Five must-read novels for summer

Posted on 28 December, 2020

In a year in which it may feel like summer has been cancelled (for the second year in a row), what we all need is a bit of distraction. Books can assist.

It may not be the most novel (pun intended) approach to 2020 but it is certainly the most COVID-safe. Whether you’re reading while you’re beached as or on the couch as you wait for a familial Zoom, these books are guaranteed to make you feel a little less socially isolated.

Ghosts – Dolly Alderton

A perfect beach read, Ghosts is the story of Nina George Dean, the last bastion of singleton-ness in her group of smug married and smug procreated friends. Sound a bit familiar? ‘Come the fuck on, Bridget’.

After an intense, wine-fuelled romance with a seemingly perfect man who tells Nina he loves her after only a few months, Nina finds her texts suddenly and unexpectedly being met with silence. She’s been communicatively stonewalled with not even an eggplant emoji to comfort her. Nina is being ghosted by a Nearly Headless Dick.

Dolly Alderton brings her signature wit and x-ray analysis to the vagaries of modern dating, while also cleverly building on some of the themes from her memoir (like female friendship). It is an effortless story with deliciously acerbic jokes and addictive dialogue. Was it a tad formulaic? Sure. Did I nonetheless love every minute of it? Yes.

The Inheritors – Hannelore Cayre

This is my choice for all those readers who won’t have as much time to get lost in a book as they might like this summer, perhaps due to demanding children (or parents, for that matter).

The Inheritors switches between the perspectives of Blanche de Rigny, who is a modern-day Breton entrepreneur with a disability and a modicum of moral reprehensibleness, and Auguste, a young socialist in an early 19th century France poised on the brink of war with Prussia, trying to avoid conscription through his family’s richesse.

Both are drawn so well and Cayre does not shy away from colouring outside the lines. Cayre excoriates society with much hilarity, sanguinity and insight. Much like Cayre’s other novella The Godmother, The Inheritors features unashamed female criminality. The crimes are mostly victimless and demonstrate the injustice of societal inequities (here for a disabled woman) that should in some way be redressed—perhaps even by one’s own hands.

Cayre writes with a sharp and incisive brilliance. And she is funny. Very funny. May you find time to hide from family and stifle a giggle as you read this book. 

Sorrow & Bliss – Meg Mason

Sorrow & Bliss features biting commentary, incisive and witty lines, a strong but lost female protagonist, and a normalisation of mental health issues.

Its protagonist Martha has been inexplicably throwing things at her husband, and feeling excruciatingly jealous of her fecund sister, a sister who had typically been her closest ally against a drunken mother and an ineffectual father, but whose primary focus is now her numerous children.

Martha is constantly sad or ill at ease or incapable of getting through a day. She doesn’t know why and she feels helpless. This is a compelling, compassionate and strangely comedic story, told cleverly and non-linearly with a terrific cast of flawed, flamboyant characters, each giving the reader a window into the aspects of Martha that she herself doesn’t understand. Just don’t get so engrossed you forget to slip, slop and slap.

All Our Shimmering Skies – Trent Dalton

Unlike Molly Hook, the 12-year-old, motherless gravedigger girl at the centre of All Our Shimmering Skies, my heart has not begun to turn to stone and so it was with pooling tears and a sigh of gentle oblivion that I closed the pages of this book.

It is an awe-inspiring story of chasing family, redemption, belonging and justice that is threaded delicately with pure unadulterated gold. Dalton unearths the glittering metallurgy of human nature, of self-sacrifice, of succumbing to and overcoming hurt, and of transcendence.

This book didn’t vibrate with the same need to tell its story as Boy Swallows Universe did. But that’s ok. It was rather a tender entreaty to act with kindness, an important reminder at this time of year.

Take A Hint, Dani Brown – Talia Hibbert

This is such a binge-able story. Protagonists Danika and Zafir were beautifully diverse, both as a reflection of the realities of the makeup of society and within themselves.

Hibbert deftly plays with gender roles. Danika, the woman in this relationship is the ambitious workaholic commitment-phobe keen for a friend with benefits and the man is an avid reader of romance novels who fervently believes in happily ever afters (and happy endings … if you get my drift). All the characters (including peripheral ones) are so far from being one-sided they’re pretty much dodecagons.

As far as contemporary romances go, this one is rich and fulfilling. My one warning is that Take A Hint, Dani Brown is very smutty so beware of reading it in the vicinity of awkward family members, particularly if you’ve had a Pimms or two.