‘Why doesn’t summer vacation last until the twenty-first of September? After all, the season doesn’t come to its conclusion on Labor Day weekend. The season of summer lasts until the autumnal equinox – just as surely as the season of spring lasts until the summer solstice. And look at how carefree everyone feels in the middle of summer vacation. Not only the children, but the grown-ups too, who take such pleasure in having a tennis game at ten, a swim at noon, and a gin and tonic at six o’clock on the dot. It stands to reason that if we all agree to let summer vacation last until the equinox, the world would be a much happier place.’
Woolly, The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles (page 416
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles
I could quote so many passages from The Lincoln Highway, but this one, right now struck a chord. We are after all in the dying embers of the summer, aren’t we? The sky more autumnal grey than the cerulean blue of high summer. Social media feeds swapping happy snaps of carefree days spent on beaches and sun loungers with freshly washed and pressed uniformed youngsters on doorsteps as we enter the return to school phase of the year accompanied with the classic cry of OMG where the heck has the time gone?
And so, this passage just made me smile. Because who doesn’t hanker after those idle summer days that just meander and drift. I might not belong to the 10am tennis, swim at noon crew of Woolly’s privileged childhood, but I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing the upside in a regular 6pm Gin & Tonic. It’s 6 o’clock somewhere, right as the song doesn’t go?
But to the story. Set in 1954 America, The Lincoln highway is about two brothers, Emmett and Billy. Emmett is home after serving a short sentence for involuntary manslaughter and his younger brother Billy has been at home waiting for his return. With their father recently dead and their home and farm sold to pay off debts, they embark on a road trip to find their long-lost mother. But nothing is ever that simple, is it? Because enter runaways Duchess and Woolly who have followed Emmett from the detention centre and have their own road trip and master plan in mind.
This is a beautifully written book. What strikes me is how Towles so cleverly gives the reader the time and space to fully get to know each of the main characters. They take it in turns to tell the story and it’s a fabulous way to get to know them. Their personalities are revealed when they’re narrating and when they become a supporting cast member. We get to know them from every angle. Because as much as this book is about Emmett and Billy, it’s also about Duchess and Woolly who definitely deserve to have their stories told too. And I love the way that Sallie (a family friend from the farm) is given her own chapters towards the end of the book too.
Towles tells the story told so elegantly and thoughtfully. He manages to give each characters their own clear and distinct voices and yet there is a thread that unites them all. And that’s Towles writing style. I don’t know how he does it and with a writer’s hat on I am in awe, while as a reader I thank him for writing such a beautiful book. There’s a reason it’s been so loved on Imogen’s Book Café and this one is a keeper. I’m sure I’ll end up reading it again. It’s prompted me to pick A gentleman in Moscow back up and try that again.
Songbirds, Christy Lefteri
After the huge success of The beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri’s follow-up Songbirds is another huge success. I started reading Songbirds earlier this year but didn’t get much further than two or three chapters, but I picked it up again this summer and enjoyed it.
Much like The Lincoln Highway, each character takes it in turn to tell the story but with Nisha always at the heart of it. Nisha is a domestic worker, trafficked from Sri Lanka to Cyprus and finds herself working for widow Petra, looking after her daughter. One night she goes missing. In the telling of the story, we meet Nisha, Petra and Yiannis, Nisha’s lover as he and Petra come together to uncover the truth behind Nisha’s disappearance.
It is a sad, poignant story told with care and it’s a book that wakes all the senses. Lefteri brings Cyprus to life through her descriptions of the natural environment whilst weaving in its social and political history to give context to the story. Revealing the dark truth behind the army of unseen women who ‘walk unseen through our world’ in the process. It is though, at its heart a story about Nisha and the choices she made in order to give her own daughter, the daughter she left behind, a better life.
We planned a simple, lie by the pool or on the beach holiday on the far western coast of the Algarve. Ten days of doing nothing. Andy was worried about getting bored (a pack of cards, a bumper book of word puzzles and jumping the pool and waves his chosen entertainment) but all I could think of were the endless hours of reading ahead of me. Add in the joy of having teenage children who sleep in late and can look after themselves in the pool meant that my summer reading plan might just become reality.
I love choosing which reads to take on holiday, but I really love playing lucky dip with the books on the shelves wherever we’re staying. This is how I managed to read (almost) twelve books in ten days. I do read quickly, but even I don’t normally read so many books in such a short space of time. So, in honour of this big summer read I thought I’d write about them all.
