Summer Reading
Lunate contributors and friends on the books they’re reading this summer
So Mayer
Pride Month x Indie Bookstore Week coincide in June, so I’m enjoying recommendations from my fellow booksellers! From Jim at Gays the Word, A Bookshop of One's Own by Jane Cholmeley and The Queer Arab Glossary, edited by Marwan Kaabour and stunningly illustrated by Haitham Haddad; from Clive and Maria at Voce Books; all this here, now by Anna Stern, translated by Damion Searls, from the ever-brilliant lolli editions; and The Seers by Sulaiman Adonis from the equally brilliant Prototype. Team Common Press served the young adult edition of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I'm reading with my niblings. And team Burley Fisher tempted me with The Corporeal Life of Seafaring by Laleh Khalili and the exhilarating Wild East by Ashley Hickson-Lovence. Shout out also to Jake Hall’s Shoulder to Shoulder, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival is a Promise and Hesse K.’s Disquiet Drive from the unmissable Pilot Press, incredible and life-changing books due out later this summer. I can't wait to hear Hesse read at the Hastings Queer Book Festival in August to keep that indie bookshop pride alive 💜
Linda Mannheim
I just picked up Glen James Brown’s new novel, Mother Naked, at an excellent launch event. Curandera, Irenosen Okojie’s latest, is just out and there’s a copy on its way to me right now. I finally got my hands on a copy of Catherine McNamara’s new collection, Carnal Fugues, and I’ll be reading it when I’m on the road next week. I’ve got a subscription to Libro.fm and am going to take this opportunity to tell everyone it’s an excellent source for audio books -- they've got a huge catalogue and you can choose an independent bookstore to support with each purchase. I’ve just downloaded Zadie Smith reading The Fraud and will be listening to it during my travels. I’m also planning to listen to The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. That title!
Niamh Campbell
I have finished one wonderful thing, Isaac by Curtis Garner, which is a masterful and very enjoyable queer coming-of-age story published in November 2024; I am looking forward to Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, which has been out for ages but which I am only now getting around to. My students always ask for fantasy texts for their creative writing studies and I tend to be at a loss, since I hate pulp wizardry, so this is my attempt to compromise by teaching something literary, but with magic. Just now, I’m reading Long Island by Colm Toibín. It is crisp and scrupulous in the style of John McGahern or Dubliners-level James Joyce, which meets my beach read requirements. Like everyone I am eager to read the incoming Sally Rooney.
Sophie Parkes
I’m in the final stages of a PhD and I’ve been keeping a note on my phone for the past couple of years of everything that I’d really like to read but haven’t got round to yet. This summer, all being well, I’m finally going to indulge. Euphoria by Elin Cullhed caught my eye as I’m interested in fictionalising ‘real’ lives, especially those who lived very public lives; conversely, Mother Naked by Glen James Brown takes a fragment of a real life and breathes enormity into it. I think they will make a good pairing. I very much like the sound of Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie, though I suspect it might give me ideas that should’ve been in my PhD so you’ll probably find me crying into its spine instead. I’ve been dying to read A Flat Place by Noreen Masud since I first heard about it, intensified by her hilarious posts on social media, while Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen and Sports and Social by Kevin Boniface earned their places on my list by title alone (but Bluemoose Books always hit the spot). Now, just to finish these appendices…
Lara Williams
I’ve not done a ton of reading this year because I’ve been too butterfly brained and depressed, but I have done some. Two standouts for me have been…
The Flat Place by Noreen Massud. An absolutely beautiful and confronting book about complex PTSD and landscapes. I finished this book on a flight and had to put my sunglasses on to cry my eyes out, so the beautifully dressed Russian lady sat beside me, eating from a tupperware box filled with plain, chopped iceberg lettuce, didn’t notice me sobbing.
All Fours by Miranda July. I read it in incremental little chunks, because I felt so aware I would never be able to read it for the first time again. I might start compulsively buying a copy whenever I see one, like Mel Gibson with Catcher In The Rye in Conspiracy Theory (1997). That is how much I loved this book!
Ruby Cowling
A recent very good book I actually read on holiday: Katherine Heiny’s short story collection Games and Rituals. But reading’s a bit of a challenge just now as I haven’t quite accepted that I need proper reading glasses. (And publishers are saving money by printing small! I’m not imagining it!) Anyway, I’m in two minds about what’s next: do I try to finish Cloud Cuckoo Land (Antony Doerr), which started quite excitingly but is bogging me down after 168pp? (I loved Memory Wall, but his novels might be too sickly-sentimental for me.) Or do I turn to my tantalising TBR shelf? I’m itching to start James by Percival Everett, and Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor. I’ve also got Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac on there, which I bought in hardback because I was so desperate to get it, only to find myself scared about what might happen if I opened my mind any further to the mind of Labatut. The Everett will probably win out due to his 100% record of being ace in every previous book.
