What a mix of page-turners and classics, Ma’am

THE Duchess of Cornwall is right not to describe her summer book selections as typical “beach reads”.

While Victoria Hislop’s five million-selling The Island from 2005 and the popular Brighton-set Roy Grace detective series by Peter James are page-turners, Camilla’s other reading choices are markedly more ambitious.

One of the most influential authors of the 19th century, Wilkie Collins was credited with inventing the modern detective novel with The Moonstone, which was serialised in Charles Dickens’s magazine All The Year Round. His earlier book, and Camilla’s pick, The Woman In White, is equally influential; dark and menacing and widely regarded as one of the first modern mystery novels, it is still read admiringly today.

Although he is far more famous today for The Count Of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, there is much to love about The Queen’s Necklace by French novelist Alexandre Dumas. A gripping tale of royal scandal, it is unapologetically based on a real-life imbroglio involving Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, and her jewels that helped doom her reputation and precipitate the French revolution.

Edna O’Brien’s hard-hitting Girl is the most recent stand-alone book on Camilla’s list.

The Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who made her name in the Sixties after her work was banned for depicting the sex lives of young women, published the book last year to critical acclaim.

Based on the real-life abduction of schoolgirls by Nigeria’s Boko Haram terror group, it recently came out in paperback and makes for an important, if uncomfortable, read.