Sun, sea, sand... and sizzling stories
We asked our top critics to choose their best books for the beach this summer. Lie back, chill out and get reading . . .
LITERARY FICTION STANDARD DEVIATION by Katherine Heiny
(4th Estate €18.19) PROVIDED you’re not embarrassed by laughing loudly in public, Katherine Heiny’s tale is the best feel-good novel around this year.
New Yorker Graham finds his beautiful second wife Audra both exhilarating and exhausting. She is one of the great comic creations of our times; a motormouth who talks to complete strangers and discusses intimate secrets on public transport.
She should be irritating, but she’s so intelligent, well-meaning, funny and kind to everyone she meets that she’s impossible not to love — though perhaps she is impossible to live with, which is Graham’s problem when his first wife reenters his life. John Harding
THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY by Hannah Tinti
(Tinder Press €21) AFTER a peripatetic existence, Samuel Hawley and his teenage daughter Loo return to his late wife’s hometown in an attempt to settle down at last.
But as Loo seeks answers about her mother’s death, her father’s former life — recounted in a series of flashbacks which revisit scenes from his criminal past — catches up with him in a bloody finale.
The cover mentions Quentin Tarantino, and it’s a valid reference for this pacy and violent — yet also poignant and sensitive — novel. Guaranteed to make even the most tedious plane journey whizz by.
JH
DESPERATION ROAD by Michael Farris Smith
(No Exit Press €20.99) RELEASED from prison after serving 11 years for killing a man while driving drunk, Russell Gaines returns home. Meanwhile, a young homeless woman shoots a policeman who attempts to rape her.
When Russell runs into her, he is torn between his natural inclination to help and the risk of being caught violating his parole. He has other problems, too, as the brothers of the man he killed want revenge.
A gripping must-read from the steamy American South. JH
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE by Elizabeth Strout
(Viking €12.74) ELIZABETH STROUT is a novelist in whose hands anything really is possible, and if you’ve yet to discover her, make this holiday the one you do. This latest novel is a companion piece of sorts to her 2016 bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton, and picks up on the stories of the inhabitants we met fleetingly in their dustbowl Illinois town.
Strout is a master of making microscopic details of individual lives resound with unerring universal truths, and this glimmering, profound, beautiful novel is modern American writing at its very best. Claire Allfree
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS by Sally Rooney
(Faber €12.74) THIS debut is the latest novel in the seemingly unstoppable flow of literary talent coming from Ireland right now, and it’s excellent: smart, funny, unusual and very true.
Frances is a 21-year-old student and poet half in love with her ex-girlfriend, half in love with the older husband of a new acquaintance and determined to resist all the restrictive notions of selfhood and gender that society chucks at her — though she is not always fully able to do so.
Female friendship and creativity are hot topics in modern fiction at the moment, and Rooney writes outstandingly well about both. CA
HOUSE OF NAMES by Colm Toibin
(Viking €16.99) YOU might wonder whether Aeschylus’s epic, blood-soaked trilogy The Oresteia really needed rewriting in novel form, but Colm Toibin banishes all doubts with this extraordinary new imagining.
Toibin largely follows the same cycle of revenge that destroys the house of Agamemnon after he sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia at Troy, but it’s the quality of the writing that really impresses: empathetic, full-bodied and steeped in a psychological acuity that brings these ancient characters to life anew. CA
RESERVOIR 13 by Jon McGregor
(4th Estate €16.99) A TEENAGE girl goes missing on the edge of Britain’s Peak District, but Reservoir 13 isn’t a thriller and the riddle of her disappearance isn’t one that McGregor cares to solve. Instead, this is a novel of aftermath, as normality — and all that comes in its wake — slowly returns to the small community. Years pass, joys and sorrows ebb and flow, and if the tone and mood are muted then it only heightens the effect of the brief, unexpected flares of humour. Yes, you’ll need patience, but that’s the point. You’ll find yourself amply rewarded. Stephanie Cross HOMEGOING (Viking €18.19) APPARENTLY this debut novel is now required reading for students at California’s elite Stanford University.
