Best summer books: Harper Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro and David Nicholls

From some monumentally huge non-fiction to numerous superb anniversary editions of Alice in Wonderland, David Sexton picks the most rewarding reading to take on holiday
An Elizabethan Idyll — In the Manner of Nicholas Hilliard, taken from Portrait: 30 Portraits of Roy Strong (Frances Lincoln, £20)
David Sexton9 July 2015

Didn’t you know? It’s only worth offering opinions about books if you’ve read them. No exceptions. Sorry. This basic rule makes most “summer reading” features, in which pundits say not what they’ve read but what they plan to read on their hols, a nonsense, or at best a laugh. Yet even the gloriously high-minded Times Literary Supplement produces a “Books for Summer” feature now in which some of their reviewers “discuss the books they’d like to read on holiday”. Well, not “discuss” exactly — more “guess”, to tell the truth.

So the TLS’s stately experts tell us what they are “planning to explore this summer”, what they are “looking forward” to “spending time with” or “to dipping deeper into” or just plain “catching up with”. Some even strive, in their donnish way, to make their offerings a bit festive. ”What’s more perfect for the beach” than “two short works by the charmingly playful, lucidly destructive Spanish novelist, Enrique Vila-Matas?” asks Adam Thirlwell. No answer to that, sunny boy, unless it’s a charmingly playful, lucidly destructive, well-chilled lager.

Another contributor, a certain Michael LaPointe, commences: “Just as in summer I crave cold, syrupy, fizzy drinks, so I seem drawn to novels that embrace a refreshing artificiality. For this reason, I am looking forward to The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato…” Literary 7 Up, is it? Nice.

Some book review pages sagely get around the problem of which as yet unread books to recommend by listing nearly all of that have appeared in the last few months, covering the waterfront though not offering much guidance to it. Or there’s always the approach that was taken back in the day by good old Denis Healey, who invariably announced as his top tip, year after year, that this summer he was planning to re-read the complete poems of W B  Yeats and Emily Dickinson, presumably to show what a big hinterland he had.

Yet we would all like some useful advice on what to take: books that will absorb us, might even reward and restore us, beyond the latest slightly lame Lee Child or the decidedly non-vintage new Stephen King. So here’s our highly selective, reprehensibly subjective, list of what we think’s good to pack this summer, whether weightlessly on your e-reader or as good old-fashioned print, if you’re feeling strong. This turns out to be the year of mighty long reads: some of them enough for a month in the country all by themselves. These are books we believe to be truly worth your precious time.

Non-fiction

Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts (Penguin paperback, £12.99)

Still a massively hefty item as as a 936-page paperback, this biography is incredibly compelling and clarifying not just about Napoleon but also about the France he left behind him: the life itself is simply one of the most extraordinary stories in world history and Roberts does it justice. Even those previously indifferent or averse to the emperor will find themselves hooked.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad, trans Sarah Death (Virago, £16.99)

By the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, this is the most remarkable, responsible true crime reporting, piecing together the story of the killing of 77 people on one day in July 2011 from all sides, including that of the victims as well tracking the dreadful course taken by the perpetrator. It makes most crime fiction, Scandinavian or not, seem paltry, irrelevant and tasteless.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A Caro (Bodley Head, £35)

A 1,312-page book, first published in 1975, about the “master builder” of New York (1888-1981), who was never elected to public office but became the great shaper of the modern city? It sounds a bit much for the sun-lounger. But this is irresistibly readable, an outright masterpiece and unparalleled insight into how power works and perhaps the greatest portrait ever of a world city. Obama read it when he was 22 and was mesmerised: it shaped his thinking about politics, he says. Alas, by the author’s request, it’s not been made available as an e-book — but perhaps it could be fitted with wheels? Battery-driven.

Genghis Khan: The Man Who Conquered the World by Frank McLynn (Bodley Head, £25)

If you are going to read a big biography, it should be of somebody who made a difference — and Temujin certainly did that, putting Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon in the shade as a monstrous conqueror. Frank McLynn is a fluent, highly productive military historian and biographer and he has synthesised a brilliantly entertaining narrative.

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 by Zachary Leader (Cape, £35)

Here’s the big (812-page) literary biography of the year, making the most of unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, presenting the genius at the heart of American literary culture in the 20th century in all his grandeur, originality and wildness. One of the reasons it’s so long is that it tries to detail all his affairs. Just saying.

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 by Zachary Leader

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £20)

A fantastic source-book of language and literature, nature and place by the writer who has revolutionised the subject and inspired a whole literary movement. Supplement it with the delightful picture book Uncommon Ground: A Word-lover’s Guide to the British Landscape by Dominick Tyler (Guardian/Faber, £16.99).

The English and Their History by Robert Tombs (Penguin paperback, £14.99).

A brilliantly told history of us, not the Scots, not the Welsh, not the Irish, just us, by a highly opinionated, always entertaining Cambridge professor of history. Quirky, incisive and fearlessly revisionist in its 1,024 pages.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Vintage paperback, £8.99).

A headclutchingly provocative account of our species from the Stone Age to the present by a young Israeli academic. Stunningly ambitious and compellingly written. They call it macro-history. They’re right.

Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome by Rachel Roddy

Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome by Rachel Roddy (Salt Yard Books, £25).

