and the ways in which coverage of violence against women continues to fall devastatingly short. 

There are also lighter moments, where Dua and Roxane bond over their shared love of book clubs. They reflect on the joy that building a community around books brings them – and especially the opportunity to spotlight and uplift writers. 

Make sure to watch and listen to one of the greatest voices of contemporary feminism give her take on the world today, the work that still needs to be done to improve the realities for women around the world and how, among all of this incredible work, she still finds time to fit in a game of Scrabble every day… 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble 

 Get in touch:      

📩 Email us – [email protected]      

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates      

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com      

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 
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Regular listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast know, as well as our new monthly read author interviews, we love revisiting some of Dua’s most memorable conversations.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is such a universal mother-daughter story, it will always deserve a second, third, even fourth read – making this illuminating conversation between Dua and Michelle from April 2024 worthy of a second, third, even fourth listen.

Some of you may already know Michelle as the uber-cool singer and guitarist of the American cult indie band Japanese Breakfast. Here, she also proves herself to be a first-class memoirist, writing with raw honesty about her teenage relationship with her Korean mother and how recreating the traditional dishes her mother used to make helped her process her grief following her death from cancer. Ultimately, it’s a story about love, something everyone can relate to.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble

Get in touch:     

📩 Email us – [email protected]     

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates     

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com     

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Jean-Baptiste Del Amo joins Dua for this special Service95 Book Club episode and answers questions from our Service95 community. 

In this episode, he reflects on the emotion he most wants readers to confront in The Son of Man, and why discomfort can open the door to deeper understanding. How does he portray brutality without crossing into excess? Where is the line between honesty and spectacle?  

The conversation also explores fate and free will. Are his characters trapped in cycles shaped by history, family and violence, or do they have the power to choose differently? How much of our lives is inherited – and how much is ours to reclaim? 

Jean-Baptiste also offers insight into his creative process: how he knows when a novel is finished, when to stop revising, and which writers have influenced his voice the most. Don’t miss it. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble     Get in touch:       

📩 Email us – [email protected]       

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates       

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com       

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts   
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This month on the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa podcast, Dua sits down with French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo to discuss his novel The Son of Man. A dark and unsettling psychological thriller, the book explores themes of inherited violence, patriarchy, masculinity and love. As Dua puts it: “I have to give a trigger warning - this book is dark, even for me!” 

In a Service95 exclusive, Jean-Baptiste reads a powerful excerpt from the novel, in which the father figure, one of the book’s three protagonists, speaks to his son about his own dark understanding of love, loyalty and betrayal. 

Whether or not you’ve read The Son of Man yet, this reading offers insight into the emotional and psychological forces driving the story. It also showcases Jean-Baptiste’s evocative writing style, from his depiction of the intensity of nature to the looming mountains of the French Pyrenees, where much of the novel is set. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble 

Get in touch: 

📩 Email us – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub and @service95 Instagram for updates 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at https://service95.com 

 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
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This month, Dua sits down with acclaimed French novelist Jean-Baptiste Del Amo to discuss his haunting novel The Son Of Man – a tense, unsettling exploration of masculinity, patriarchy, and the cycles of violence passed from father to son. Set largely in an isolated mountain house in rural France, the novel follows a family upended by the sudden return of a father whose past trauma slowly reveals itself in devastating ways.

“This is a dark book, even by my standards,” Dua says. “And yet, there’s also real beauty here.”

During the interview, Jean-Baptiste tells Dua why he wanted The Son of Man “to talk about all the fathers and all the sons,” and how he used the narrative to confront how violence is learned, inherited, and repeated. He also speaks of his commitment to writing characters who are rarely centred in French literature, drawing on his background in social work to tell these kinds of stories.

Together, Dua and Jean-Baptiste delve into how the novel’s claustrophobic structure draws you into the story, the author’s decision to focus on just three central characters, and the way small, visceral details signal the father’s unpredictable energy. 

As their conversation unfolds, they reflect on the emotional complexity of the novel’s title and its relevance in today’s world. Against the backdrop of ongoing global conversations about male violence, The Son Of Man asks urgent questions about trauma, responsibility, and whether it’s possible to break inherited chains of behaviour.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble  Get in touch:     

📩 Email us – [email protected]     

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates     

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com     

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Regular listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast know, as well as our new monthly read author interviews, we love revisiting some of Dua’s most memorable conversations — and this is a firm favourite. 

This time from the archive, we’re diving back into Dua’s conversation with George Saunders about his experimental novel Lincoln In The Bardo, Dua’s Monthly Read for October 2024. Set in the cemetery where President Abraham Lincoln is mourning his young son Willie, it’s a story of intense personal grief, told against a backdrop of the American Civil War.  

Dua and George discuss how he told such an unforgettable story through the eyes of a group of bickering ghosts, and explore the concept of the Bardo, a transitional state between life and death. Together, they read a poignant extract from the book. It’s a glimpse into the mind of one of today’s most compassionate writers — and not one to miss.  

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble Get in touch: 

📩 Email us – [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 
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Mark Ronson and Dua Lipa come together for a live recording of the Service95 Book Club at New York City’s legendary Hotel Chelsea. 

