SUMMER FICTION:Beach reads, crime, short stories, literary novels: ANNA CAREYmarks your reading card for the coming months
1 The Troubled Man
By Henning Mankell
Harvill Secker, £17.99
After more than two decades of angst-ridden crime-solving, Swedish detective Kurt Wallander takes his last bow in Mankell’s suitably gloomy new novel. The Ystad detective’s many fans won’t want to miss finding out how Wallander, now in his 60s, deals with a cold-war mystery involving Soviet submarines in Swedish waters, as well as his new role as a grandparent and the spectre of his own impending dementia.
2 Great House
By Nicole Krauss
Viking, £8.99
At the centre of Krauss’s second novel is a desk that was plundered by the Nazis in Hungary in 1944 and now links the four narrators of the book: a New York novelist who was given the desk by a friend of a friend later murdered by Gen Pinochet; an elderly Israeli widower raging against his estranged son; an elderly British man whose wife came to Britain with the Kindertransport before the second World War; and a young American woman at Oxford University, in love with a man whose strict father tracks down the possessions of Holocaust victims. This is a powerful work about grief, memory and the weight of history.
3 Mistaken
By Neil Jordan
John Murray, £7.99
The story of a young man from Marino Crescent in north Dublin who discovers he has a southside doppelgänger, Mistaken recently won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award at Listowel. Jordan (left) painstakingly evokes a changing Dublin, from the 1960s to the present day, as his narrator Kevin grows up and finds his fate is inextricably tied to that of Gerard, his more affluent lookalike, with tragic results.
4 A Visit from the Goon Squad
By Jennifer Egan
Corsair, £11.99
A book that combines the stories of an ageing 21st-century music producer, a beautiful young kleptomaniac in the 1990s, a group of confused young Californian punks in the 1970s and a desperate publicist with a dictator for a client could have been a confused mess, but Egan’s dazzling novel, which deservedly won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, jumps between characters and decades to create a hugely satisfying whole.
5 The Moment
By Douglas Kennedy
Hutchinson, £9.99
Shortly after travel writer Thomas Nesbitt signs his divorce papers, he receives a package from Petra, his German ex-girlfriend, which brings his thoughts back to his experiences in 1980s west Berlin. As an eager young writer he shared a flat with an elegantly wasted Anglo-Irish artist and fell in love with Petra, a translator for a pro-western radio station. But, like many things in cold-war Berlin, Petra is not all that she seems. Kennedy’s 10th novel shouldn’t disappoint his many fans.
6 Saints and Sinners
By Edna O’Brien
Faber and Faber, £12.99
Although these stories by the grande dame of Irish letters visit London and New York, Irish society is still at the heart of O’Brien’s work. Tangled relationships between mothers and daughters, family feuds that will never quite be resolved, the moral bankruptcy of a boom-time businessman: old and new versions of Ireland collide in these powerful tales.
7 A Monster Calls
By Patrick Ness
Walker, £12.99
When the writer Siobhan Dowd died, in 2007, she left notes for an unwritten novel. The acclaimed young-adult author Patrick Ness (left) has taken Dowd’s idea and turned it into a hugely powerful novel that has been wowing adults and younger readers alike. The story of a boy with a very sick mother who is regularly visited in the night by a terrible tree-like monster, it’s a hugely powerful depiction of fear and grief, brilliantly illustrated by Jim Kay.
8 Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe
By Jenny Colgan
Sphere, £7.99
The frustrated woman opening her own cupcake emporium may now be a media cliche, but if anyone can turn it into something fresh it’s Colgan, whose very funny books are proof that just because a book looks fluffy doesn’t mean it’s not smart. Armed with her baker grandfather’s recipes (included in the book), former corporate drone Issy launches her cafe, but finds that being a cupcake queen isn’t as easy as she’d hoped.
9 The Forgotten Waltz
By Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, £14.99
The pleasingly unreliable narrator of Anne Enright’s first novel since winning the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering is Gina Moynihan, a sophisticated young married woman in boom-time Dublin who starts an affair with a married man. Gina wilfully plays down the importance of Sean’s relationship with his troubled young daughter, and Enright gives us both a devastatingly witty look at the rise and fall of the property market and an insightful, unsettling look at all-consuming desire.
10 The Fatal Touch
By Conor Fitzgerald
Bloomsbury, £11.99
This is only the second Alec Blume novel by the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald (pen-name of Conor Deane), but Blume, an American who has lived in Rome for years and is now a commissioner with the Italian police, has already won the devotion of many readers. When a notorious Irish art forger is murdered Blume discovers that senior policemen, including the belligerent Col Farinelli, don’t seem keen to pursue the matter. Soon Blume is uncovering a dark world of corruption.
