Murderous Debuts, Edge-of-Your-Seat Thrillers and Complicated Love Affairs–16 Spirited Reads to See You Into Summer
From buzzy debuts to old favourites, the books to see you through summer.
Summer’s round the corner and from fresh debuts to the welcome return of some old favourites, we have everything you need to make the most of those first long, lingering days in the park or by the pool. Whether you opt for a rollickingly wicked account of murder and revenge, a tangled tale of love and friendship, or a tender exploration of grief (with a full cast of ghosts on the side, no less) is up to you. What we can guarantee is that once you start to dip into this lot, you’ll won’t want to put any of them down. Happy reading!
Editor's Picks
In what might well be the standout debut of the summer, Thompson’s darkly comic novel follows Yrsa, a Cambridge PhD student studying the intersection of race with violence and the liberation of Black women. On the surface, she’s a friendly, willing and compliant friend and colleague. Underneath? Pure cool, calculated rage. When a friend and fellow post-grad is unceremoniously dumped by the older research professor that she’s been having an affair with, Yrsa sets out to confront him, leading to his untimely ‘accidental’ death by a killer bee. And so Yrsa sets off on her righteous, murderous rampage, upping the ante – and her own justification for her behaviour – with each act of violence. As the body count grows, so does her desire to enact her brand of so-called revenge in ever more elaborate ways. Is she killing because she has a point to score, some deep-seated psychological issue, or she simply enjoying it? Thompson’s tale moves at a cracking pace and will have you equal parts rooting for and horrified by Yrsa’s increasingly slapdash quest for justice right through to the bitter end.
Kinsella’s fascinating tale of the struggle for self-determinism in art and life offers a sharp, beautifully nuanced insight into inspiration, the push and pull of the long ties that bind, and who owes whom what in pursuit of personal and creative freedom. We meet aspiring actress Frida in mid-Noughties Dublin. Since leaving left drama school several years before, she’s struggled to land roles and is on the point of giving up when a mutual friend sets up a meeting with up-and-coming playwright John Reddan. The pair immediately share a professional and emotional connection, leading them to work together on a number of creative projects together for better and worse. The novel charts the ups and downs of their personal and professional journeys as the pair move from friends to lovers to estrangement and various degrees back again over a near two-decade stretch of changing fortunes.
Following the loss of their unborn baby, Phoebe and Clare have moved to the former’s family farm in the hope that a new location will bring a fresh start for them both. But while Clare returns quickly to the busy rhythms of farming life, Phoebe’s loss is not so easily salved. With little to distract her and feeling increasingly isolated and alone, she withdraws more deeply into herself. That is until one day, while walking in the woods, she comes across an abandoned baby hare (the leveret of the title) and sets about rebuilding the bond she lost with the premature death of their daughter. What follows is a deeply haunting tale of grief and loss. Goldreich’s spare, beautiful prose captures the essence of both women’s struggle to grapple not only with the pain of that loss but the ever-yawning rift it has opened between them. A vivid and mesmerisingly powerful debut.
When 23-year-old Yosye is given the opportunity to leave her small village in Nigeria to move to Lagos, she can’t believe her luck: the city offers an opportunity to reinvent herself and kickstart her life. But if her junior position in a shiny architectural firm trusted with building an equally shiny new city on land reclaimed from the sea feels like a winning ticket, elsewhere in the city, things are becoming rather more sinister, as a series of self-drownings by pregnant women begins to reach near-epidemic proportions. When Yosye discovers herself to be pregnant after a one-night-stand, she’s drawn deeper into the city and its secrets, and as the death toll rises, it becomes clear something beyond her understanding is afoot. What price must be paid to create the luxury vision of new Lagos of the Architect’s dreams – and is Yosye willing to sacrifice what’s needed to serve it? Aguda’s vividly written, fable-like debut offers a superb parable of loneliness greed and desire full of creeping dread in a narrative that’s all the more powerful for its beautifully controlled prose.