Lucie McKnight Hardy
Two books I read recently and highly recommend – one an oldie and one a new release.
Harriet Said… was the first novel Beryl Bainbridge wrote, albeit her third to be published, and possibly my favourite of hers I’ve read so far. The nameless teenaged narrator is unashamedly, but subtly, manipulated by her friend Harriet into taunting a middle-aged neighbour, with the objective of humiliating him. The pair are ostensibly groomed by the man and his friend, but it soon becomes unclear who is attempting to coerce whom. In typical Bainbridge style, the characters’ motivations are not always laid bare, and there is something elusive about this novel, which makes the horrific ending all the more powerful.
Forthcoming in August is Rachelle Atalla’s The Salt Flats, which I devoured a couple of months ago and am still thinking about. Set in a retreat on the salt flats of Bolivia, this is the compelling and highly original tale of Martha and Finn’s attempt at repairing their relationship as part of an isolated and intense community. Atalla’s prose is elegant and faultless, and there is a growing sense of unease which reaches an almost unbearable intensity. An ambitious and hugely imaginative novel.
Adam Farrer
I’m in the final stages of writing a book and my brain is blaring right now, but one thing that has given me comfort over the last few months has been escaping my own book and diving into other people’s.
Ania Card’s forthcoming Above Us The Sea had me tumbling through the waves of grief, loss, identity and friendship. Tawseef Khan’s Determination, a kaleidoscopic novel exploring the lives caught up in the vagaries of immigration law, is as believable and compelling as any memoir. Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg hit me like a feral mashup of And The Ass Saw The Angel and Lord of the Flies. It felt like it could have sprouted legs and crawled off my bedside table at any moment. Miranda France’s The Writing School would have made my books of 2023 if I’d got to it before last week. Variously moving, tender and sharply funny, it’s a phenomenal piece of work. I’ve also been revisiting Elmore Leonard, whose books are an education in the use of dialogue. Every line feels real and completely suited to its character. I just wolfed Freaky Deaky, am halfway through Get Shorty and Rum Punch is waiting in the wings.'
Kate Vine
A great summer read requires a certain balance. A recent novel that nailed it was Francesca Reece’s Glass Houses. Exploring belonging and community in Wales, it shifts between radical nationalism and an unashamedly sexy love story with exhilarating pace.
Refreshing takes on autofiction have also proved interesting. The Paris Trilogy by Colombe Schneck (translated by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer), echoed Simone de Beauvoir in its calm yet brutal dissection of the everyday harms of womanhood. Lost on me by Veronica Raimo (translated by Leah Janeczko), conversely, is one of few books to make me laugh out loud – repeatedly – capturing the specific absurdities of life as a storyteller.
There’s much to look forward to this summer too. Having devoured her nonfiction, I can’t wait to read Lauren Elkin’s fiction debut, Scaffolding: a Parisian tale of fidelity and psychoanalysis, it sounds deliciously intense. I’m equally excited for Aysegül Savas’s new novel, The Anthropologists – her prose is at once spare and explosive; I’ll read anything she writes.
Glen James Brown
I’m really looking forward to Goodlord: An Email by Ella Frears, which was published a few weeks ago. The book is a fictional-memoir that takes the form of one long, howling email to an estate agent. According to the blurb, Goodlord… is ‘as funny as it is harrowing, and beautifully skewers the contemporary housing crisis while questioning the fundamental desires, drivers and disappointments that lie at the heart of our obsession with ‘property’.
The concept itself is enough to flambé my head. I love fiction that experiments with form. I love fiction that takes these risks in service to topics the majority of publishing doesn’t deem worthy, even though the housing crisis is something so many of us are affected by. We need literature that tackles this stuff with verve and originality. Frears seems to have done just that.
Gary Kaill
I’ve finally finished a longform dual review of two extraordinary recently published novels and, so, the prospect of reading for ‘fun’ again for a while appeals like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve promoted Out of Human Sight by Sophie Parkes to the top of my stupidly tall reading pile. I was lucky enough to read parts of this debut in a creative workshop (run by the inestimable Susan Barker) while studying on the Creative Writing degree at MMU a few years back and I’m looking forward to seeing — far too late in the day! — how it all turned out. Very well, I imagine. I have a copy of the recent re-issue of Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant and a proof of Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. Both look, for very different reasons, right up my street. On top of that, lots of friends have been recommending recently published books by Noreen Masud (A Flat Place) and Amy Twigg (Spoilt Creatures) and both are on the list. I think I’ll go back to Stephen King this summer, too. Late King is a mixed bag, of course, but his new short story collection, You Like it Darker, has received good reviews, and I hear it contains a mini-sequel to Cujo. If true, I’m in for that alone.