Our top 10 summer reads

Where’d you Go Bernadette

by Maria Semple (2012)

Eccentric Bernadette Fox is many things – architectural maven, intelligent wife to guru husband Elgin and loving mum to teenage daughter Bree. But what she isn’t is a domestic goddess happy to be obscured by suburban life in Seattle. In a hilarious turn of disastrous events Bernadette becomes disenchanted with life and others’ opinion of her and decides to disappear. How Bree searches for her mum is the premise of this satirical read full of sharpish wisecracks and clever protagonists who will have you chortling loudly. You’ll love Bernadette’s virtual assistant based in India. Nothing less can be expected of Semple – writer of hit TV comedies Arrested Development and Saturday Night Live, who has a direct line to readers’ funny bones.

No Place to Hide

by Glenn Greenwald (2014)



This offering from Greenwald, an ex-Guardian journalist, sums up the hows, wheres, whats and whys of the infamous Edward Snowden case – and pulls no punches. Reading like a premise straight out of an Orwellian nightmare (1984 anyone?) Greenwald charts the young whistleblower’s lifting the lid off mass surveillance programs run by the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies that spared no one and nothing. Initial chapters read no less than your average spy thriller, rife with the nail-biting tension of Snowden fleeing to Hong Kong from spies and contacting Greenwald. But it’s also a nuanced, factual and journalistic outline of historically significant events that will have you devour the tome from cover to cover in one go.

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green (2012)



If you still haven’t cried over this cult young adult love story, or caught up with the equally poignant movie adaptation that was released last month, we won’t judge. What’s the summer for, eh? But be warned – you’ll enter the territory of full-on waterworks (you’ll need a towel, not tissues) when you read this haunting romance about two 16-year-old cancer patients – Hazel Lancaster and Augustus Watters – who meet and fall in love at a support group. Although stacked in the young adults’ section in book shops, Green’s mature, poignant prose that flits wittily through topics as heavy as the fragility of life and the urgent passion of doomed first love, bridges age groups. So go ahead and relive the swoony pangs of first love.

The Fever

by Megan Abbott (2014)



Touted as the next Gone Girl, Abbott’s latest definitely lives up to the hype. Sixteen-year-old Deenie Nash is worried – there’s a mysterious contagion plaguing the teenage girls of her town. While the symptoms include sudden violent seizures, the causes remain inexplicable, throwing the town into a tizzy of rumours and conspiracy theories, from a vaccine gone awry to a poisonous lake at the town’s borders. Inspired by real incidents that befell teenage girls in Le Roy, New York, Abbotts’ clear, supple prose slowly strips the candy-floss veil off toxic jealousies and the edgy, hormonal teenage world. Suspense and paranoia come to an effective, thrilling fever pitch that will keep you on the edge of your sun lounger with every page turn.

Tender is the Night

by F Scott Fitzgerald (1934)



Fitzgerald is famed for his iconoclastic The Great Gatsby. But his fourth and final finished novel Tender is the Night does more than hold a candle to Gatsby’s brilliance. The evocative, elegiac tale traces the crumbling marriage of the Drivers (Dick a young psychoanalyst and Nicole a wealthy heiress and his expatient) in the backdrop of Switzerland and the fashionable French Rivera in 1925. Painting a haunting portrait of the post-war 1920s glamour, the transience of love and the debilitating quality of a hedonistic lifestyle, there are plenty of dazzling parties camouflaging the protagonists’ hollow lives. Reflecting Fitzgerald’s real-life volatile marriage to wife Zelda, this modernist mustread is suffused with the yearning for simpler love and innocent times.

The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje (1992)



This Booker prize winning novel and Oscar-laden silver screen counterpart will whisk you away on a journey to a different time and place. Set in post-war 1945 in a rundown Italian monastery in Florence a burned beyond recognition patient is tended to by Hana, a young nurse. Flashing between Italy and Northern Africa and the unknown patient’s passionate love for a woman named Katherine Clifton, the layered narrative calls for slow reading, savouring Ondaatje’s beautiful ambiguous prose while you unearth the identity and terrifying secrets of the burned English patient.

The Good Luck of Right Now

by Mathew Quick (2014)



If a book with Richard Gere in it doesn’t scream summer read, we don’t know what does. The new offering from Mathew Quick, author of Silver Linings Playbook, is about Bartholomew Neil, a middle-aged loner grieving his mother’s death. Sorting through her correspondence in the search for closure and solace he finds a letter she was sent by Richard Gere asking her to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Bartholomew sees it as a sign from the universe that if he makes contact with Gere his life will be sorted. The heart-warming story sees Bartholomew joined by a motley band of slightly off-kilter yet lovable eccentrics on his quest for Gere. Quirky and comical, this is a gratifying read on the importance of friendship and love.

The Vacationers

by Emma Straub (2014)



Straub’s second stab at fiction has bookish tongues wagging in praise for her portrait of the dysfunctional Post family (Franny, Jim and son Bobby and daughter Sylvia) on a fortnight getaway from New York to balmy Majorca. The island is not the balm they needed to repair their cracked relationships and becomes the final straw that breaks them. Laced with wry, humorous observations, this breezy literary read is drenched with the sizzling Spanish sun. It’s a mix of languorous ambience and the jumpy energy of the cleverly crafted characters as we join them on this family holiday on cerulean Mediterranean shores.

And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini (2013)



After The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, you’d think there are only so many books on the gorgeous rugged terrain of Afghanistan and separated siblings that Hosseini can weave into a bestseller. This emotionally charged account of human lives starts off in 1950s Afghanistan when a poor father gives up his three-year old baby daughter Pari to a rich Kabul couple, tearing her away from her brother Abdullah. The ensuing chapters develop interconnected plots with multiple memorable characters taking you globetrotting through Paris, San Francisco and Greece. In typical Hosseini style, there’s lyrical mysticism, folklore and a bittersweet yet hopeful end that will leave you teary and smiling all at the same time.

The Silkworm

by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling, 2014)



Last year’s Cuckoo’s Calling saw Rowling’s private-eye Cormoran Strike limp into our Potter-less lives. Strike’s second outing arrives as a cracking crime thriller set in the world of publishing. Leonora Quine hires Strike to investigate the disappearance of her novelist husband Owen, who is later found murdered in a copy-cat slaying from his new book. The suspense ratchets up as Strike and faithful female sidekick Robin Ellacott sift through suspects, each embodying a stereotype of the literary world. The crisp, sardonic prose and tight structure make it a pageturning whodunit worth spending your summer on.