From family sagas to political memoirs, the best recent books to accompany your summer break, plus page-turning paperbacks and children’s and YA books.
Fiction
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy
In his best-selling novels, Sittenfeld has imagined the loves and lives shared by Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. This time, Sally Milz, a self-deprecating TV program scriptwriter, is the topic of her essay. The ensuing romcom is elevated by Sittenfeld’s smart writing and eye for comical detail when Sally discovers Noah, a pop star she suggests to be out of her league. a wonderful beach buddy.
Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting
This enormous, multi-layered tragicomedy about an Irish family in trouble by the author of Skippy Dies is both enjoyable to read and profoundly upsetting. We enter each family member’s head in turn as long-kept secrets, suppressed desires, and poor decisions.
A House for Alice by Diana Evans
A sequel to Evans’s 2018 novel Ordinary People, A House for Alice opens on the night of the Grenfell fire, then follows Alice – longing to return to her native Nigeria – and her three daughters as they reckon with a city and a country in crisis. You don’t need to have read the earlier novel to enjoy this tender yet political tale, though one of its pleasures is reconnecting with Melissa and Michael several years on.
Author Naoise Dolan’s The Happy Couple
The sequel to Excited Times is a witty parody of contemporary love. Celine, a pianist with her head in the clouds, and Luke, a commitment-phobe, accidentally get into an engagement. Both are bisexual and harbor twice as many uncertainties. In a delectably acidic comedy filled with one-liners, Dolan works with narrative form as well as expectations as the wedding approaches and friends and ex-lovers further complicate things.
Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman
a substantial, high-concept story from the creator of the vampire movie phenomenon The Passage. The wealthy lead enviable lives on the remote island of Prospera and are restarted when they grow old and worn out. The servant class is becoming uneasy, though, and one day a mysterious message proclaims: “The world is not the world.” A compelling query
Deborah Levy’s novel August Blue
From Parisian cafes to Greek beaches to London’s streets, Levy’s exquisitely ludic study into selfhood, mother love, and meaning takes place throughout Europe. A concert pianist who is no longer able to play discovers her twin in an Athens flea market. As she puzzles over the secrets of her origins and ambitions, everything she has suppressed starts to come back.
Catriona Ward Ward has carved out a special gothic realm where the fantasy, thriller, and horror genres converge in Looking Glass Sound, and this story of fierce friendships, gruesome crimes, and intellectual rivalry is her best to date. A teenager’s coming of age was marred by horrifying findings on the New England shore; these experiences and their effects are presented both as memoir and fiction.
Author Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre
Written with wit, originality, and a luxuriously lovely literary style, The Suede bassist’s crazy adventures of the rebels, dreamers, and reprobates who make up a new theater company in Elizabethan England are hilarious. This is a larger-than-life work of historical fiction that is twice as entertaining.
Large Swissauthor Jen Beagin
This seductive, outrageous novel, which is slated to be made into an HBO show starring Jodie Comer, follows Greta, a therapist’s transcriptionist who develops an infatuation with one of his patients. The events that follow initially seem predicable, but in an oddball, humorous way. But as Beagin sharpens the emphasis on her main characters and their histories, the book’s surprise, heartbreaking core emerges.
The sequel to the Booker-winning The Luminaries, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton Catton, confronts a gang of young guerilla gardeners against a millionaire who has hidden intentions for a New Zealand national park. In a book that is equal parts action and ideas, environmental danger, political expediency, personal ambition, and the generational gap are thrillingly discussed.
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
The writer’s observations as a music-loving youngster in the late 1970s served as the basis for this fiery, lyrical debut that made the Women’s Prize shortlist. It is steeped in dub reggae. Through love, sorrow, and peril, we follow Yamaye as she follows her goals and re-connects with her past in Jamaica, London, and Bristol amid a backdrop of discrimination and police brutality.
Aleksandar Hemon’s book The World and All That It Holds
This century-spanning epic, which begins with the visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, tells the story of two men who discover each other amid the turmoil of the world: a Bosnian soldier and a Sephardic Jewish pharmacist. Hemon enjoys learning languages.
by Eliza Clark Penalty
The second book by the author of Boy Parts, which was released at the start of July, is a ferociously vile examination of online fandoms, broken Britain, the crimes of adolescent girls, and the voyeuristic demand for true crime. On the eve of the Brexit vote, a 16-year-old was killed by her peers. The “truth” at the center of the story is now laid out by a retired journalist, but has a desire for content resulted in a moral void? Scary, witty, and impossible to put down.
Martin MacInnes’ book In Ascension
A marine biologist with a challenging family history becomes involved in the investigation of an unbelievably deep trench in the Atlantic ocean that sheds information on the origins of life on Earth.