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| Illustration by Leon Edler |
Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part six
From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST
Patrick Gale
Anyone who endured their teens in the 1970s as I did will devour Nina Stibbe’s sequel to the equally delicious Man at the Helm. Funny, subversive and unexpectedly touching, Paradise Lodge (Penguin), just out in paperback, follows her heroine’s adventures when she bunks off school to work in an old people’s home ripe for Thatcherite reforms. I’m always banging on about the need to read more dead authors – they have nobody marketing their work and they’re cheap and usually brilliant. Please discover Sylvia Townsend Warner this summer. Her The Flint Anchor and The Corner That Held Them (Virago) are neglected comic masterpieces whose evocations of chilly East Anglian landscapes are the perfect balm for sunburn. I’ll get no holiday as I’ve a new novel out, but on my train journeys I’ll be reading Anne Enright in preparation for interviewing her at the North Cornwall book festival.
Geoff Dyer
I’ll be in Berlin for most of July, heading there via – or at least in the company of – Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking). Always worried that I have a book too few, I’ll also be lugging Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (Granta), Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo) and Iris Origo’s Tuscan diaries, War in Val D’Orcia (Pushkin). In the second world war, the Germans used 2.7m horses, of which 1.8m died. This is just one of many moving statistics in Ulrich Raulff’s unusual and stimulating history of – and elegy for – the last 100 years of our relationship with the equine world, Farewell to the Horse (Penguin, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp).
Curtis Sittenfeld
Who Is Rich? (Fourth Estate) by Matthew Klam is a terrific summer read – a cartoonist at an ocean-side artists’ conference ponders creativity, infidelity and his own existential purpose, and the results are hilarious and bracingly intelligent. A similarly artsy but more sober read is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner) by Alexander Chee. Chee’s insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new novel When Katie Met Cassidy (Piatkus) by Camille Perri. I’ve heard it’s sexy, entertaining and subversive, and doesn’t that sound like a magnificent combination? I plan to read it while visiting my sister in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kerry Hudson
This summer I’m fulfilling a long-held ambition to explore the mountains and cities of the Republic of Georgia by their marshrutka countrywide minibus network. On a trip that is mainly travel, I want books that will inspire me, that are humane and thought-provoking. After reading the first outstanding story, I’ve been impatiently hoarding Glen James Brown’s debut, Ironopolis (Parthian), a series of interconnected tales set on a dilapidated Middlesbrough council estate. Likewise, Mary O’Hara’s Austerity Bites (Policy Press), which reports on the frontline of austerity cuts, a book sadly as relevant today as when it was first published four years ago.
Ocean Vuong
The Wilderness (WW Norton) by Sandra Lim is a knife blade fashioned into a magnifying glass. Oscillating between bold declarations and restrained, seething fury, the poems slowly build to a storm in the psyche. The book is a masterclass in line-making and metaphor. It lifts me, like the best books, higher into myself. “When I come to the right place, I believe I’ll paint a door on it and / walk right through.” I’ve also been struck by Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (Tyrant). It is the epitome of autofiction – and advances the tradition to include images and photographs. But more than that, it is the first book I’ve read in a while that faithfully enacts Kafka’s truism that a book must be an axe that shatters the frozen seas inside us. Brutal and unforgiving, it explores a crumbling marriage and its ensuing existential crisis through the lens of the West Virginian working class. A classic of urgent, American storytelling.
Josie Rourke
Sally Rooney’s award-winning novel, Conversations With Friends (Faber), is one of the best debuts I’ve encountered. It’s a witty and entrancing read, perfect for a summer’s day spent doing nothing else. I’m hoping to visit friends in the Hudson Valley this summer; I first need to finish editing my film Mary Queen of Scots – which is based on John Guy’s biography of Mary Stuart, My Heart Is My Own (Harper). For my summer reading I will dive into Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (WW Norton). I love his mission to invigorate settled ideas, and it’s good preparation for the next play I’m directing, Measure for Measure at the Donmar, London.
Sebastian Faulks
I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic (Little, Brown), in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder. I have some misgivings about patient confidentiality and exaggeration and/or light fictionalisation in places (Tallis has form as a horror novelist), but this is undoubtedly riveting stuff.
Attica Locke
I’ve just put down The Kiss Quotient (Atlantic) by Helen Hoang and I loved it so much I want to hand it out to strangers on the street. It’s a beautiful love story and a peek inside the life and heart of a woman who has Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. I was mesmerised by this book, which manages to be steamy hot and sweet at the same time. An American Marriage (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones is another incredible love story, though fraught with greater challenges for the couple at the centre, which makes the story all the more moving. Jones’s prose is chock-full of lyricism, grace and wisdom. You will never forget the story of Celestial and Roy. Unfortunately, there are no grand travel plans for me this season. My summer “holiday” will be stolen moments in my favourite reading chair.
Sabrina Mahfouz
Carol Morley
Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (Windmill), about Frankie, who retreats from urban life and connects with nature, really made an impression on me this year. A fun and breezy read was Charlotte Bingham’s memoir MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks (Bloomsbury), an account of her discovery that her father was a spy and of her own “inactive” service. Go Went Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky) by Jenny Erpenbeck, looking at the plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor, I found very moving. My dream holiday reads include The Overstory (William Heinemann) by Richard Powers, an eco epic, with trees at the heart of the storytelling, and Ling Ma’s Severance (Macmillan), a brilliant-sounding post-apocalyptic novel, centring on the end times of late capitalism. I’ve been learning to swim this year, and while I’m in Paxos practising my strokes, I’ve accumulated some books with swimmers on the covers, and top of the pile to read is Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes (Virago) by Jessica J Lee.
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