Relaxation, new feelings, a short break from the monotonous and exhausting schedule, new emotions, adventures and year-long-awaited pleasure - all this usually comes to us on hot summer days. We escape from everyday, monotonous life for a few days and take refuge in the mountains, sea, village or foreign resorts. You will agree with me that our best companions at this time are books - adventures within adventures.
From prize winners to hidden gems, from books to stir nostalgic memories of holidays past to novels set in picturesque destinations, these reads capture the essence of the season.
WHAT TO READ THIS SUMMER
10 of the best summer reads nominated for the Booker Prize, chosen by the readers A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
In the summer of 1920 two men meet in the quiet English countryside. One is a war survivor, living in a church, intent upon uncovering and restoring a historical wall-painting. The other, too, is a war survivor, camping in the next field in search of a lost grave. Out of their physical meeting comes a deeper communion – with the landscape, with history – and a renewed belief in the future. In J.L. Carr’s tale of survival and healing, a damaged veteran rediscovers the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth discovers a "Hello Kitty" lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery. Ruth Ozeki’s bewitching metafictional novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Molly Lane had many lovers, among them Clive Linley, Britain’s most famous composer, Vernon Halliday, editor of a respected broadsheet, and Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary - and tipped to be the next prime minister. When Clive and Vernon meet to pay their last respects to Molly at her funeral, they make a pact that will have unforeseen and profound consequences for everyone concerned. A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan's darkly humorous 1998 Booker Prize-winning novel.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Iris Chase – married at 18 to a politically prominent industrialist, but now 82 and poor – is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by her once-prosperous family. While bewailing her unreliable body and deriding those who try to help her, Iris reflects on her far-from-exemplary life and perilous times, particularly on the events surrounding her sister Laura's mysterious early death - a death which confirmed her iconic status as the author of a scandalous novel. Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford (a ridiculously modern town), about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It’s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark – quite unspeakable – into its ear. Nicola Barker’s startling visionary narrative. If history is just a sick joke that keeps repeating itself, then who exactly is telling it – and why?
Holiday by Stanley Middleton
Edwin Fisher is at the seaside, but this is no normal beach holiday. To escape the death of his son and the death-throes of his marriage, he has retreated to a place where he had once known the unqualified happiness of childhood. But as painful memories rise unbidden and uncontrolled, Edwin must confront each in turn – realising that without a past there can be no future. Stanley Middleton’s 1974 Booker prize-winning novel is both a precisely observed portrait of English provincial life and a moving exploration of grief and regret.
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother’s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat, searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, Sofia is forced to confront her difficult relationship with her mother. Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
In Martin MacInnes's 2023 Booker Prize longlisted novel, Leigh grows up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms.
When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms. What she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings, and leaves her facing an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Maud Bailey is a scholar researching the life and work of her distant relative, a little-known 19th-century poet named Christabel LaMotte. Roland Mitchell is looking into an obscure moment in the life of another Victorian poet, the celebrated Randolph Henry Ash. Together, the two uncover a dark secret in Ash's life: though apparently happily married, he conducted a torrid affair with LaMotte. As Maud and Roland dig deeper, they too find themselves falling in love. A gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance which won the 1990 Booker Prize
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. Rachel Cusk offers a deep affirmation of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons, in her 2021 Booker Prize longlisted novel.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
February, 1862. Two days after his death, 11-year-old Willie Lincoln is laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. All that night, his father Abraham paces the darkness of the graveyard, shattered with grief. Meanwhile, Willie is trapped in a state of limbo between the dead and the living – drawn to his father with whom he can no longer communicate, existing in a ghostly world populated by the recently passed and the long dead. George Saunders' startlingly original novel is a thrilling exploration of death, grief and the possibilities of life, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.