SUNSHINE READING
PULL UP A DECKCHAIR OR BRIGHTEN YOUR COMMUTE – HERE’S FACT, FICTION AND PODCASTS APLENTY TO SEE YOU THROUGH SUMMER
Our reading habits often change during the summer – home or away. Perhaps you’re considering an audiobook for a long journey or feel it’s the right time to delve into something a bit more wellbeing focused? Or maybe you’d just like to try a different author to while away a twilight evening or lunch hour in the park? Have a browse through our Books Editor’s recommended reads for some warm-weather inspiration. »
One for twilight evenings Things in Jars by Jess Kidd (Canongate)
Jess Kidd heads to Victorian London in the company of the incomparable Bridie Devine, fiery and tender of heart, as she attempts to find kidnapped Christabel Berwick, aged 6, said to have supernatural gifts. Accompanied by her housemaid, the be-whiskered Cora Butter and ghostly Ruby Doyle, a deceased, tattooed boxer, Bridie battles against unscrupulous surgeons and corrupt curiosity collectors in her attempt to rescue the child. Utterly unique and beguiling.
If you’re going to a music festival… Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Hutchinson)
Fabulous, flawed and with a voice like a fallen angel, the fictional Daisy Jones was a 70s icon with The Six. Composed in a series of interviews with family, friends and band members, it tells an explosive story of drugs, bad decisions, sexual tension and songs that slay. But it also sensitively explores addiction, complex questions of love and loyalty, the pressures of creativity and the grim emotional realties behind the glamorous life of a star. Totally gorgeous.
One for a rainy weekend Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Galley Beggar)
Lucy Ellmann’s one sentence 1,040-page epic is beyond excellent. Told in a breathless rush of wonderful words, it follows the seemingly random thoughts of a harassed Ohio housewife as she bakes her way through the days. She worries about the future of her children and the planet as she watches nature out the window and lattices pastry to the tops of her cherry pies. It’s a state of the nation novel, with an impassioned plea for the environment at its heart. Funny, furious and fabulously inventive.
Take a blanket to the park… Lanny by Max Porter (Faber)
Set in a village outside London, this disquieting, exhilarating novel sings the wonders of the natural world, the gossipy nature of the villagers and the strange danger of Papa Toothwort, who has woken from his evergreen slumber and is eavesdropping on all and sundry, but especially Lanny. Lanny is joyful, eccentric and enthusiastic, a boy of passions and playfulness and poetry and when he goes missing, his parents’ world cracks apart.
Summer in the city? Social Creature by Tara Isabelle Burton (Raven Books)
Like fireworks against a night sky, this explosive debut has darkness and dazzle aplenty. It’s the tale of the twisted friendship between rich glamorous Livinia and poor, literary Louise. Both girls are relentlessly, brilliantly awful, sharing the victim/villain roles
as they teeter between love and hate. It’s a heady mix of dread and decadence, and as their relationship deteriorates, things take a turn for the deadly.
One for a train journey Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane (Granta)
University gardener May is 40, and at an impasse in her life. She’s grieving the loss of her mother, living with her elderly father, and has deeper friendships with trees than people. Feeling lonesome and at a loss, the engagingly eccentric May decides to revive her languishing relationships, and heads off on a voyage of self-discovery, in this subtle, wryly funny and warmhearted study of friendship.
Read the day after a family get-together My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)
Responsible, resentful Korede has always been told that: “big sisters look after little sisters”. But it’s a problematic task when your beautiful younger sister, Ayoola, is a remorseless psychopath who has a habit of stabbing unsatisfactory boyfriends. A new love interest – handsome hospital doctor Tade and Korede’s secret crush – ups the ante as Ayoola also sets her sights on him too. A short, sharp and slyly funny take on familial obligation.
If you’re on the way to a wedding… Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (Hodder)
Soon to be married 30-year-old Charlie Lewis is reminiscing about the summer he was 16 and fell in love for the first time. Struggling at school, with a home life that’s traumatic and a future that looks futile, his world is transformed by Fran, who’s part of the theatre group he’s cajoled into joining. Eloquent on the throes of teen emotions, this is a romantic, bittersweet, brilliantly funny coming-of-age story.