The Beach
by Alex Garland
Can there be a more summery read than a novel called The Beach? Our hero Richard inherits a failing beachside cafe from the aunt he never knew and finds love with… no, sorry, that’s not what happens. Richard is a backpacker, travelling around Asia in those pre-smartphone days when you genuinely could disappear into the world and no-one knew where you were until you sent a postcard. Hearing of an almost mythical hidden island paradise near Thailand, he sets off to find it—but the lazy days and hedonism soon turn into darkness, paranoia and violence, with an apocalyptic climax. Garland’s corrosive debut was turned into a movie by Danny Boyle in 2000, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and somewhat sanitised for Hollywood reasons. But the partnership between Garland and Boyle persisted—together, they’re behind 28 Years Later, which actually has a strong kinship with The Beach thanks to both works’ exploration of what happens to people and societies during enforced isolation.
David Barnett
Fleishman Is in Trouble
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
An excoriating portrait of a bitter divorce might not be number one on your list of holiday reads—but Fleishman is in Trouble is so much more than that. Seldom have I charged through a novel as quickly as this: it’s propulsive, detailed, moving and, that rarest of qualities, funny. We begin in New York City just after Toby Fleishman, a successful doctor, has separated from his wife, Rachel, a very successful theatre agent—and, as Toby swipes through Tinder and grapples with childcare, Rachel goes AWOL. Narrated by his old university friend Libby, we soon learn, through Toby’s inner torment, of Rachel’s flaws, failures and cruelty; through Libby’s own suburban boredom and the frivolous adventures of their other friend, Seth, we also learn that there are myriad ways one can have a midlife crisis. But best of all are the revelations that come midway through the book, when we are reminded, abruptly, of the perils of holding rigidly to our own perspective, and just how differently someone else might experience the same situation.
Emily Bootle
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
I’m reading Mansfield Park again. After weeks of grappling with the exasperating writings of Søren Kierkegaard, returning to Jane Austen is a balm. But the funny thing about Austen is that the sense of comfort she brings me—on my first big trip to Japan, in the 1990s, I took all her novels as a sort of security blanket—is not really true to what she’s about. It’s the same with the popular image of Austen as romcom in empire line dresses. The books actually set out from the hard social realities of the early 19th century. How’s this for an illusion-free opening?
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
Ian Bostridge, Classical Notes columnist
My Hollywood and Other Poems
by Boris Dralyuk
Dralyuk was born in Odesa but has lived in Los Angeles since the age of eight. Among the writers he has translated are Isaac Babel and Andrey Kurkov. In this first collection of his own poems, Dralyuk wittily and gracefully evokes the lives of other east European exiles who have washed up in LA during the past 100 years, along with a variety of the city’s institutions. Among the latter are a film memorabilia store, an émigré library with ever fewer visitors, and the hotel where the aged Sarah Bernhardt stayed during her last visit to the city. Many poems are imbued with nostalgia, but there is also the resolve of a fine craftsman determined to make a go of his life and work. The shortest poem, “Plants in Pots”, reads in full:
Calm captives, inch by inch, they make their flight,
and reach the window, bent on seeing light.
Robert Chandler
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
The Clark family is heading to Paris this summer, which means one thing—Balzac. Last year in France I read his Black Sheep, a gripping yarn about two brothers, one an idealistic artist and the other a money-grabbing rogue. Balzac’s weaving together of granular detail about the city and slabs of documentary French history, all while sustaining a family soap opera, is brilliantly achieved. This year, I’m taking Lost Illusions, considered by many to be his novel of grand summation, a town-verses-country morality tale pegged around the fortunes of a naive printer and a wily journalist. If anyone has any advice about how to persuade my 14-year-old son to visit the Balzac house in Paris, please do drop me a line.
