Summer reading

Wonderful books for lazy holidays,

Literary reads Crossings by Alex Landragin, Pan Macmillan

A wealthy bibliophile brings a treasured manuscript to her Paris binder. The pages are creased, yellowed and pungent with the nutty aroma “that old paper exhales as it decays”, and underneath the title is a jumble of figures. It is an alternative page sequence: the book can be read as three stories or as one novel. In the first story, Laudanum-addicted poet Charles Baudelaire meets a woman who says she was once his lover. She offers to find him the youthful body of a literary talent to cross into. If you start on page 150, “the end of the story” you meet a Jewish escapee writing a novel as Nazis burn books. While story two, The City of Ghosts, is a dark romance burning as the Germans invade Paris.

THE MUSEUM OF BROKEN PROMISES by Elizabeth Buchan, Allen & Unwin

Laure is the curator of a unique Parisian museum, housing everyday items that represent moments of grief, betrayal and loss. Her own contribution – a train ticket from Czechoslovakia to Austria – suggests a connection with dissident politics behind the Iron Curtain. As the action flits back to the summer of 1985, a story of Cold War intrigue and secret love is revealed.

DAMASCUS by Christos Tsiolkas, Allen & Unwin

A new Christos Tsiolkas novel is always an event and Damascus doesn’t disappoint. It’s a powerful, exciting and ambitious historical work based on the gospels and letters of

St Paul, unpicking our idea of Christianity and its teachings. Here we are knee-deep in the world immediately following Christ’s execution and as debate about Jesus rumbles, there are also questions of faith, good and evil to be nutted out.

GIRL by Edna O’Brien, Allen & Unwin

Concise and confounding, this superb novel narrated by a Nigerian girl abducted by Boko Haram, throws up powerful questions about the darkest corners of humanity and how we deal with them. But amid the horror is tenderness.