11 The Paris Wife
By Paula McLain
Virago, £12.99
Hadley Richardson was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, his companion during the Moveable Feast years in 1920s Paris. McLain’s novel retells the story of that period through Hadley’s eyes, from the blissful romance of her early married life to the ultimate collapse of the relationship. You don’t have to be a Hemingway fan to be drawn in by McLain’s evocation of this fascinating world.
12 Unspoken
By Gerard Stembridge
Old Street, £12.99
Stembridge’s third novel is a saga looking at the rapidly changing Ireland of the 1960s through a diverse group of characters, including the loving Strong family. As television exerts its modernising influence on the country, we also meet the politician Dom, a thinly disguised version of Donogh O’Malley, whose introduction of free secondary education at the end of the decade would transform Irish society.
13 The Dead Summer
By Helen Moorhouse
Poolbeg, €15.99
When Martha Armstrong moves to a remote Norfolk farmhouse with her baby after her bitter divorce, she finds her new home is anything but a rustic idyll. Many years ago the house was occupied by two Irish sisters with a tragic secret, and when things start to go bump in the night it seems that the house hasn’t forgotten its past. The debut novel of this Dublin-based writer is a classic chiller.
14 A Death in Summer
By Benjamin Black
Mantle, £12.99
John Banville’s crime-writing alter ego returns with another sophisticated slice of Irish noir. Set in 1956, it sees his protagonist, the pathologist Quirke, returning for the fourth time to investigate the murder of a newspaper magnate, Richard “Diamond Dick” Jewell, who is found with his head blown off in his Co Kildare estate. Quirke’s sleuthing brings him into close contact not only with Diamond Dick’s beautiful French widow, Françoise, but also with a shadowy orphanage with which Jewell was somehow connected.
15 The Tiger’s Wife
By Téa Obreht
Phoenix, £7.99
The youngest writer to win the Orange Prize for Fiction, the 25-year-old (below), in her debut novel, offers up a richly complex fable set in an unnamed part of the Balkans, where a young doctor called Natalia is treating children affected by a recent war. Natalia is determined to unravel the truth behind the stories her grandfather told her as a child, including one about a mysterious “deathless man” and another about a tiger who escaped from a zoo in 1941 and came to her grandfather’s village.
16 You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
By Sarra Manning
Corgi, £6.99
Romances don’t come much sharper, smarter or more romantic than this story of Neve, who has always been seriously overweight and self-conscious. Now she’s lost weight and is determined to win the heart of William, the boy she loved at college. So she asks bad-boy Max to show her how to have a relationship. Touching and witty, with a wonderfully snarky heroine who prefers Virago Modern Classics to Manolo Blahniks, it’s a sweet story with an edge and genuine depth.
17 The Leopard
By Jo Nesbø
Vintage, £7.99
Harry Hole, the creation of Jo Nesbø (left), is the archetypal tormented detective. Struggling with gambling and drugs, and attempting to come to terms with the impending death of his father, he has fled to Hong Kong after yet another traumatic case. But then he’s called back to Norway to investigate the horrible murders of two women who were staying in a remote mountain hotel. With no connection between the victims and not a single clue to follow, Hole is in trouble – and then yet another visitor to the hotel is murdered.
18 Carte Blanche
By Jeffery Deaver
Hodder and Stoughton, £13.99
Following in the footsteps of the acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks, who was granted permission by Ian Fleming’s estate to write the 2008 Bond novel Devil May Care, the American thriller writer Deaver takes on the world’s most famous secret agent. This is no retro pastiche, though: the story, which sees 007 facing a sinister waste-management mogul, is firmly set in the present day, and Q has provided Bond with some thoroughly modern, app-filled gadgets. But some things, thankfully, never change: he still introduces himself as “Bond . . . James Bond”.
19 Bullfighting
By Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape, £12.99
The characters in Doyle’s collection of short stories are coming to terms with getting older – or at least trying to. It’s a testament to Doyle’s skill as a writer that, despite the ostensible similarities between his protagonists (they’re all middle-aged men from ordinary backgrounds living in north Dublin suburbia), their voices remain distinct and their stories never feel bleak.
20 The Best of Everything
By Rona Jaffe
Penguin, £8.99
First published in 1958, this compulsively readable novel by Rona Jaffe (left) has been reissued by Penguin after its appearance in an episode of Mad Men. Its frank portrayal of four very different women working in the Manhattan publishing and theatre worlds in the 1950s caused a sensation when the book first appeared. Today’s readers will enjoy Jaffe’s evocative depiction of a society in which women could be labelled old maids at 25, as well as her perceptive characterisation and skilful storytelling.
