Simmering Summer Reads: Keep Calm and Carry on Reading
Novelist Catherine Robertson shares her top Simmering Summer Reads for the latest instalment of our Keep Calm and Carry on Reading series – she recommends ten books that are perfect for the summer holidays – or anytime you don’t mind sand between your pages. For further reading inspiration see our Keep Calm and Carry on Reading recommendations on everything from doorstoppers (very big books) to thrilling novels that make your heart go thump.
1.
The Summer Book (1972/2008 in English) by Tove Jansson
I will boldly state that this is the best book ever written about summer holidays, and the one most likely to make you want to move to Scandinavia and build a house on an island you can walk around in four-and-a-half minutes. One of ten books Jansson wrote for adults, and drawn from her own life, it is about a small child’s summer in the Gulf of Finland. Because her mother is dead and her father mainly absent, the child spends most time with her grandmother, their days made up of small adventures, discussions and squabbles, all told in deceptively simple but luminous prose, and woven together into an overall effect of completeness and utter magic.
2. Revival (2014) by Stephen King
More sizzle than simmer in King’s latest novel, where electricity is put to use in a way that has dark consequences for everyone zapped by it. Narrator, Jamie Morton, is a boy when he meets the new local minister, Charles Jacobs, who arrives with his wife and child, and an intriguing secretive hobby that, after a personal tragedy, becomes an obsession. Thirty years on, after personal struggles of his own, Jamie meets up again with Jacobs, and events build to a typically horrific King climax. A great beach read, though you’ll flick those ants off the picnic blanket faster than you might have before.
3. Heat Wave (1997) by Penelope Lively
I’ve always thought ‘Lively’ a misnomer, as her writing is so dry and controlled. But that’s what makes her novels enjoyable, though, personally, I would not like to be the target of her critical, take-no-prisoners eye. In this novel, Pauline is spending an uncomfortably hot summer in the British countryside, editing a novel about romantic love in a cottage called World’s End, near a town overrun by yobs. Her daughter and baby grandson are in the adjacent cottage, along with Maurice, the man her daughter married, and in whom Pauline sees an increasing likeness to her own, serially unfaithful ex-husband. Prickly and tense, with an unexpected but most satisfying ending.
4. The Smoke and the Fire
(1964) by Essie Summers
Chosen for the author’s name, the reminiscent-of-barbecue title, and for that fact that no beach house is complete without a stack of old Mills and Boons. Essie Summers is New Zealand’s romance pioneer, writing 56 novels right up until 1997, the year before she died, aged 86. All (or most) were set in New Zealand, and her descriptions of the countryside did so much for tourism that she was awarded an OBE. I’ve not read this novel, but the heroine has agreed to marry a bloke she hardly knows, and the man she probably ends up with has a double-barreled surname, so it’s bound to be a cracker.
5. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001) by Garrison Keillor
I have all the Lake Wobegon novels, plus a bunch of The Prairie Home Companion radio shows on tape, so no prizes for guessing I’m a fan. Keillor’s humour is gentle and compassionate, but his observations are sharp and his comic timing impeccable. This novel stars Gary, suffering from sexual urges and the kind of guilt that comes with being fourteen in a small Mid-Western town in 1956. Gary prays for God to have mercy, but God is having none of it: ‘“Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No…yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they are”.’ Highly enjoyable.
6.
We Were Liars (2014) by E. Lockhart
This was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and won the Goodreads Choice award for best young adult fiction. Narrator, 17-year-old Cadence Sinclair, is returning to her family’s summer home on their private island two years after something terrible happened there of which Cadence has no recollection at all. She hopes that by re-connecting with her two cousins and the boy she fell in love with that previous summer, she will begin to remember why she was found in the dark, alone and distressed, half-naked and wading into the sea. This is a beautiful book that adults will also enjoy. Keep the tissues handy, though.
7. Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) (1889) by Jerome K Jerome
When I lived in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Jerome K Jerome’s former house in Marlow Common came up for sale and if I’d had two million quid, I would have bought it purely because of the pleasure this book has given me since my grandfather first read out loud the bit about Uncle Podger hanging the picture. That still makes me cry with laughter, as does Harris in the Hampton Court maze, the tale of travelling with cheese (‘…it put him in mind of a dead baby’) and the general ineptitude of George, J and Harris, to say nothing of Montmorency the dog, as they attempt to boat up the Thames one summer.
8. Heavenly Hirani’s
School of Laughing Yoga (2014) by Sarah-Kate Lynch
The heat in this book is that of Mumbai, where Annie Jordan reluctantly travels with her husband. Initially, Annie refuses to leave the hotel, but is enticed out by a laughing yoga class, even though she cannot see how forced chuckles will make her feel better about her missing, presumed dead, dog, her self-obsessed just-adult children (a result, she fears, of her own weak parenting), and her increasingly platonic relationship with her husband. This is a warm and amusing book that tackles head on the hard questions that arise when women (and men) of a certain age look back over their lives and don’t always like what they see.
9. The Tent, the Bucket and Me (2009) by Emma Kennedy
I do love a book that makes me properly laugh, and by properly, I mean tears and snot and all your family leaving the room because they’re sick of you trying to read bits out loud to them. This is such a book. It is about all the summer camping holidays Emma Kennedy had as a child in the 1970s, none of which was anything less than catastrophic. The bucket is a constant presence, used in ways you really don’t want me to describe, and there is Spam and a man who smokes a cigarette though his private parts, and – I’ll leave you to read the rest. In private. It’s less embarrassing that way.
10. How to Catch a Cricket
Match (2006) by Harry Ricketts
Cricket is the sport that defines a New Zealand summer, whether you’re playing it barefoot on the beach or courting melanoma as a spectator at a five-day test match. It is also a sport that has long attracted derision for its glacial pace, bonkers nomenclature and impractical use of white flannel. If you are such a derider, read this book. It has been written with love and more than a hint of geeky obsession, and anyone who does not end up with an improved affinity for this really quite odd game is forever doomed to summers that will always fall slightly short of perfection.
Catherine Robertson’s debut novel,
The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid (2011), hit the New Zealand bestseller list
immediately, making its way to number one. She quickly followed up with The Not So Perfect
Life of Mo Lawrence. The third volume of her trilogy is called The Misplaced
Affections of Charlotte Fforbes. Hailed as ‘a new national treasure’, Catherine was a
featured author at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. Two of her books have been published in Germany
and her first has also been published in Italy. Her latest novel, The
Hiding Places (Penguin Random House) is due out in April 2015.
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