In this episode, they respond to your questions from the Service95 Book Club community, diving into the allure of reading, curiosity, and the city after dark. What draws us to intense, shadowy novels? If they could bring back one long-lost NYC institution, which would it be? How do they navigate the endless stream of book recommendations when choosing their next read? And what truths does the night reveal that daylight often conceals? 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble  Get in touch:     

📩 Email us – [email protected]     

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates     

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com     

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 
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This month on the Service95 Book Club podcast, Dua sits down with producer and DJ Mark Ronson to discuss his memoir Night People – a candid look at the music, obsession, and late-night worlds that shaped him long before success felt secure.

In a Service95 exclusive, Mark reads an excerpt from Night People that revisits a formative early lesson in ambition. The passage recalls a moment when, desperate to get a foot in the door, he sells out his best friend Sean Lennon without his knowing, securing a slot for his band at the New Music Seminar. It’s a story driven by hunger, insecurity, and hard-earned self-awareness.

It’s a revealing snapshot of why Night People stays with you – not because it smooths over mistakes, but because it faces them head on.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble  Get in touch:     

📩 Email us – [email protected]     

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates     

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com     

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 
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This month, for the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa speaks with producer, songwriter and DJ Mark Ronson about his memoir Night People: How To Be A DJ in 90s New York City. Part cultural history and part personal reckoning, the book traces Mark’s formative years between London and New York, and how his immersion into NYC nightlife ultimately shaped the 90s DJ scene in the city.

Set in 1990s New York, Night People captures the clubs, characters, and contradictions that shaped Mark’s creative life. He reflects on the idea of “night people,” shaped by his unconventional upbringing and his parents’ nocturnal lifestyle, and how DJing became both an escape and a source of control, validation, and belonging.

Written with candour, the memoir explores ambition, missteps, and the risks involved in pushing musical boundaries — including a defining moment when Mark challenged convention by dropping rock music into a hip-hop crowd.

Ultimately, Night People is a story about devotion to music, craft, and the communities built in dark rooms.

 Get in touch:     

📩 Email us – [email protected]     

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates     

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com     

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Regular listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast will know that, alongside our new monthly author interviews, we love returning to some of Dua’s most powerful conversations from the past two and a half years.

This time from the archive, Dua revisits her discussion with Brit Bennett, author of Service95 Book Club’s November Monthly Read for 2023, The Vanishing Half. The novel opens up profound questions about identity, class, and the legacies that echo across generations – including perhaps the most challenging question of all: what even constitutes race?

The Vanishing Half follows the Vignes twins, who grow up in a small Southern Black community obsessed with skin tone. As they come of age, their lives split in radically different directions: one sister returns home to raise her dark-skinned daughter, while the other chooses to pass as white, building a life far removed from her past – even from her own family. As their daughters’ lives eventually intersect, Brit weaves a layered exploration of identity, inheritance, and the cost of reinvention across generations.

In this episode, Dua and Brit talk about the nuances of self-invention, the emotional cost of secrecy, and the ways in which family history can shape – and sometimes distort – who we become. Together, they reflect on the complexities of belonging, the fragility of personal truth, and the choices that define our lives. Don’t miss it. Get in touch:    

📩 Email us – [email protected]    

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates    

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com    

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
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This month on the Service95 Book Club podcast, Dua sits down with Norwegian author Ingvild Rishøi to discuss her moving novel Brightly Shining – Dua’s Monthly Read for December – a story shaped by love, chaos, and the stubborn hope that gets a child through tough times.

 

In a Service95 exclusive, Ingvild reads a passage that captures the novel’s intimate focus on a family stuck in a familiar loop of crisis and shaky fresh starts. We see a dad trying to pull himself together and two daughters who’ve learned how to handle responsibility, exhaustion, and a cautious kind of optimism. 

 

It’s a little taste of why Brightly Shining stays with you – not because it looks away from hardship, but because it brings out the fragile hope that keeps shining through it.

 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble  Get in touch:    

📩 Email us – [email protected]    

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates    

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com    

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month, for the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa speaks with Norwegian author Ingvild Rishøi about Brightly Shining, a contemporary reimagining of The Little Match Girl. The novel follows two young sisters and their alcoholic father, blending social realism with subtle magic to explore poverty, hope, and the emotional complexities of the holiday season.

Told through the perspective of 10-year-old Ronja, the story highlights the resilience of children navigating instability, the blurred lines between truth and denial within families affected by addiction, and the differing ways siblings cope with responsibility and hope.

By weaving Norway’s most iconic Christmas tale into a modern setting, Rishøi creates a narrative that feels both timeless and urgently relevant – a compassionate portrait of childhood survival and imagination.

Warning: Contains spoilers!

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble 

Get in touch:    

📩 Email us – [email protected]    

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates    

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com    

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast will have spotted that, as well as our new monthly author interviews, we love diving back into some of Dua’s most memorable conversations from the past two years – and this one is too good to miss. 

This time from the archive, Dua sits down with legendary musician, poet and writer Patti Smith to talk about Just Kids – her award-winning memoir and Dua’s Monthly Read from September 2023. A tender portrait of her bond with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids captures the raw electricity of New York in the ’60s and ’70s and the formative years that shaped two extraordinary artists.

In this episode, the two explore how Patti began shaping the story that would become Just Kids and the role of devotion and creative kinship in her early life. Together, they reflect on the risks and revelations of youth, the power of choosing your own path, and the way memory can become its own kind of art.

It’s an emotional, intimate discussion about love, loss, and the enduring legacy of art – and one that will stay with you long after listening.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble  Get in touch:    

📩 Email us – [email protected]    

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates    

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com    

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices