Top Summer books (The Times)
Top Summer books: fiction
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/fiction/article4136483.ece
BIG THINKERS AND SLOW BURNERS
Winter by Christopher Nicholson 4th Estate, 247pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
The novelist becomes the novelised in Christopher Nicholson’s novel about Thomas Hardy’s final years. Hardy, in his eighties, is married to his second wife Florence but becomes infatuated by the raven-haired beauty Gertrude Bugler, a young amateur actress and “the very incarnation of Tess”. NB: you’re never too old to cause a complete mess of your personal life. It is brave thing for a writer to set himself up against Hardy, but Nicholson gets away with it with his minute descriptions of the fastidious Hardy and the lush Dorset countryside.
The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi
Faber, 304pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Another fictionalised biography of a writer - there are rather a lot at the moment. Perhaps the authors hope they’ll receive the same treatment in 50 years’ time. This one, by My Beautiful Laundrette screenplay writer Hanif Kureishi, caused a ruckus on publication as everyone (publishers and journalists) asked whether he had based his cruel, ageing, womanising novelist Mamoon on VS Naipaul. The deadpan author’s seventh novel, about a young writer commissioned to write an autobiography of a once-great novelist, bears more than a little similarity to Patrick French’s biography of the Indian writer.
Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally
Sceptre, 392pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
In August 1944, when Thomas Keneally was eight years old, Japanese prisoners-of-war at Cowra, New South Wales, staged the largest breakout of the Second World War. Keneally, a former Booker winner, tackles the clash of cultures between the fearful and angry local population and the escapee POWs. This is Keneally’s 30th novel. He is best known for is Schindler’s Ark, which was rebranded as Schindler’s List for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Faber, 224pp, £7.99. To buy this book for £7.59, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mummy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then you lay down. They cut around. Wait and hour and day.” McBride’s debut novel, about a girl’s relationship with her brother who has a brain tumour (and inspired by her own brother, who died of the same), took six months to write and nine years to get published. Now it has swept the awards from the experimental Goldsmiths Prize to the more mainstream Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Be warned: it is not for everyone. It has a strange, sparse, impressionistic style that will remind some of James Joyce and others of nonsense. Persevere: you stand to be greatly rewarded.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams
Vintage, 336pp, £8.99. To buy this book for £8.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
At the start of the 19th century, the buffalo population hovered somewhere around 60 million. By the start of the 20th, it was around 1,000. John Williams’s second novel is set around the 1870s in the Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing, which runs on whores, liquor and rumours of buffalo. It is about an educated man named Will Andrews and his attempt to make a life for himself in the West. It’s also about America’s need to destroy in order to create (the buffalo were killed not for their meat but to clear the path for railroads). Fans of Williams’s campus-novel Stoner won’t find the same story, but they will find the same teller and he’s just as good in this slower, meandering novel.
Bark by Lorrie Moore
Faber, 240pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £11.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Here’s a little taster menu for your literary diet: the master of the short story returns with this collection of eight fierce tales on subjects ranging divorce, illness, death and abandonment.
HEART BREAKERS
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Serpent’s Tail, 336pp, £7.99. To buy this book for £7.59, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
This recommendation comes with a warning: only read it if you are feeling emotionally secure. 1970s America: Rosemary, the daughter of a psychology professor, has been “twinned” with a baby chimpanzee named Fern. She was “my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half,” says Rosemary, “I was also all those things to her.” Then, aged five, Fern is taken away. This is about an experiment that goes wrong, a family’s loss and a case against using and abusing animals.
The Undertaking by Audrey Magee
Atlantic, 304pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
It was a marriage of convenience: desperate to escape fighting on the Eastern Front, German soldier Peter Faber marries Katharina Spinell by proxy despite knowing nothing of her. He has done it to get the honeymoon leave; she for the widow’s pension, if he dies. Yet when they meet for the first time, they fall passionately in love. This is no simple love story: before long, Peter is back in the field and Katharina finds herself working for the Nazi party.
PULSE RACERS
Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips
Jonathan Cape, 464pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Harry Powers, the Lonely Hearts murderer, was the original serial killer. The pig-eyed sociopath preyed on vulnerable, middle-aged women before killing them and taking their money. In Jayne Anne Phillips’s historical novel, some of his victims are given a voice: in 1930s Illinois, widowed Asta Eicher begins a correspondence with Powers, believing that a future with him will save her young family. She is wrong and with terrifying inevitability the plot races towards its bloody conclusion. The youngest daughter, Annabel, narrates from beyond the grave, much like The Lovely Bones.
Children of Paradise by Fred D’Aguiar
Granta, 384pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Inspired by the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 members of Jim Jones’s cult died of cyanide poisoning in a “revolutionary suicide”, D’Aguiar’s novel imagines a mother and daughter’s escape from a religious madman’s cult which says that slavery is by no means a thing of the past.