21 There But for The
By Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
At a dinner party, one of the guests, a friend of a friend of the hosts, goes up to the spare room, locks himself in and refuses to come out. For months. And possibly forever. That’s the premise of Smith’s playful new novel, in which a man called Miles Garth takes over the spare room of the painfully smug Genevieve Lee and her husband, Eric. Smith’s love of language is in evidence throughout (she revels in puns and wordplay), as is her gift for social satire.
22 The Absolutist
By John Boyne
Doubleday, £16.99
In Boyne's best-selling historical fiction he has looked at everything from the mutiny on the Bounty to the final solution. Now he turns his attention to the first World War and the "white-feather men", the conscientious objectors derided as cowards. The Absolutistis the story of Tristan Sadler and his relationship with fellow soldier Will Bancroft, who declares his pacifism and is shot for his supposed treason. As Tristan wonders if he can tell Will's sister of his true feelings, Boyne examines the lasting effects of the "war to end all wars".
23 Long Time, No See
By Dermot Healy
Faber and Faber, £12.99
This first novel in 11 years from the author of Sudden Timesand A Goat's Song, set in a small west-coast town, is the story of a young man called Philip, known to all as Mr Psyche, whose friend Micky has been killed in a car crash. Through Psyche's eyes the reader encounters the often eccentric locals, including two charismatic old men, Joe-Joe and the Blackbird. But the little town is hiding some dark secrets . . .
24 Bloodline
By Brian O’Connor
Poolbeg, €15.99
Hailed as the modern Irish answer to Dick Francis, our racing correspondent Brian O’Connor’s debut novel is a suitably fast-paced thriller set in the world of jockeys, stable hands and horse trainers. When a Ukrainian groom is found dead, champion jockey Liam Dee initially finds himself a suspect. But soon Dee, a taller-than-average jockey who’s fallen out of love with his profession, is involved in the search for the young man’s real killer.
25 Anatomy of a Disappearance
By Hisham Matar
Viking, £16.99
The dramatic events this year in Libya have drawn people’s attention to the region. Perhaps the best-known Libyan writer in the English-speaking world is Hisham Matar. The protagonist of his new book is Nuri, a Libyan teenager who (as was the case with Matar) has grown up in Cairo after his father fell foul of the government. Nuri is sent to school in England, but when his father disappears he finds himself becoming almost too close to his beautiful English stepmother, Mona.
26 The Better Half
By Sarah Harte
Penguin Ireland, €14.99
Harte’s glossy debut novel is the story of a rich developer’s wife who finds herself losing everything and realising that she’s always lived through her spouse and children. Harte (right) combines a classic blockbuster plot with insights into the lives both of women experiencing serious empty-nest syndrome and of working-class girls who are kept out of education by invisible barriers. And of course there are lots of glam parties and social scandals too. A beach read with bite.
27 The Making of Us
By Lisa Jewell
Century, £12.99
With their gripping, emotionally engaging plots and complex characters, Jewell’s books are commercial fiction at its best. This is the story of Lydia, Robyn and Dean, three very different people with one thing in common: they are all the biological children of Daniel, who donated sperm to a London clinic in the 1970s. The story of how the three half-siblings make contact and tentatively create new relationships makes for a compelling read.
28 City of Bohane
By Kevin Barry
Jonathan Cape, £11.99
Set in the fictional Irish city of Bohane in the not-so-distant future, this debut novel by Kevin Barry is the darkly exuberant story of a terrible feud between Logan Hartnett and his old nemesis, Gant Broderick. In this dystopian future Ireland, where a city is divided into almost tribal groupings, there is little modern technology, but there’s more than enough action as the various factions do battle in a fractured city on the windswept west coast.
29 The Tenderloin
By John Butler
Picador, £12.99
In 1994 a young UCD student called Evan leaves his native Dublin and heads to San Francisco. Sexually confused and easily impressed by both the local nightlife and the city’s internet start-ups, Evan gets involved with “new media” company ForwardSlash and becomes increasingly drawn to its founder, the charismatic Sam Couples.
30 We Had It So Good
By Linda Grant
Virago, £12.99
When US student Stephen meets Andrea at Oxford in the late 1960s, they’re both part of the counterculture. But by the 21st century they and their friends are part of the affluent establishment wondering how they could have become so old. Grant’s moving novel is less a love letter to her peers and more an ode to her parents’ generation, who created the affluence she and her fellow baby boomers enjoyed. Enlightening and entertaining reading.