It’s easy to see why: though Homegoing comes in at a mere 300 pages, it spans eight generations and addresses unforgettably the legacy of slavery across two continents and three centuries.
Each chapter belongs to a new descendant of two Ghanaian halfsisters, and the action moves between Africa and America. It might sound confusing, but Gyasi’s compelling protagonists — be they slave or student, prisoner or teacher — carry the reader with them.
Ambition and talent don’t always go hand-in-hand; here, they unquestionably do. SC
POPULAR FICTION HOW TO STOP TIME by Matt Haig
(Canongate €16.99) TOM HAZARD, a London teacher, is four centuries old but looks just 40. He has lived everywhere and met Captain Cook, F. Scott Fitzgerald and (my absolute favourite bit) Shakespeare.
On the downside, he has watched the murder of his mother by a witch-obsessed mob and seen his wife die of the plague. Completing his heartbreak is the fact he lost touch with his daughter, Marion, centuries ago. Can he find her now? And love again? And stay out of the clutches of those who want his ageless genes for biotech?
I loved the jokes about the past and the musings on love and time, but what I adored most of all were the scenes in Elizabethan England. Who knew that Greensleeves was a rude song? Please write a whole Tudor book next, Matt!
THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS by Ruth Hogan
(Two Roads €23.79 ) WHEN this book first appeared I said it was the perfect cure for the New Year blues. But it could apply just as well to any summer blues. Shy Laura is housekeeper to Anthony, who copes with the loss of his spirited wife by collecting items that people have lost.
They fill a whole room and when he leaves his beautiful house to Laura, the catch is that she must find their owners.
She is joined in her quest by super-wise Sunshine, whose Down’s syndrome gives her valuable emotional insight.
The subplot is hilarious, about Bomber the publisher, his devoted friend Eunice and ghastly sister Portia.
This touching, funny and romantic debut is that rare and precious thing — a real story with brilliant characters.
ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE by Gail Honeyman
(HarperCollins €12.74) ANOTHER fantastic book about someone outside the norm.
Grumpy, frumpy Eleanor despises the people in her office. No one — including the reader — realises her sneering stems from a terrible past. She spends her weekends in vodkasoaked oblivion, seeing no one. But then along comes Raymond.
He’s far from a catch — he eats noisily and dresses terribly — but he’s got a kind heart, the first Eleanor has ever come across.
Slowly, cautiously, he encourages her to rejoin the human race. It’s misery memoir meets Adrian Mole with a bit of The Office thrown in.
GINNY MOON by Benjamin Ludwig
(HQ €12.74) THIS amazing novel takes you right inside the head of an autistic teenager — one who’s adopted and has a junkie for a birth mother. But if that sounds heavy, fear not — you won’t read a funnier, more moving book this year.
Narrator Ginny’s latest ‘forever parents’ are about to have a baby of their own. Her arrival stirs up painful memories of Ginny’s old life. What happened to her baby sister?
Ginny’s anxiety on this score, which she can’t communicate and her carers misunderstand, leads her back into her mother’s fatal grip. The reader is on tenterhooks as she blunders from misjudgment to mistake. My family became obsessed with Ginny Moon. Her catchphrase: ‘Can I have a beverage?’ is still current.
CRIME AND THRILLERS JACK THE RIPPER: CASE CLOSED by Gyles Brandreth
(Corsair €26.59) THE twist in this latest instalment of Brandreth’s vastly enjoyable series, featuring Oscar Wilde and a cast of real historical characters, is the recruiting of Wilde’s friend Dr Arthur Conan Doyle to help solve one of Britain’s most compelling mysteries — who was Jack the Ripper?
Since Melville Macnaghten, chief constable of the Metropolitan Police’s CID, was a neighbour of Wilde’s in Tite Street, Chelsea, the book creates a perfectly believable narrative of Wilde’s being invited to look at the Ripper case.
The cast of players includes novelist James Barrie and Alice In Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll.