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker
MacLehose, 624pp, £20. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Swiss literary heartthrob (it’s a select group) Joel Dicker’s pacy whodunnit is set in a sleepy town in New Hampshire, where university professor Harry Quebert lives in self-imposed exile. Marcus, a former student suffering writers’ block, visits his house around the same time that the body of a 15-year-old girl, with whom Quebert had had an affair, is found in a hastily-dug grave in his garden. So what really happened? The Europeans loved it; the Americans, not so much: you decide.
Gretel and the Dark by Eliza Granville
Hamish Hamilton, 368pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Fairytales take a sinister turn in Eliza Granville’s novel which was inspired by the author’s discovery of how the Third Reich used the Brothers Grimm’s tales to promote nationalism. The story begins in Vienna, 1899, at the home of the eminent psychoanalyst Josef Breuer. A young lady has been brought to him with her head crudely shaved and two incisions in her throat. When she awakes three days later, she claims to be a machine, created to find “the monster” Adi. In another thread, we’re in 1930s Germany with Krysta and her doctor father who looks after “the animal people”. This is fairytale fiction for grown-ups, laced with fact - and it’s terrifying.
SUN LOUNGERS
The Fortune Hunterby Daisy Goodwin
Headline, 480pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
The author of The Last Duchess - which recently became a film starring Keira Knightley - returns with another historical fiction romp, this time set in 19th-century England. Scandalous Sisi, Empress of Austria, enjoys the hunt in more senses than one. Bored of Viennese life, the vain royal, whose beauty regime includes veal facepacks and egg yolk shampoo, visits England where the dashing yet dastardly Captain Bay Middleton (the fortune hunter of the title) catches her eye. Trouble is, he’s ten years her junior and already engaged to another woman . . .
Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn
Picador, 272pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £15.29, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
In 2006, Edward St Aubyn’s novel, the much-admired Mother’s Milk, was overlooked for the Booker prize. In 2011 his At Last was conspicuous by its absence on the longlist. Don’t think he’s forgotten: his latest work lampoons literary prizes and the feckless actors, talentless civil servants and croneyistic MPs who judge them. It’s refreshingly bitchy, archly funny and always clever - will any prize dare put it on its longlist?
Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe
Viking, 256pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £13.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Last year’s surprise wonder was Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina, a memoir of the Leicester nanny’s years in literary north London in the 1980s. Unpretentious and hilariously honest, it included such gems as: “AB [Alan Bennett] says that only an extremely accomplished pianist could pretend to play as badly as Les Dawson pretends to do. Maybe it’s the same with S. Beckett. He could write a really good (sensible) play that everyone would get, but he doesn’t . . . he’s pretending to be crap, which you can only do if you’re a genius”. She returns in August with her first novel, which is set in the 1970s. Lizzie, aged nine, is worried about her mother: newly divorced, she’s moved her children to the Leicestershire countryside, where single women are seen as a threat. So Lizzie and her sister decide to take matters into their own hands.
The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson
4th Estate, 432pp, £8.99. To buy this book for £8.54, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
The ubiquitous Jonas Jonasson’s books are more reliable than Ronseal: not only do they do exactly what they say on the tin, they do it with wit and humour too. His debut, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (about a 100-year-old man who climbs out of a window and disappears), is still lodged at the top of the charts after months and a film is out. Now the Swedish journalist has returned with another excellent book about a down-on-her-luck South African heroine named Nombeko. Her prospects change after she is hit by a drunken engineer and she discovers that her actions can have far-reaching consequences.
The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin
Doubleday, 288pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
If you haven’t already read the previous eight volumes of Tales of the City, an everyday story of transfolk, then you have your summer reading list tied up in one. For those who have, this is the concluding novel, which picks up with a 90-something Anna Madrigal (an anagram of “a girl and a man”) who has returned to her home state of Nevada to confront her past.
THE WILD ONES
Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes
MacLehose, 352pp, £15. To buy this book for £12.75, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Having fallen asleep in 1945, Hitler wakes up to find himself in 2011 Berlin (“and he’s Führious…”). He doesn’t understand why Hitler Youth Ronaldo is being so disrespectful to him, becomes obsessed with video games and dishes out dating advice (“Women’s hearts are like battles. They are not won through hesitation”). Vermes pokes fun at the tyrant’s failed attempts to grasp the modern world and while the jokes may be obvious, they’re still very, very good. One for fans of ’Allo ’Allo and Springtime for Hitler.
