BEACH READS | WHERE QUALITY MEETS RELAXATION
You by Sleep With Me author Joanna Briscoe is an addictive novel about a teenager, Celia, a student in the 1970s at a Bohemian school in Dartmoor. James Dahl is her attractive English teacher and tensions rise to breaking point as Celia’s mother finds herself drawn to Dahl’s intriguing wife.
The Booker Prize longlist has been announced and our picks from it are Julian Barnes at the top of his game with The Sense of An Ending. It’s short but sweet, about a peaceable man called Tony, now middle-aged, whose past is about to come back to him in ways he could never have predicted. Alan Hollinghurst is the hottest-tipped Booker longlister. The Strangers Child is a typically perfect characterization of posh men in a bygone English age.
Meanwhile, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a mesmerizing family biography whose firm presence on bestseller lists is testament to its genuinely absorbing content.
Thriller junkies might look at House of the Hanged by The Savage Garden author Mark Mills: it’s a riveting, creepy tale that takes secret agent Tom Nash from Petrograd of 1919 to the French Riviera in 1935. The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo, pretender to the Stieg Larsson throne, will also guarantee your time passes in a page-turning daze.