Philip Clark
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death
by Maggie O’Farrell
A memoir might not be the obvious holiday read, but Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am is an extraordinary chronicle of a life defined by near-death experiences. Over 17 essay-style vignettes, she takes you through a lifetime of moments where the fragile boundary between existence and expiration was tested almost to breaking point. From a childhood illness she should never have survived to an encounter with a violent man on a remote hiking trail, O’Farrell’s experiences—recalled with her typical lyricism—would be deemed unbelievable if in a novel. The title is taken from The Bell Jar, where Sylvia Plath listens to her heart to remind herself of her existence, and that effort rings throughout this memoir. It is O’Farrell’s story of survival and how a lifelong proximity to death has given her a fastened grip on living.
Lucy Hicks Beach
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
by Laura Spinney
Reading Laura Spinney’s latest book in April whetted my appetite for travel and adventure. It traces the remarkable story of how one tiny tongue, spoken by an obscure people on the Pontic-Caspian steppes, became the common ancestor of the sprawling Indo-European language family. Proto traces some of the routes the language took as it transformed into everything from Hindi to Farsi, from Latin to Russian—and, eventually, English too. Sadly, the Ukrainian and Russian steppes can’t be on my holiday itinerary this summer, but I will be consoling myself with the thought that the chatter I will hear at my actual destination (Italy) will contain faint traces of the words spoken by riders of the ancient grasslands.
Keith Kahn-Harris
Shibboleth
by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert
The book I’ve been rhapsodising about recently is Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s extraordinarily funny and ballsy debut, Shibboleth. Something of a Lucky Jim for our times, Lambert’s book boldly tackles hot-button topics of religion, race and academia, and reduces his readers to tears of laughter in the process. Shibboleth focuses on the apparently unremarkable Edward, an Oxford student whose possession of a Zanzibarian and Muslim grandfather means that he is taken up by the forces of progressivism around him, not least the splendidly named Angelica Mountbatten-Jones, an affluent poverty tourist who becomes aroused by her proximity to a tame Muslim, and the terrifying Liberty Vanderbilt-Jackson, a scion of Upper East Side privilege who acts as the arbiter of all things socially acceptable. I haven’t read a wittier, wiser or more provocative novel in years.
Alexander Larman
The Boys
by Leo Robson
Although novelists often make good critics, the opposite is not true: when critics try to write novels, things tend to go awry. The Boys, by Leo Robson—for my money, the best and most intelligent book critic at work today—is an exception that proves the rule. Set against the backdrop of the London Olympics over two weeks in July 2012, it traces the relationship between two thirtysomething brothers trying to find their way in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths. It is a brilliantly observed study of London (mainly Swiss Cottage, but even so), of grief (personal and generational) and of the ways in which we poke holes in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to assert their vitality. Most of all, though, it is very funny.
Rhodri Lewis
Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere
by James Bloodworth
James Bloodworth is one of those rare journalists who sets the standard for everybody else. Lost Boys is the product of his typically dedicated research: five years immersed in the world of the manosphere, the online terrain where male insecurity is funnelled into misogyny, often pushed by grifters offering to “coach” men to sexual success. What I admire most about Bloodworth’s work is that he maintains an uncompromising moral clarity but backs it up with the sort of forensic and nuanced handling of detail rarely seen from other polemicists. Here, he’s thoughtful and realistic about the challenges facing young men, which make them prey for false prophets such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate—while never losing his sensitivity to the price that women pay, first and foremost. The one book that everyone should read this summer.
Kate Maltby, theatre critic
A Lonely Man
by Chris Power
Chris Power’s 2021 debut novel is my cheat two-for-one summer pick because I’d suggest starting with Mothers, his brilliant short story collection from 2018. The two work together: snippets from some of his stories re-emerge in A Lonely Man, which is set in Berlin and concerns, yes, lonely men, as well as the creative process and Russian corruption. Power delivers family dramas, existential crises and more as he wrestles with the ultimate question for any writer: who owns a story, anyway? This is an entertaining literary thriller that will leave you looking forward to Power’s next book.
