Quartet of summer reads
Asked award-winning Hungerford Bookshop’s Emma Milne-White for some recommendations, Here’s her first four
UTOPIA Avenue by David Mitchell Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their musical legacy lives on. This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism and jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close. Above all, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.
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Amanda Craig
When Hannah is invited into the firstclass carriage of the London to Penzance train by Jinni, she walks into a spider’s web. Now a poor young single mother, Hannah once escaped Cornwall to go to university.
But once she married Jake and had his child, her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter, and in the course of their journey the two women agree to murder each other’s husbands. After all, they are strangers on a train – who could possibly connect them? But when Hannah goes to Jinni’s husband’s home the next night, she finds Stan, a huge, hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems – not least the care of a half-ruined house and garden. He claims Jinni is a very different person to the one who has persuaded Hannah to commit a terrible crime. Who is telling the truth – and who is the real victim?
by Taffy BrodesserAkner Finally free from his nightmare marriage, Toby Fleishman is ready for a life of online dating and weekendonly parental duties. But as he optimistically looks to a future that is wildly different from the one he imagined, his life turns upside-down as his ex-wife, Rachel, suddenly disappears. While Toby tries to find out what happened – juggling work, kids and his new, app-assisted sexual popularity – his tidy narrative of a spurned husband is his sole consolation.
But if he ever wants to really understand where Rachel went and what really happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen it all that clearly in the first place...
There is no one that this book isn’t for. I can’t believe it’s a first novel. Pure brilliance.
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Rachel Joyce
In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition.
She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation.
They will risk everything, break all the rules, and at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.
This is a story that is less about what can be found than the belief it might be found; it is an intoxicating adventure story, but it is also about what it means to be a woman and a tender exploration of a friendship that defies all boundaries.
THE strange title of this 2019 independent American film might put potential viewers off, especially when it’s hidden among some of the more well-known titles on the Netflix roster. However, it deserves its place 10 times over, with the film coming across as one of the most touching and down-to-earth wonders of recent years.
The mouthful of a title refers to the wrestling alter-ego of Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a 22-year-old with Down syndrome, who manages to escape from the care facility where he lives in order to fulfil his lifelong dream of meeting the professional wrestler known as Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).
Zak finds himself a stowaway on a small fishing boat owned by Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), a troubled young man dealing with both the guilt he feels for his brother’s death and a gang of local thugs out for his head.
The pair of misfits travel together through the swampy North Carolina coastline, finding solace and love in their growing brotherly bond.
It’s a delightful Southern American odyssey that’s modelled on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – a fresh take on the coming-of-age journey that lovingly deals with themes of family, friendship, and overcoming one’s hardships.
The wild yet beautiful setting and the characters that the pair meet on their way really enrich the world around the central friendship,
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