7 Books Perfect For Summer Reading

Main featured image: Bookshops to visit: Atlantis Books, Nomikos Street, Oia, Greece.

Have you made it through Orna Mulcahy’s Ultimate Summer Reading List selected from the best of this year’s publications? Keep scrolling for even more great reads to keep you hooked throughout the remainder of summer …

Beautiful damaged girls are at the centre of Megan Nolan’s second novel ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS (Jonathan Cape, €15.99) set between 1970s Waterford and London in 1990. It’s the story of the Green family who relocate to London when 16-year-old Carmel is found to be pregnant by a man she won’t name, and too far gone to have an abortion. Carmel is a beauty, nurtured by her kindly mother Rose. Her half-brother Ritchie is an alcoholic, their father John a steady drinker with a bad work accident and disastrous first marriage still on his mind. The book opens with Carmel savouring the memory of her lover, even as disaster looms. Enter Tom, a tabloid journalist tipped off to a story about a child who is missing, feared dead in a block of council flats. The blame shifts to ten-year-old Lucy, last seen playing with the victim, Mia, and now held by the police. Lucy is Carmel’s daughter, and sensing a scoop, Tom corrals the Green family into a hotel, promising endless drink and a daily stipend if they’ll tell their story. Instead, the Greens recall their individual hurts and family history. Nolan digs deep, crafting complex characters for whom life could have turned out differently, if only. Carmel’s early passion has given way to a numbed motherhood and a total inability to connect with Lucy. Rose has died and all goodness seems gone. When the case collapses and Tom’s tawdry story with it, the family returns to Waterford to see what can be salvaged.

THE COUPLES (John Murray, £14.99) is a highly accomplished first novel from Lauren Mackenzie, an Australian screenwriter and editor living in Dublin who has penned scripts for Fair City and contributed to The Stinging Fly. Three couples have gathered in a crumbling big house to celebrate the birthday of Frank, a film-maker whose best days are behind him. His partner, Lizzie, worries about her own dwindling acting career, while caring for their “yours, mine and ours” household on a shoestring. Teacher Eve and her landscaping husband Shay are struggling to make ends meet as recession bites while Conor, a doctor, and his perfect wife, Beatrice, seem to be the couple who have it all. When Frank throws some Ecstasy into the mix, and suggests a spot of partner swapping, the reader is left guessing as to what happened next. Mackenzie skilfully reconstructs the night, setting her cleverly constructed couples on a course of destruction. Really good.

There’s a lot of talk about TALKING AT NIGHT (Michael Joseph, €15.99), Claire Daverley’s debut love story published this month in 22 languages, with comparisons being drawn to David Nicholls’ One Day and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Teenager Rosie makes up songs in her head and graduates to writing lyrics on her arms to deal with her pain; she’s destined for Oxford, while her twin Josh dreams of Cambridge. To get there, he takes Maths grinds from Will, the cool but troubled boy at school who can have any girl he wants, except Rosie, whose song he can’t get out of his head. Rosie has big plans and OCD, Will says he will wait but a terrible event at his birthday party casts a 20-year shadow over their relationship. Daverley has created two really fine flawed characters in Will and Rosie, and given them a chemistry that carries through to middle age, before granting them one more chance to be happy. Be warned, there are parts that will make you cry.

Lisa Jewell’s mesmerising storytelling makes for perfect summer reading and her latest novel, NONE OF THIS IS TRUE (Century, €23) is just as addictive. Two women are celebrating their 45th birthday in a fashionable pub – glamorous podcaster Alix Summer with her gang of noisy champagne-guzzling friends and mousy denim-clad Josie, at a table for two with her husband Walter, a man of few words. They couldn’t be more different, but Josie seizes on the coincidence of their birthdays to forge a connection with Alix when they both visit the bathroom, and later engineers a meeting with her “birthday twin”. Alix, whose podcasts focus on stories of domestic violence, is intrigued and slightly repelled by Josie who offers to tell her own story of abuse but something doesn’t add up in the telling, and soon Alix is uncovering a far more unsettling story in which Josie is anything but a victim.

EVERYONE HERE IS LYING by New York Times bestselling author Shari Lapena (Bantam, €21.99) pushes the same psychological buttons. Nine-year-old Avery Wooler vanishes from a quiet, affluent neighbourhood and the police quickly zone in on her father William’s suspicious timeline. There are hours he can’t account for, spent with his mistress who’s also a neighbour. As the police delve deeper, it turns out everyone on the street has something to hide. Like Marion who has captured Avery to get back at William for his affair. When Avery is recovered safe and insists on telling her own story on television, a whole new and more frightening picture emerges. Twists and turns to the very end and probably already a series in the making.

Australian writer Eliza Henry-Jones’s SALT & SKIN (September Publishing, €15) is an eerily beautiful novel about the erosion of land and human trust. Widowed photographer Luda Managan moves from her drought-ridden Australian home with her two teenage children, Min and Darcy, to a remote Scottish island threatened by erosion. Almost immediately she captures a horrific example in a photograph that goes viral and angers the islanders. For Min and Darcy, the move to a new community is fraught as they confront factions in their new school and befriend Theo, a teenager who was washed up on the island years before and is an object of fascination for the media. Luda meanwhile is drawn to the story of the island’s “witches” – women sentenced to death for riding whales, whose ancient symbols are etched in her cottage’s roof beams. Has the community really put its witch-hunting days behind it and, if not, could she be the next victim?

Finally, a murder mystery set aboard the doomed Titanic, THE SEVENTH PASSENGER by Angie Rowe (Poolbeg, €16.99). Rowe takes the fact that a small group of people disembarked from the Titanic at Cobh before its tragic onward journey to imagine a crime on board, with witnesses and possibly the killer lost in the sinking. When a body shows up after the ship has departed Cobh, Inspector Lorcan O’Dowd is tasked with solving the mystery – not easy when the crime scene is at the bottom of the sea. Rowe, who trained as a librarian, weaves fact with fiction into a convincing and entertaining yarn. @OrnaMulcahy