Andrew Davies and Margaret Busby

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE by Elizabeth Jenkins, chosen by Andrew Davies
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys, chosen by Margaret Busby
ASSEMBLY by Natasha Brown, chosen by Harriett Gilbert

Andrew Davies is a screenwriter and novelist whose TV adaptations include Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace and Les Misérables. His big-screen credits include the first two Bridget Jones films, and his memoir is An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts. He chooses The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), the story of a disintegrating marriage between a barrister and his devoted wife, threatened by the arrival of a new neighbour with an interest in her husband.

Margaret Busby, who became Britain's first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Alison & Busby in the 1960s, is now President of English PEN. She has edited two major anthologies of writing by women of African descent, Daughters of Africa, as well as a collection of her own essays, Part of the Story. She chooses Dominican-British author Jean Rhys's classic novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, set in the oppressive colonial society of 1930s Jamaica and imagined as a prequel to Jane Eyre.

And Harriett Gilbert champions the slim debut novel by Natasha Brown, in which a financially successful woman who has just learned she has cancer must attend her boyfriend's parents' anniversary party, Race, class and gender all play into the main characters' experiences of butting up against society's elite.

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Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio Bristol