Susie Mesure
I Remember
by Joe Brainard
Is it a poem, a memoir or a notebook dropped on the way to therapy? To read Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975) to put such questions aside and relax with a book devoted to the simple pleasure of writing precisely true sentences. Newly reissued by Daunt Books, with introductions by Paul Auster and Olivia Laing, Brainard’s memories of growing up gay in 1950s America all begin the same way, but can then go anywhere: “I remember when fibreglass was going to solve everything”; “I remember ‘Queers can’t whistle’”; “I remember solid red when you close your eyes to the sun”.
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Cold Water
by Gwendoline Riley
I was surprised when First Love (2017) became Gwendoline Riley’s breakout novel because I think it’s probably the most caustic of her books. I much prefer Cold Water (2002), her first novel. It would be disingenuous to say this one reeks of summer: it’s set in Manchester (like much of her work), so there’s plenty of rain—it’s called Cold Water, after all. There’s a passage towards the end, nonetheless, that reminds me of the expansive sense of freedom that a stretch of decent weather in Britain always brings. It starts: “This summer, there were five whole weeks without any rain at all, and on those long, pale afternoons, I would use my whole body weight to push the window in my bedroom right up, so I could climb out, and sit out, with bare feet dangling and the curtains floating behind me.”
Alex Peake Tomkinson
The Glass Pearls
by Emeric Pressburger
To his colleagues and neighbours, Karl Braun is a quiet, cultured, middle-aged man who escaped Hitler’s Germany. Two decades on from the war, he is a lodger in Pimlico, where he tunes pianos and tries to court Helen, an employee at a local letting agency. But when the newspapers report that the west is hunting down a notorious Nazi war criminal, Braun’s usually rigid behaviour starts to change. The Glass Pearls (1966) by Emeric Pressburger is an overlooked masterpiece. Pressburger, best known as one half of the filmmaking duo Powell & Pressburger, was a Hungarian Jew who fled Berlin in 1933 and whose mother died at Auschwitz. In The Glass Pearls, he writes a trim psychological thriller with a dramatic denouement. Read it for its tight prose, its noirish suspense and its extraordinary humanity.
Daniel Rey
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
by Sam Dalrymple
In 1921, the crown jewel of the British Empire, known simply as the Raj, swept across the ocean, from Aden to the border with Thailand. Its people, a quarter of the world’s population, all used the same currency, the Indian rupee, and travelled on passports stamped “Indian Empire”. Yet within 50 years, this encompassment had shattered. The ambushes and killings on trains carrying Muslims west from Bengal into Pakistan and Hindus in the opposite direction is only one of the lasting images of the conflict. Sam Dalrymple, who was raised in Delhi and studied Persian and Sanskrit at university, is superbly well-placed to tell this story. In his first book, he has trawled archives in Britain, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and the Gulf, plumbed unpublished private memoirs and combed through dozens of personal interviews. Best of all, he can write! With a film-maker’s eye and a traveller’s ear, he adds telling detail to a vast canvas, bringing the dying moments of the Indian empire to life in all their brilliant tottering majesty.
Fiammetta Rocco
Me of All People
by Alfred Brendel
My perennial literary travel companion is a novel by PG Wodehouse, whose virtuosic, warm-hearted and infinitely surprising humour somersaults and leaps off the page, lightening even the most infuriating of travel woes. But, at the moment, I find myself drawn to revisiting books by the great pianist Alfred Brendel. I have rarely seen such an outpouring of grief in the musical world as after his death in June. Countless reminiscences were shared celebrating his astonishing and wide-ranging intelligence; his wit and love of the grotesque and absurd; his profound musical wisdom and artistic generosity. Me of All People, a book of conversations on all manner of subjects, might be an unfamiliar visitor to a beach towel, but it is pure delight from beginning to end, both serious and funny in equal measure.