The dirty dozen
Salley Vickers, The Gardener*
Meg Rosoff, Friends like these
Meg Rosoff, The Great Godden
Kate Sawyer, The Stranding
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising*
David Baldacci, Hell’s Corner*
Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close
Ian Rankin, Doors Open
Alan Johnson, The late train to gypsy hill
A walk in the park, Jill Mansell
Joanna Trollope, Sense & Sensibility
Rumaan Alam, Leave the world behind
*My top three holiday reads
The books I packed in my suitcase
Great storytelling, relatable characters and vivid locations
In The Great Godden andFriends like these Meg Rosoff gives a masterclass in fresh and contemporary writing. She is superb at stripping away wordy descriptions that clutter the page and get in the way of the story and characters. This is how you write clearly. Every word earns its keep and reading these two books felt like that welcome shot of caffeine you crave on a sluggish morning.
Friends like these is set in a steamy 1980s Manhattan summer and features four interns jostling for position at a New York newspaper. The story focuses on Beth and her friendship with Edie, one of the other interns. It’s a classy read. The Great Godden is another summer story, but this time we’re on the south coast of England, maybe somewhere like like the Witterings, as one Californian teenager wreaks havoc when he and his younger brother are invited to join his mother’s friends on their annual summer holiday. I loved how Rosoff manages to keep you hooked, despite having a pretty good idea of how the story is going to end. The storyline keeps moving, and boy are the characters and location vivid.
Salley Vickers’The Gardner is a different kind of read and one that I love. Halcyon (Hassie) Days and her sister Margot move to Hope Wenlock in Shropshire after their father dies, buying a Jacobean (or is it) home with their inheritance. It’s a story about relationships, family dynamics, love, loss and the healing power of nature and our surroundings. Hassie is recovering from the heartbreak of a relationship breakdown as well as the death of their father, who she moved in to care for before his death.
The sisters’ relationship isn’t without friction and sharing a home together for the first time since childhood, it gives them the chance to explore the different relationships they had with each of their parents, and the impact that has on their relationship. The location is an important a character, as much as the people, with Hope Wenlock playing a crucial role in restoring Hassie and helping her to find solace. It’s a beautiful read, as I’ve come to expect from Vickers. She has such a talent for weaving people and places together to tell stories beautifully. Love, love, love.
If I’d read the blurb for Kate Sawyer’s The Stranding, I’m not sure I’d have bought it, but I was swayed completely by the plaudits on the back cover and I wasn’t disappointed. Set in the UK and New Zealand, the premise of the book feels fantastical, but having read Ken Follet’s Never a few weeks earlier, it didn’t feel so out there. At its heart, it’s a story about Ruth, a 30-something woman trying to understand herself, her relationships and her place in the world. The story weaves her unhappy London life with her decision to travel to New Zealand, where life as she, and the world knows it is altered irrevocably. Tender, beautiful and worthy of all the praise.
If you want to be transported to the world of surfers, movie stars, dysfunctional families all set against the stunning backdrop of the Pacific Coast, then Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising is for you. It was the first book I pulled off the bookcase in the villa and I devoured it. It’s a cracking read with the Pacific Coast brought to life with its flawed characters, bound by family ties, sharp dialogue and a plot that keeps moving. I wonder if it helped that I was lying under a hot sun and whether I’d have enjoyed it as much if reading it against a dank Yorkshire sky. Who knows! But it was a great read to kick off the holiday.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a David Baldacci, but there always seems to be at least one on the shelf of the holiday home we’re staying in, whether that’s Portugal, Devon or Northumberland.
And I can’t help but be drawn into stories of renegade CIA agents and global politics, and Hell’s Corner doesn’t disappoint. The constant smoke and mirrors, twists and turns keep you guessing throughout as John Carr or is it Oliver Stone reprises his role as the numero uno rogue agent invited back into the fold and charged with solving a bombing in Lafayette Park across the road from White House.
Aided and abetted by his Camel Club friends and a female MI6 agent, the presence of strong female characters – as baddies as well as goodies – was a welcome counterbalance to all that testosterone. I do sometimes feel like I’m drowning in the descriptions though but I’ve learned to spot the details I need to know to keep the story moving rather than getting too bogged down. A great page turner. You know you’re getting a solid, good read with Baldacci.