The Emperor Waltz by Philip Hensher
4th Estate, 624pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Philip Hensher says he has written “a big, camp epic about books, AIDS, boyfriends, money, political protest and the importance of not having your bathroom suite in avocado.” We say: only he could get away with a novel that unites 1970s gay rights activists in Marylebone, art students in Weimar in the 1920s and 2nd-century pagans. Lovely. It’s clever, gripping and a little bit mad.
Telling Talesby Patience Agbabi
Canongate, 144pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
This is a modern retelling of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Yes, they come around every few years and now it’s the turn of poet and performer Agbabi - it’s fast-paced and very witty. The Miller’s Tale begins: “I’m just 18 an newly wed/ My husband’s old an crap in bed/ My lovers fit, well hung, well read.”
Top Summer books: crime
Mr Mercedes by Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton, 408pp, £20. To buy this book for £16, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Stephen King’s crime and thriller offerings (as distinct from his horror
output) can be disappointing. But every now and again he reminds us that
when he’s on form he’s up there with the very best. Mr
Mercedes is one of those occasions. Bill Hodges is a recently retired
cop anguished by one big failure: failing to catch the driver of a stolen
Mercedes who deliberately drove into a queue of job-seekers, killing and
injuring many. Hodges receives a gloating, taunting letter from the killer,
which jolts him into an obsession to hunt him down and prevent an even more
horrific crime. Huge tension.
The Farm by Tom Rob Smith
Simon & Schuster, 351pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £10.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
This novel has its roots in the author’s own family’s experience, and what a
weird, absorbing tale it is. Daniel in London receives a phone call from his
father in Sweden telling him that his mother has gone mad and is in an
asylum. Soon afterwards his mother phones to warn him that his father is a
wicked liar. The shocked Daniel, who has always regarded his parents as
being close and contented, gradually uncovers a story of deaths and trolls
in desolate Sweden, where his parents have gone to live. But he still faces
the dilemma: which of them to believe?
In the Morning I’ll be Gone by Adrian McKinty
Serpent’s Tail, 326pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
An excellent, thoughtful police thriller that is also a convincing portrait of
a society under political and social stress. It’s Northern Ireland in 1984,
in the middle of the Troubles. Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in an
overwhelmingly Protestant force, has been unjustly demoted. His superiors
offer him reinstatement on the condition that he hunts down his childhood
friend Dermot McCann, now a top IRA man who has escaped from prison. Duffy’s
sensitive attempt to renew contact with McCann’s family, once so close to
him, involves him in having to probe a mysterious death.
Someone Else’s Skin by Sarah Hilary
Headline, 402pp, £13.99. To buy this book for £12.59, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
A superb debut and an impressive new cop-heroine, modern, passionate and
mixed-up. DI Marnie Rome bears the psychological scars of both her parents
being knifed to death by a teenager living in their house. She and her
sidekick arrive at a women’s refuge to conduct a routine interview. They
come across one of its residents stabbing the husband from whom she was
escaping. Rome investigates, then there’s a disturbing disappearance from
the refuge. The horror of domestic violence is the thread that runs through
the novel, coupled with the failure of the justice system to deal with it.
Irène by Pierre Lemaitre
MacLehose Press, 395pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £13.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Lemaitre is one of several French crime writers somewhat belatedly making
their mark on British audiences. This is the first of a trilogy introducing
Commandant Camille Verhoeven of the Paris homicide squad. (The second,
Alex, was the first to be published in English, last year.) Less than
five feet tall, irascible at work but loving at home, he’s called to a
bloodbath. Two prostitutes have been killed and mutilated. Their bodies and
the room have been arranged as a theatrical tableau. More gruesome deaths
follow, accompanied by similarly bizarre staging. The clues are references
to crime fiction. Do not be put off by the gore.
Missing You by Harlan Coben
Orion, 416pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Coben is constantly high on the bestseller lists but not often given the
respect he deserves by reviewers. He’s a master of the multiple twist. Just
as it seems an explanation is within reach, the reader is hammered with
another, even more shocking surprise. Missing You begins with New
York detective Kat Donovan surfing an online dating site when she sees a
picture of her ex-fiancé, the love of her life, who cruelly dumped her 18
years before. She makes the mistake of trying to get in touch, setting off a
range of scary consequences and the reopening of old wounds, including the
unsolved murder of her father.
A Colder War by Charles Cumming
HarperCollins, 400pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £10.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
The spy thriller has been on the ascendant in the past few years, breeding a
bunch of talented writers, Cumming among the very best. He’s old-fashioned
in a satisfying sense, sticking to the comfortable formula of Russia versus
the West with no attempt to promote as principal villains China, Islam or
nasty corporations. This is the second novel to feature Thomas Kell, an
agent in disgrace, and Amelia Levene, MI6’s first woman boss. Kell’s friend,
a past lover of Amelia, dies in a suspicious plane crash. Kell inquires.