Like her much-lauded Dreamland (an adaptation of which is coming to small screens soon), Rankin-Gee’s latest novel is set in a slightly dystopian, near-future. In this case, an all-too-plausible tech-driven London in thrall to a new right-wing-led coalition government determined to rinse the state for everything it can. We meet Elle – a forecaster for the most sinister of the tech giants in question – after a shocking week at work. Desperate to unwind, she attends a dinner party where she meets Ed. They share an instant connection that blossoms into friendship, then attraction, then – could it be possible? – love. Both their lives are complicated by Ella’s morally dubious job and their own sexuality: debut novelist Ed is held up as the voice of gay young men everywhere, while Elle has long been sure she is firmly committed to women. In a thoughtful, challenging questioning of both their motivations, Rankin-Gee explores the pull and push of queer desire turned unexpectedly heterosexual – while all around them, London burns.
More Summer Reads
Mika is a 24-year-old virgin working long hours in a dull office job in Tokyo – and determined to address that state as soon as she can. Invited to a summer party by her much cooler, better connected best friend, she meets Hawaiian Japanese expat Tai and promptly decides he is the one to solve that ‘terminal’ condition for her. What follows is a relatively slight tale of Mika’s crush and her pursuit of sexual satisfaction, but no one’s coming here for plot: Yamaguchi’s voice is so fresh and vital it leaps from the page and will have you rooting for Mika and her self-absorbed sexual obsessions from first page till last. Lots and lots of fun.
Bannister’s premise reads like a thriller; its execution, however, is more an analysis of the fickle winds of fates and the paths lives can take. Five people converge on a railway platform and we’re told from the top that one of them will die in five minutes time. The question, then, is which one? As the clock ticks down in real time, we’re taken into the pasts of each of the key characters, building out their backstories in a bid to tease out our sympathies (or otherwise) as they come closer to their fate. If the characters in question are archetypes to the point of near-caricature – crotchety old lady; harried mum and her tearaway child; bullying businessman; foreign student – their backstories are far stranger than the topline of those archetypes suggest, serving a plot that has much to say about moral responsibility and consequences. Told in an arm’s-distance narrative style with plenty of dry humour and a sharp eye for a takedown, this twisty, genre-bending debut deserves every one of the plaudits sure to be coming its way.
Joey and Chuck meet in an east London bar and enjoy a night of flirting and so-so sex that, somewhat surprisingly to them both, slowly, stumblingly, leads to more. On paper, the pair are a curious match: Joey, 23 and working in a coffee bar, is pure gen-rent; Chuck, 35, is struggling with anxiety and depression after a cancelled engagement and problems with his work as a copywriter (‘lead copywriter’, he emphasises) at a creative startup). But they both share a similar yearning for finding more meaning in their lives and in their shared passion for writing and so the slow burn of their romance begins. The novel is both an old-school romance and a sharp satire of online life and of trying to stay afloat in the unforgiving rush of contemporary London, and Calder does a good job of balancing both. These are people we root for. A charming, sympathetic debut.
Pester’s newest collection of short stories is a treat. The Sail Away Land of the title represents the liminal space between life and death, presented as both a literal and metaphorical place according to each story. A question about performance in the workplace reveals the psychological cracks of its interviewee far back into childhood; a young boy hanging around a playground yearns to join in with the other kids but cannot for reasons slowly revealed; a group of workers are given the go-ahead to drink a mysterious liquid that will take them into lands unknown via the doorway in another colleague’s head. (‘There is a free bar,’ the office manager offers when asked what it’s like through there.) Together, they add up to a selection of brilliantly weird, beautifully written tales that, while surreal, are anchored in such vivid, humane prose they feel all too plausibly everyday.
At first glance, Riley’s slim seventh novel is a tale of the friendship between Laura and her friend Putnam, set against the changing face of London and its shifting media landscape over the decades since they first met. And to a degree that’s true: we meet the pair of them on a stifling hot afternoon as the city is drenched in the orange glow of Saharan dust storm as Putnam – still reeling from the death of his father not long before – announces his departure from the literary magazine where they first met after a new editor is brought in to shake things up. From here, however, Riley proceeds to peel back the layers on what Putnam perceives to be Laura’s considerably more carefree life. And so the tale proceeds to dissolve into the complexities and traumas of her own past, from her distantly uncaring mother to her grooming by a second-rate comedian with chilling shades of Jimmy Savile. Presented in Riley’s trademark chillingly precise, diamond-cut prose, it’s both devasting and horribly everyday, revealing the secret stories we all carry with us and the friendships that bind.