In Marian Keyes The Mystery of Mercy Close Helen Walsh of the infamous fictitious Walsh family of sisters, takes centre stage as the Private Investigator hired to find a missing member of a once young, now ageing boy band on the cusp of an epic comeback.
I think anyone who can consistently write books that tackle the tougher parts of the human psyche in a way that is honest, authentic and relatable to a mass audience is to be applauded. Behind the sharp dialogue, Keyes tackles alcoholism, depression, family dynamics head on and isn’t afraid of a messy, incomplete ending. Just like real life. That said, this isn’t one of my favourites, I recently picked up Again, Rachel (the older Walsh sister and protagonist of Rachel’s Holiday) and I’m sure I read Watermelon (featuring another sister, Claire Walsh) a long time ago. Still a good read though.
Ian Rankin is one of my go-to crime writers along withVal McDermid and Ann Cleeves. Open Doors isn’t a Rebus book, the prickly detective Rankin is so well known for, instead we meet a new cast of characters. They embark on the audacious theft of significant works of art from a large warehouse that stores works of art and artefacts for the national art gallery and museum during an ‘Open Doors’ weekend. I had a nagging feeling that I’d read this before, or maybe another book or drama with a similar storyline. And sadly, that seemed to get in the way of me properly enjoying this. A solid holiday read, but maybe not a standout Rankin for me.
The only reason I picked up Jill Mansell’s A Walk in the Park because it’s set in Bath, a city we lived in for 13 years and where our children were born. It’s not necessarily a great reason for choosing a book, but there you go!
I have a soft spot for the city, and it adds something to the read when you know the locations. This is a classic teenage boy meets teenage girl, girl disappears to her aunt in Keswick for 18 years because she falls pregnant but then returns with her daughter when her father dies to inherit the family home.
So much of the storyline is predictable. You can see the twists and turns coming a mile off, which doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable, but I’d love to know who came up with the Harry, the Keswick based character with the small business making country clothing. His little workshop is discovered by a Kanye-esque character who’s on tour in the UK. This leads to an unlikely friendship and a sub plot which jarred with the main storyline and left me wondering why they chose to introduce gay characters into the story in such a clumsy way. Frustrating.
I thought I’d give Alan Johnson’s first novel The late train to Gypsy Hill a go, and it was ok. One thing I’ve learned this year in all the writing workshops and tutorials I’ve sat through is the power of ‘showing, not telling’. And I think this falls into the too much telling camp, leaving it a little one dimensional. But the premise of Russian agents poisoning their homegrown enemies on English soil, with a Ukrainian waitress (or is she) playing a crucial role, gives it a very real edge and he deftly keeps the storyline moving. An easy, enjoyable read.
Oh dear….
I was quite partial to a Joanna Trollope Aga Saga in my teens. I think reading all those family dramas made my own dysfunctional family life feel not quite so out there but this, her reworking of Sense and Sensibility was pretty awful. I’m not against an Austen update but this is no Netflix Persuasion (which I thoroughly enjoyed). This on the other hand; one dimensional characters with few redeeming features, clunky storytelling and dialogue. I was really disappointed, I fancied a light, sharp modern telling of the classic, but it didn’t work for me.
A pile of books by the pool, doughnuts on the beach and the poet Mary Oliver, I didn’t really read this, it was more of a dip in and out from time to time.
And finally, I had high hopes for Leave the world behind, but abandoned it. I couldn’t get to grips with the characters, or their relationships. They felt like shadows I just couldn’t quite grasp, rather than fully formed people. I love the idea behind it though. A New York family on holiday in an isolated Airbnb on Long Island when one night, a couple claiming to be the hosts who own the holiday home knock on the door claiming there’s been an East coast blackout and they didn’t want to stay in their Manhattan apartment, craving the safety and security that their countryside home provides instead. Can they come in and stay in the spare room? Phone signals gone. No TV. No connection with the outside world, completely cut off from reality.
It’s weird when a book has so many great reviews, and you can’t get to grips with it. But I really want one of you to read it and let me know what you think! It just wasn’t for me.
That’s all for this time round, I’ll be back next month where I’ll share a few thoughts on far fewer books! Drop me a note and let me know what you’re reading now and what your top reads have been this year.