There’s a mole leaking secrets.
The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly
Hodder & Stoughton, 352pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £13.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Charlie Parker is like no other private eye and John Connolly’s imagination
like no other crime writer’s. The Maine-based Parker is as much avenger as
he is detective; his opponents may bear human names, but they might as well
all be called Evil. His pursuit of them strays into terror and the
inexplicable. In this, the 12th in the series, Parker starts with the death
of a tramp, but is soon on his usual deeper, darker, chilling rampage.
Connolly manages even to make the name of the Maine town where the action
takes place seem sinister: it’s called Prosperous.
The Sudden Arrival of Violence by Malcolm Mackay
Mantle, 382pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Not many crime writers can claim to have created a truly original style.
Mackay has done so in his Glasgow Trilogy (of which this is the last), a
feat all the more remarkable for a native of Stornaway who had rarely
visited the big city. His central character, Calum MacLean, is a young but
brilliant hitman who wants to quit the job at which he excels. But that
doesn’t suit Glasgow’s gangster milieu, which is full of its own infighting.
Blood is shed, people are betrayed and many die. The plot’s good, but what
grabs even more is his unique way of telling it.
Inspector Maigret by Georges Simenon
Penguin, £6.99. To buy these books for £5.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Penguin is republishing all 75 Maigret novels in new translations, but -
here’s the twist - at the rate of one a month in the order in which they
were written. So far nine have come out. There’s something satisfying in
following from the beginning the development of a character who was to
become the most revered policeman in crime fiction. There’s another reason
for admiring the Maigret novels: they’re short. In that space, however,
Simenon says more than most crime writers do in books three times the
length. Catch up with those already published, then eagerly await your
monthly fix.
Top Summer books: John Sutherland’s top fiction picks
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/fiction/article4138901.ece
Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant
Virago, 320pp, £14.99
Those of us who were around in the early Seventies with bubbling brains and
exploding hormones will remember the biggest act of social optimism since
the founding of the NHS - the “new universities”. Linda Grant, pioneer
student at the gleamingly new university of York, takes a long, fascinating,
look at how that 1970s optimism, brave new world and all that, soured. It’s
the kind of novel they should give away with the graduation scroll, in case
you expect too much from life. The party didn’t last long, but it was fun
while it did.
To buy this book for £13.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
Hutchinson, 304pp, £14.99
So much about the “Great War” is being forced down their throats, we’re told,
that youngsters are getting bored with trench mud and are clicking back to Call
of Duty. Video games have it over Wilfred Owen every time. The best GW
novel their parents are likely to come across this anniversary year is Helen
Dunmore’s The Lie. Its thesis? There are no truths worth dying
for. There is, however, if you dig deep, some essential goodness in
humanity. Dunmore writes with disarming simplicity and narrative clarity.
Read her novel in one sitting in a quiet place.
To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry
Faber, 288pp, £17.99
To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
Doubleday, Ireland, 160pp, £12.99
To buy this book for £10.80, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Ireland, per capita, produces more good novels than any country in the
English-speaking world. Two Irish novelists (in addition to the
all-conquering, wholly impenetrable, Eimear McBride) warrant close attention
this year: Sebastian Barry, with The Temporary Gentleman, and Donal
Ryan, whose The Spinning Heart did an autopsy on the corpse of the
Celtic tiger. Barry is mid-career and rising steadily. His latest novel, the
third instalment of the McNulty saga, returns to the perennial Joycean
theme, exile. Barry, I predict, is destined to join Joyce and Beckett in the
Irish pantheon. Not this year, perhaps, but soon.
Echo’s Bones by Samuel Beckett
Faber, 160pp, £20
There was, coincidentally, 24 years after his death, a new work of fiction by
Samuel Beckett this year, Echo’s Bones - a short story dropped
from his first collection, More Pricks than Kicks (a title designed
to get up the nose of the Irish censors). The publisher declined to include Echo’s
Bones on the very reasonable grounds that he couldn’t make head nor tail
of it. At last those heads and tails are sorted out with two pages of notes
for every page of text by the scholar Mark Nixon. Makes me proud to be a
pointy-headed professor.
To buy this book for £17, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Canongate, 304pp, £15
What’s the best “war is hell” novel this war-obsessed year? No contest, Phil
Klay’s Redeployment. Klay, a marine who served in the Iraq
“surge”, returned to take a course in creative writing. Brave man. His
narrative opens, brutally: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on
purpose and called it ‘Operation Scooby’. I’m a dog person, so I thought
about that a lot.” Like Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More
Than You Klay’s narrative, which comes at the reader like rounds from an
M80, is pitched artfully halfway between fiction and frontline reportage.
They should have bound the novel in Kevlar.
To buy this book for £13.50, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
or call 0845 2712134