The cookbook to take this summer, deliciously readable as well easy and tempting to use, getting the simplest dishes just right. Food-blogger Rachel Roddy spends a year living in the Testaccio area of Rome and tells it day by day, so sympathetically: beautifully produced, too.

Fiction

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador, £16.99)

Hanya Yanagihara is a 40-year-old Hawaian-born editor at Condé Nast Traveller in New York. This is her second novel and it is immensely powerful. Yanagihara traces the careers of four college friends, all men (she’s less interested in women), as they strive to form careers and confront disappointment in their lives — most notably, a lawyer, Jude, professionally successful but unable to escape his abusive childhood and damaged body. It is at once heartrending and unstoppable. Published here on August 13 (when it will be reviewed) but, oddly, the American edition is readily available here already as is the e-book (recommended, since it is 720 pages).

Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis (Cape, £20)

This is an astonishing debut (surely likely to feature in the Booker longlist later this month) by an expert on Dickens and in particular the first illustrator and possibly the original creator of The Pickwick Papers, Robert Seymour. It tells a surprising version of the story behind this comic masterpiece, completely contradicting the version later put about by Dickens himself, after Seymour’s death. Jarvis fills out this story with truly Dickensian creative energy himself, funnily enough, haring after every digression, suddenly following a new character, giving us a life of the Great Grimaldi, all narrated from the vantage point of an assistant to a present day scholar and collector. Worth all its 802 pages — and a great prompt to go back to one of the funniest books in the language.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £20)

Ishiguro’s first novel since his masterpiece Never Let Me Go of 10 years ago, is a weird one. It’s set in post-Arthurian Britain and features knights, ogres, wizardry and a dragon, just as if it was Game of Thrones. But it couldn’t be more dissimilar, being the story of a lost elderly couple, suffering from amnesia, on a mysterious quest, told in a strangely formal, distant, dislocated fashion, paying homage to Malory. You couldn’t say it is suspenseful but it lingers strangely in the mind: a wonderfully odd, late addition to Arthurian literature.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate, £20)

Franzen’s keenly awaited new novel isn’t published here or in the States until September, so it’s not in the shops anywhere yet: sorry. But proofs are circulating around London and it’s the book everybody asks everybody else if they’ve read yet at every literary shebang. Purity is yet another whopper (563 pages) about a Julian Assange-type figure with a dubious past, and it embraces Dickensian melodrama and coincidence, not to mention great expectations and an updated Miss Havisham. Beg, borrow, steal.

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (Heinemann, £18.99)

Published next Tuesday, including as an e-book and audiobook narrated by Reese Witherspoon. Almost nobody has read this discovery from the vaults yet, so who knows if it will live up to or even transcend To Kill a Mocking-Bird? But many of us are devoutly hoping it will in any case outsell E L James’s Fifty Shades re-write, Grey — for James has, painfully for all who value good writing, flogged 688,320 units in two weeks. Rescue us, Harper Lee!

Us by David Nicholls (Hodder, £7.99).

Quickly moved on to paperback, Us is the perfect fast holiday read, being about a holiday that goes wrong, when separating couple Douglas and Connie take their teenage son Albie on a farewell grand tour of Europe and he does a runner. Another emotive, page-turning saga from Nicholls, right, the One Day mogul.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £20).

Atkinson’s previous novel, the terrific Life after Life, told and re-told different versions of one woman’s life. In this companion piece she tells the story of his brother more or less straight, but no less powerfully. “Be warned — this book will stick like one of your own memories or dreams,” said our reviewer.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett (Weidenfeld, £12.99).

Barnett adopts the Sliding Doors/Groundhog Day alternate-life method for a tearjerking romcom about a couple destined to be together sooner or later, although maybe not forever, and maybe at a cost to their own ambitions, giving us three ways it could go or has gone. Fancy structure, adequate execution.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £12.99).

There’s only one Gone Girl, I am sorry to report, so we have to make do with secondary books about how you never really know your partner… The Girl on the Train, about an alcoholic commuter getting voyeuristically involved in other people’s lives, begins excitingly but then ties itself in a knot rather than offering a satisfying denouement. Never mind: it’s already sold a quarter of a million copies. Try, too, in similar vein, Disclaimer by Renee Knight (Doubleday, £12.99) in which Catherine finds she’s reading a novel which tells her own darkest secret…

The 3rd Woman by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, £12.99).

In the absence of a new high-concept thriller from Robert Harris, here’s the first under his own name from the Guardian journalist who previously wrote his thrillers as Sam Bourne. In a future Los Angeles, now effectively owned by the Chinese, journalist Madison Webb finds that investigating the murder of her younger sister uncovers profound corruption…

Fresh Hell by Rachel Johnson (Penguin, £7.99).

Fluently entertaining, this is volume three of Rachel Johnson’s romcom exposé of the lives of the super-rich in Notting Hill, this time revolving around their crazy excavations of basements, while her alter-ego heroine Mimi goes mad for an arty Frenchie, Farouche. “All women are a little bit mad,” she says. Surely not!

Fresh Hell by Rachel Johnson

Last but not least, for an anniversary classic, don’t forget Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, repackaged in all kinds of formats, from a hardback featuring a lurid jacket designed by Dame Vivienne Westwood (Vintage, £15) to a whoppingly over-sized Complete Alice featuring coloured versions of Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations (Macmillan, £30). Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, £20) is the new book to read about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson but there’s no beating the original. “‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat, ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ “

Happy holidays.

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