There are few guarantees on holidays but even the most lacklustre break can be rescued by taking along something riveting to read. And even a brilliant time away can be crystallised in the moments you spend glued to a paperback. The happiest reading experience of my adult life was in Seville a few years ago, when I barely spoke for the first 36 hours as I sat, in 40 degree heat, tearing through an advance copy of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
You may prefer something more outré – Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is not my idea of a fun holiday read but I have a friend for whom the most memorable part of her stay in a French gite was when she lost all composure and began sobbing and pacing round the courtyard during a crucial point in the narrative.
Each to their own but we hope you find something in the list below to transport you, however the rest of your holiday turns out.
Everything’s Fine
Cecilia Rabess
This is set to be the smash hit novel of the summer, endorsed by everyone from Nick Hornby to Meg Mason. The author has previously worked for Google and Goldman Sachs and says the book was part-inspired by her reading an article entitled “Donald Trump Is Destroying My Marriage,” which featured couples with opposing political views explaining how they did or didn’t discuss politics with their spouses. This is a love story – between Jess, a liberal Black woman and Josh, a conservative white man, but one which Rabess has said she hopes asks more questions than it answers.
Behind These Doors
Alex South
The memoir of a former prison officer may not be everyone’s idea of holiday escapism but this is an eye-opening account of life in Britain’s prisons from a woman who worked in many of them during a ten year career. And let us not pretend that some of us, on holiday, don’t want to read about characters who are definitively having a worse time than us. While occasionally horrifying, South’s writing is insightful rather than voyeuristic and she offers an important overview of the many things wrong with the prison service as well as the extraordinary humanity of many on the frontline – not least the social workers who visit prisoners on their day off.
Ordinary Human Failings
Megan Nolan
This much-hyped second novel from the journalist Megan Nolan has an engaging premise: set in the nineties, a tabloid journalist begins to probe long-held secrets of an Irish family on a London council estate, implicated in a shocking crime. The Greens emigrated from Ireland to the UK following a scandal but their reclusive existence is interrupted when a child goes missing and they are immediately suspected. Carmel, at the centre of the family, must unravel decades of trans-generational haunting to confront the truth. One critic called it “politically astute, furious and compassionate”.
I, Julian
Claire Gilbert
The fictional autobiography of a 14th century anchoress, Julian of Norwich, who walled herself into a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation, may not initially sound promising but this is a beautiful account of the life of the first woman to author a book in English. It is not lost on Gilbert that there was no way for a woman who was not an anchoress to have the freedom to become an author, and reading about Julian, it soon becomes clear why she proved such an inspiration to so many during the lockdowns of the recent pandemic. Julian’s life is far from charmed – it is full of bereavement and physical pain – but this lovely, meditative book is the ideal novel to make like Greta Garbo and hide away with during a noisy group holiday.
A House for Alice
Diana Evans
The wonderfully talented Diana Evans has said she wants to create visibility and truthful representation for people of colour in her work. A laudable aim but this would be pointless if her novels weren’t so engaging. In her latest, she dares to ask what happens when Alice – an immigrant from Nigeria who has lived in London for 50 years – rejects integration and wants to return to the country of her birth. This is a rich family saga which touches on the Grenfell Tower fire, masochistic sex, Croydon nightclubs, eating disorders and what it means to raise a black son. For fans of Bernardine Evaristo and Charlotte Mendelson.
Pineapple Street
Jenny Jackson
Anyone whose appetite for observing the lives of the super-rich was left unsated by watching Succession and The White Lotus should be packing Pineapple Street in their suitcase. It centres on the Stockton family, whose wealth comes from real estate and focuses in particular on the sisters Darley and Georgiana, as well as their sister-in-law Sasha. How much you enjoy the book may be influenced by your tolerance for dialogue such as “Oh no! I left my Cartier bracelet in Lena’s BMW and she’s leaving soon for her grandmother’s house in Southampton!” (Southampton in this context is a village on Long Island, rather than the birthplace of Rishi Sunak). A juicy treat if you have the stomach for wealth signifiers aplenty.
The List
Yomi Adegoke
The hype surrounding Yomi Adegoke’s first adult novel makes us suspicious. The co-author of Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible has already sold the TV rights to The List to HBO Max, the BBC and A24 and the book has been heralded as the novel of the summer. But then Bernardine Evaristo – who is nobody’s fool – has said “this is a topical, important and probing novel that thrashes out the moral issues around social media outrage and personal culpability. Adegoke captures an impressive array of voices and vernaculars with such supple verisimilitude, it feels as if her vividly realised characters are in the room with you” and who are we to argue with Mz Evaristo? The bright lilac cover will be seen in airport lounges and Airbnbs everywhere this month – read it before everyone starts talking about the TV series.
A Thread of Violence
Mark O’Connell
If you are coming to Mark O’Connell, author of the To Be a Machine, hoping for a salacious serving of true crime, then you need to keep looking. This is nonetheless a scrupulous and compelling account of a double murder that took place in Ireland in 1982 and was described by the then Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey as “Grotesque. Unbelievable. Bizarre. Unprecedented.” O’Connell’s interest in the case was fuelled by the fact that Malcolm Macarthur, the murderer, was arrested while he was staying in an apartment next to the home of O’Connell’s grandparents. After this jumping off point however, O’Connell works hard to get out of the way of the story, but is never unthinking about his own desire to pursue it. A Thread of Violence will not offer you sunny escapism but it’s the kind of book which you can only read with time and space to think. For fans of Camus’s The Stranger and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
