With the English countryside baking in the glorious sunshine in recent weeks, it is not difficult to close your eyes and dream of the sea lapping at the shore while you lie back with a book in one hand and a glass of chilled rosé in the other... (This is your holiday, by the way, not mine. Mine consists of constant nagging from children to play cricket or build sandcastles or go crabbing.)
So for those who will earn a little peace to immerse themselves in a good book, here are five recommendations for the summer.
Under the Dome by Stephen King
Under the Dome comes with the added benefit of making you exercise while lying back. This is a big book, a Stephen King monster in the grand tradition of The Stand, which it now challenges as my favourite King book of all time.
A glass dome suddenly, mysteriously and violently comes down around the Maine town of Chester's Mill, trapping those inside within its invisible boundaries and holding the outside world - including all the might of the US military - at bay. King then describes the journey of Chester's Mill as it changes at disturbing speed from being a quiet, rural backwater into the seventh circle of hell, as it undergoes rapid physical and political change.
As resources dwindle, the town's kingpin, Big Jim Rennie - a dazzlingly memorable villain - tightens his grip on Chester's Mill taking control with his own personal police force of violent, stupid youths. The resistance is led by a short order chef and former Marine.
King takes his time to set and tell his story, bringing an astonishing level of detail and care into the narrative, without the book ever feeling slow in any way. He has a marvellous and diverse cast of characters and uses them brilliantly to bring alive a story that is part classic-battle-of-good-and-evil and part personal drama, and part political polemic - addressing environmental issues as well as examining the abuse of power and reduction of personal freedoms exerciused by authoritarian regimes acting "for the good of the community".
This will keep you captivated and turning pages for hours.
(For those who might want a touch of King, but could do without the 800 page epic, I just finished The Girld Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of a nine-year-old girl who gets lost in the woods of Maine and keeps herself going with her ingenuity, courage and a Walkman radio that pipes in Boston RedSox games featuring her favourite player Tom Gordon. You don't need to like baseball to enjoy this book, but reading it reminded me just what a fantastic writer King is. To make the story of a girl lost in the woods so compelling takes extraordinary skill.)
A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
Like many, I suspect, I had my first taste of Sebastian Faulks reading the haunting Birdsong. After devouring I couldn't get enough of Faulks and went into the back catalogue and enjoyed The Girl at The Lion D'or and A Fool's Alphabet - both beautiful novels. Everything since, including Charlotte Gray and On Green Dolphin Street, has been pretty disappointing. But not A Week in December, which I have listened to on audio in recent weeks and frequently been frustrated that it is simply not possible to increase the pace of the reading.
This is a hugely ambitious novel, one that follows the lives of a number of Londoners - including a Premiership footballer, a radical Islamist, a failing barrister, a Tube driver and a hedge fund manager - over the course of seven days. This device provides Faulks with the perfect canvas on which to paint a biting satire of modern life and its greed, selfishness and growing dislocation from reality.
It is funny, moving and thoughtful and contains one of the best deconstructions of the modern financial world I have come across. The style is deceptively simple - it is incredibly easy to read - but masks a subtle clever novel that speaks on a number of levels.
Afterlight by Alex Scarrow
Mrs H does not read a great deal, and certainly not many thrillers. But she absolutely raced through After Light, a post-apocalypse novel telling the story of a group of survivors trying to rebuild their lives and society in the wake of global meltdown that follows the collapse of the oil trade.
This is a follow-up to Last Light, which details the events leading to the crash and the immediate aftermath, but is a far more accomplished novel that examines the idea of society in the modern world. My review of After Light, written before Mrs H read it, is here, but the fact that she enjoyed it so much suggest that it ought to have a broad appeal.
A gripping story, and a perfect summer read.
Troubles by JG Farrell
In May of this year, Troubles by the late JG Farrell was awarded the "lost" Booker prize of 1970. I honestly could not have been more pleased if I had won the prize myself. There is a great deal of pleasure in passing on a recommendation to people that they accept and later thank you for. I have been buying Troubles for friends and relatives for years after being totally captivated by the book when I studied it for A level in 1988. To see the book's greatness being recognized by thousands of voters and lionized in the media was a splendid moment. (Warning to friends and relatives: expect to be given a copy of Troubles soon; my sincere apologies if I gave you a copy a decade ago).
Troubles follows Major Brendan Archer, a Great War veteran to rural Ireland, where he is in search of a woman who may or may not be his fiancée. Archer, an indecisive, passive man finds himself in the Majestic Hotel, owned by the young lady's Anglo-Irish father, and with a ringside seat to the decline both of the hotel - burnt out in part and overrun by cats - which itself offers a microcosm of the state of British rule in Ireland.
It is poignant, funny and powerful - a masterpiece. It is the book that introduced me to the power of literature and if you haven't read it, you should.
(Don't stop with Troubles either, which is one part of Farrell's end of empire trilogy that also includes The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Book in 1973.)
Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson
We seem to be in something of a golden age for historical crime fiction. Later in the summer brings the fifth installment of CJ Sansom's genre-leading Shardlake series. We have Andrew Taylor producing gems such as Bleeding Heart Square, Andrew Pepper's Pyke series and a host of others. Making a decisive play to occupy this purple patch are the good folk at Headline, who later this summer will unleash James Forrester's excellent debut Elizabethan mystery, Sacred Treason (review soon), after scoring success with the first two novels of Imogen Robertson: Instruments of Darkness and The Anatomy of Murder.
Instruments of Darkness launches the Georgian detective careers of wealthy naval wife, Harriet Westerman and student of anatomy, Gabriel Crowther. Set in deepest Sussex, this is an atmospheric and twisting novel in which Westerman and Crowther investigate a murder apparently linked to a nearby seat of the aristocratic Earl of Sussex. The novel has a little bit of everything: an engaging heroin, loony-tune aristos, a cracking plot that fizzes along and a dangerous hidden secret. The follow-up is just as good.
These are all books I have read, so next week I'll be back with my own summer reading list.