It’s 1980s New York and self-styled ‘dyke-about-town’ Renata, who just happens to be able to see ghosts, is mourning the death of her best friend, Mark. from the terrifying new disease (Aids) that has been decimating her East Village community over recent months. Her loss is made greater by the fact that while it seems every other freshly minted local ghost has made an appearance, Mark has so far failed to show. Meanwhile, a mysterious, clean-up operation is underway, offering to rid the old tenements and buildings of supernatural presences and general bad vibes to the monied incomers who are rapidly gentrifying the neighbourhood. Adler’s debut is a loving elegy to loss, friendship and changing times that, even if it all gets a little too Ghostbusters at times, remains rooted in the deep connective tissue of love, friendship and community.
Gilmartin’s third novel tells the tale of a pair of Dublin-living friends across four decades. We meet them as they gather together for the first time after the pandemic, an event that’s changed them all in different ways. Most notably, on the surface at least, former star rugby player Dylan, who’s struggles to recover from long Covid have brought strain to his marriage with Rachel. Meanwhile, overworked physiotherapist Stevie is feeling the strain of her relationship with underemployed actor Ben, who she’s been with since university. When Ben lands a key part in a production of Pinter’s Betrayal life threatens to imitate art as the couple’s decades-long friendships and animosities – and various secrets that have long been running under the surface – are brought to bear, causing a fatal fissure through their friendship. A sharply told tale of love, desire and the cost of what might have been.
Daphne is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband when she runs into a face from her long-ago past – her former stepfather Eddie, who disappeared from her life following the near-fatal car accident that was the reason (she’s always believed) her mother choose to divorce him shortly after. Over the weeks and months that follow, the pair reconnect to compare memories of that day and the fallout that followed. But as Daphne delves deeper into her past, she’s forced to confront other realities and truths about what had been going at that time, uncovering a truth she’s unprepared for. Patchett proves her mastery of family dynamics once again in smooth, clean prose. It’s a beautiful, if oddly old-fashioned tale, but fans are in good hands and will not be disappointed.
Strout may have moved away from her familiar worlds of Lucy Barton and Olivia Kitteridge, but her familiar themes of family, loneliness and characters haunted by their pasts remain. On the surface, beloved high-school history teacher Artie Dam has everything he can wish for. Blessed with a long marriage to Evie and a grownup son, he lives in a beautiful house and is loved by his students and community alike. Below the surface, however, all is not well. The hole that opened up in his marriage after his son played a pivotal role in a fatal car crash a decade before has failed to heal. Worried for the state of the world, the state of himself he increasingly fails to see a way forward until a sailing accident brings a shift to his world view that leads to a secret being inadvertently revealed that Artie’s life changes in ways he could never have imagined.
The 1970s was the decade where porno went from top shelf to, if not quite the mainstream, then certainly well into the public consciousness, thanks in large part to the burgeoning – then booming – pornographic magazine and film industry. Rowbottom’s tale of friendship and fortune within this setting proves a suitably salacious backdrop in which young friends Winnie and Jude set out to carve new lives for themselves. But when Jude disappears things get decidedly real. Thirty years later Winnie sets out to find out what happened, taking us all along for the ride.
Gangland Hong Kong serves as the backdrop to Cho’s intriguing tale of Dragon Head’s daughter, Ehuna, whose family’s efforts to protect her from the worst of their dealings go awry when her son is kidnapped in a show of power between rival gangs. We follow her story and that of her family and childhood love as she wrestles with her past and the secrets that have followed her into adulthood. It’s an arresting tale, solidly and affectingly told in which the bonds of love, loyalty and family mean all.