Mishka Rushdie Momen
Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
by J Hoberman
Life as a 24-hour party? This is former Village Voice film critic J Hoberman’s ode to the bohemian New York of the 1960s. Most histories talk about urban blight: white people fleeing the city, blue-collar jobs disappearing, crime and drug usage growing. Hoberman focuses on the young people who refused to be scared. They moved into neglected neighbourhoods, and... bang! Free jazz, wild poetry, experimental movies, absurdist theatre. Were they modern Bacchae, fiddling while America burned? Many were furious—with racism, the war in Vietnam—but, in apartments and loft spaces that today are coveted by the super-rich, they laughed and screamed, danced and versified, strived to imagine a new world order. It was a teeming, troubled period and Hoberman is a beady-eyed, forgiving guide to it all.
Sukhdev Sandhu, film critic
Act of Darkness
by Francis King
Although largely forgotten today, King was a prolific writer of brilliant novels, short stories and criticism, twice nominated for the Booker Prize and appointed president of Pen International. I could recommend much of his fiction, but this 1983 novel ranks among his very best. The story begins in India in the 1930s, during the twilight years of Britain’s colonial power. It takes us through the dust and devastation of the London Blitz and thereafter behind the bars of Holloway Prison, before drawing to a close many years later in a remote part of Australia. At the novel’s heart is a shockingly violent murder, the enigma of which propels the narrative forward, though not in ways we might expect. Instead, King creates a haunting study of a family destroyed, the whys and wherefores of which remain a disturbing mystery until the book’s final pages.
Lucy Scholes
PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
edited by Sophie Ratcliffe
Reading a book on the beach is probably the closest any of us will ever come to the cloudlessness of life as lived by PG Wodehouse. A new 50th anniversary edition of his letters—PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe—finds little denting the indefatigably cheerful Wodehouse, whether he is dishing out gossip from the French Riviera, pacing hotel corridors to work out his plots or penning stoical postcards from a Nazi internment camp, where he was held during the war with “a copy of Shakespeare, a pair of pajamas, and a mutton chop”. His humorous radio broadcasts about life in the camp—a “ghastly blunder”, he admitted in a 1946 interview—led to him accused of being a Nazi stooge, but, today, they merely reaffirm the pacifistic, childlike naivete that buoyed his best writing. Wodehouse himself cheerfully admitted that he hadn’t “developed mentally at all since my last year at school”—it’s hard to imagine a better beach companion.
Tom Shone
Wolf Solent
by John Cowper Powys
Allow me to recommend a writer of thousand-page tomes that can seem unreadably obscure. But: when people get John Cowper Powys, they really get him. He remains a byway of literature, an important kink on the mystic thread of countryside-with-sex that runs from Thomas Hardy to DH Lawrence. Much of his writing is set in Hardy’s semi-fictional territory of Wessex: think pageants and stone circles and grail legends. His magnum opus, A Glastonbury Romance, is a vast epic that follows the inhabitants of an entire town as they stage a Passion Play. The place to start, though, is with Wolf Solent, which has been newly reissued this summer as a Penguin Classic. Published in 1928, the novel is about a young man who moves to a country village, where he is torn between sexual love for one woman and spiritual love for another.
Oliver Soden
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
by GB Edwards
In 1981, the year of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, another of the finest—and most richly enjoyable—post-war English-language novels first appeared. It is as singular, eccentric, inventive and historically astute as Rushdie’s breakthrough epic. It likewise draws strength from a literary language on the fringes of mainstream English. Yet I draw blanks whenever I mention The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and its author GB (Gerald Basil) Edwards. In Edwards’s only novel, published posthumously, an old man on the Channel Island of Guernsey—Edwards’s birthplace—remembers his long life in a small community that becomes a microcosm of a world in flux. Funny, wry, wise, hugely absorbing, Ebenezer’s narrative captures an unforgettable voice and shows how the advent of modernity convulsed minds and lives in marginal places just a ferry ride from home. Kudos to New York Review Classics for keeping this overlooked marvel in print.
Boyd Tonkin
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