Six Books For The Summer
With long summer days and (hopefully for many!) some decent time off ahead of us, we’ve compiled a reading list for the months ahead. Lucky for us, it’s a bumper season in publishing. There was a long list of contenders for this reading list, but we’ve done our best to pick our top 6 must-reads over the summer.
The Season, Helen Garner
Helen Garner could write about the most boring thing in the world and make it profound and gripping. 200+ pages on her grandson’s suburban AFL team? We don’t hesitate. We’re in. In The Season, we follow a classic Garner narrator with an eye for the unexpected detail as she replays the epic theatre of watching her grandson train and play in the Under 16s AFL football in Melbourne. The writing is about much more than football (of course) and makes for a perfect slow summer read when there’s time to soak in and enjoy every word of Garner’s world.
Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst
If you have space for one big heart-wrenching novel this summer, let it be Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst. The highly anticipated new novel by the British Novelist traces themes of life across decades, as it follows actor Dave Win over seventy years of life. We see how Dave is shaped by those he meets and how his experiences have a lasting influence on his life. An epic tale of a life’s course, Our Evenings is languid and immersive, a novel to lose yourself in on long summer nights.
Three Days In June, Anne Tyler
Summer is always a good time to read Anne Tyler, and her new release, Three Days in June, is no exception. With a mother-of-the-bride protagonist in the throes of wedding drama, this novel has everything we’ve come to love from Anne Tyler, with scintillating family dynamics, intriguing characters, and long-held secrets revealed…It’s due for release just in time for the season's final weeks, on the 11th of February. Pre-ordering is always a good idea.
James, Percival Everett
James is the newest release by acclaimed author Percival Everett and is a powerful reimagination of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of Jim— a man fleeing slavery who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River.
Everett’s retelling is thought-provoking and powerful. There are many moments of intensity, and scenes you will want to sit with for a while. A great read for when idle days of summer run their course and you find yourself ready for some deep thinking once more.
It was announced just a few weeks ago that James won the National Book Award for Fiction in the U.S.
Show Don’t Tell, Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld (another author whose every word we hang off) is about to release her second short story collection, Show Don’t Tell, which comes out right at the end of this summer.
In typical Sittenfeld style, humour mixes with intelligence through stories of love, friendship, ambition and fame. An absolute pro about bringing out a character’s inner life, Sittenfeld binds us to her characters before we realise she’s done so. In Show Don’t Tell, we meet some who will stick with us forever, including the return of a much-loved character from one of our favourite Sittenfeld novels of the past (Prep, to be specific).
Good Cooking Everyday, Julia Busuttil Nishimura
You know what’s a revelation? A cookbook that you will actually cook from! Both a “grow-up” and a companion to her first cookbook, Ostro, released in 2017, Good Cooking Everyday does what it says on the tin and inspires with recipes you’d really want to cook every day.
The first thing that struck us as we flipped through the pages of Julia’s newly-released fourth cookbook was how approachable, appealing and realistic every recipe in this book was. Not a single “that’ll never happen” crossed our minds as we perused the breads and tarts, comforting soups, imaginative pasta dishes, share plates, salads and desserts. Yes, even the desserts. It is an excellent new cookbook from which to feed your people and fill the summer days.