10 Books For Absorbing Holiday Reads

Get absorbed by these 10 holiday reads – whether you’re poolside or reading from the garden – with picks by C&TH and reviews by book columnist Richard Hopton.

Fly & Flop: Richard’s Top 3 Holiday Reads

Words by Richard Hopton

Authenticity

by Alice Sherwood

‘We live,’ writes Alice Sherwood, ‘in a storm of make-believe and deception’, a world in which the ‘lines between reality and illusion are increasingly blurred’. ‘We are searching,’ she says, ‘for authenticity in a world that is ever more inauthentic.’ Accordingly, she explores stories of behaviour both in the human and the natural worlds that question how we define the term ‘authentic’. It’s a slippery concept, as her varied case histories show: the impersonations of a fantasist; old-fashioned wire fraud; genuineness and attribution in art; evolutionary deception in nature; and commercial sleight of hand in the drugs and food industries. This book can be read as a quasi-philosophical investigation into truth in the modern world or simply for the entertainment value of the stories it tells. Either way, or both, it’s fascinating. Mudlark, £16.99

The Trio

by Johanna Hedman (translated by Kira Josefsson)

‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd,’ the saying goes. The Trio tells the story of the relationship between Thora, scion of a wealthy Swedish family of industrialists, August, an aspiring artist, and Hugo, a law student. Johanna Hedman’s first novel, set mainly in Stockholm but with sorties to Paris, Berlin, New York, London, and Brighton, is an emotionally acute and absorbing account of the way in which the friendships between the three protagonists form and reform, reconfiguring themselves in the course of the novel. The trilateral story is told bilaterally, in chapters alternating between Thora’s and Hugo’s voices, leaving the mildly enigmatic, bisexual August both in and out of the story. It’s beautifully written: Hedman has an almost
tactile descriptive precision and a keen eye for the plangent phrase. Wholly memorable and enjoyable. Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

Miss Aldridge Regrets

by Louise Hare

Louise Hare’s second novel is an intriguing murder mystery set aboard the Queen Mary in 1936 as she crosses the Atlantic from Southampton to New York. Lena, the eponymous heroine, is a mixed-race, jobbing jazz singer who, wholly unexpectedly, lands a part in a Broadway musical. This break enables Lena to escape London where she had become embroiled, albeit tangentially, in the murder of the owner of the seedy nightclub in which she performs. Her freedom proves short-lived as once abroad the Queen Mary she falls in with the Parkers, an unlovable if wealthy American family, and their entourage from which point things go rapidly downhill. The novel is characterised by the convincing period detail and love of jazz which featured so strongly in Hare’s debut novel, the widely acclaimed This Lovely City. HQ, £14.99

7 Absorbing Holiday Reads

As picked by C&TH

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