Demonstrating once again Brandreth’s assured touch for Victorian time and place, it is a delight, concluding with an interesting suggestion of who the Ripper might have
been.
THE DRY by Jane Harper
(Abacus €8.99) THIS superb debut from a Britishborn, Australiabased journalist grips like a vice from the first paragraph to the last, atmospherically evoking the isolated town of Kiewarra, outside Melbourne, which has been rocked by a horrific murder/suicide in the midst of a ferocious drought. Karen Hadler and her six-year-old son Billy appear to have been shot by husband and father Luke, before he turned the gun on himself. Officer Aaron Falk, an expert in fraud and tax evasion rather than oldfashioned police work, grew up in the town and returns for the funeral, but is drawn into investigating the deaths. Told with heartbreaking precision and extraordinary emotional power, it reveals the prejudices, secrets and lies of smalltown life against the background of emotions inflamed by heat and a crime that remains a mystery to anyone who knew Luke.
MATCH UP edited by Lee Child
(Sphere €18.19) A PERFECT book for the sun lounger: 22 of the world’s finest crime and thriller novelists have come together to write 11 new short stories using their best known characters — a sequel to the chart-topping collection Face Off three years ago.
This time, each author combination is a male and female one, and the results are a delicious confection of hard-boiled, fast-moving stories with an emotional heart.
Val McDermid’s Tony Hill combines with Peter James’s Roy Grace in an elegant, if gruesome, tale about the lengths foot fetishists may go to in order to fulfil their fantasies, while Lee Child’s Jack Reacher teams up with Kathy Reichs’s forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan to challenge the charge that she killed an investigative reporter.
Both are worth the price of admission alone, but so are many of the others.
EXILE by James Swallow
(Zaffre €12.74) A SECOND outing for Britain’s answer to Jason Bourne, the nowdisgraced MI6 field operative Marc Dane, this is the follow-up to Swallow’s best-selling Nomad. It’s a doorstop of a book in true Tom Clancy tradition, with plenty of talk of guns and armaments, lashings of treachery and exotic locations — though the hero is not as likeable, or as smart, as Jack Ryan.
The characters include a pair of vicious Serbian brothers who sell arms, a disgraced Russian general who offers them a portable nuclear bomb, a brutal Somalian pirate who steals it and the shadowy Rubicon organisation in Monte Carlo, run by a mysterious billionaire.
Our hero is the only person who can see the danger the world is facing. Inevitably, a race against time develops. Fast-moving and fun, if a bit too long. GEOFFREY WANSELL
DEBUTS THE END WE START FROM by Megan Hunter
(Picador €12.99) IN THIS short, fragmentary novel, an environmental disaster plunges England into chaos as one woman gives birth to her first baby, Z.
Escaping London with her husband, R, they go first to his parents, but are soon forced north in search of food and shelter.
During their transition through refugee camps to a remote Scottish island, R abandons his wife, leaving her to cope alone. As the world around them becomes increasingly threatening, she is primarily focused on the milestones that mark every baby’s life. Narrated by the mother, the prose is stripped right back, with passages in italics referring to a variety of creation myths. This economy of style empowers a narrative celebrating motherhood, which is ambitious, original and disturbing — and took me back to those raw early days of parenthood.
ITHACA by Alan McMonagle
(Picador €18.20) THE Celtic Tiger has roared its last in Ireland, leaving behind a country in recession with its communities depressed and poverty-stricken.
In one such area, 11-year-old Jason mooches about town looking for a purpose — and for his unknown dad. His vodka-swigging, loose-moralled, unstable mother is little help as she struggles to survive and to provide for her son.
Outside town lies the Swamp, a pool of stagnant water where Jason meets a girl about his age, a loner like himself.
As they befriend one another, they share secrets and stories, imagining themselves adventuring in far-flung places before getting up to mischief closer to home.
Jason is a memorable childnarrator, and the village and its inhabitants leap from the page, thanks to the exuberance of his voice and his observation of detail.
Tender, poignant and very funny, McMonagle is a writer to watch. FANNY BLAKE