SUMMER MUST READS

BIRNAM WOOD

BY ELEANOR CATTON

To read Birnam Wood is to cruise through New Zealand, with its delicate environment and politics. Catton’s latest novel lies in the noman’s land between thriller and political commentary, contrasting the idealistic, often self-defeating politics of young eco-conscious with the extremes of capitalism.

Termush

BY SVEN HOLM

The qualities of a perfect holiday read –a hotel resort backdrop: tick; a thin paperback that you can squeeze in your hand luggage: tick; a post-apocalyptic disaster setting: bear with me.

Y/N BY ESTHER YI

Y/N is not a book for everyone; but if you are fascinated by what a combination of magical realism and K-Pop extreme fandom would look like, you’re in the right place.

Y/N tells the story of a woman who abandons her sullen life in Berlin to try and find Moon, a K-Pop star who has just recently quit his band and disappeared from public life. This journey takes her back to her homeland, South Korea, and then further in a world where dreams and reality collide.

This book is a bit pretentious at times - and the dialogues would never take place in real life, making it difficult to relate or sympathise

Yellowface

BY REBECCA F KUANG

When a book is as hyped as this one is, it is easy to approach with trepidation, but have no fear here: Kuang’s newest novel is an unequivocal triumph.

Kuang, who has said she will not write in the same genre twice, has this time gone for a pop dark satire which is as twisted as it is brilliant.

Written from the point of view of a jealous friend who steals her late friend’s manuscript and posthumously publishes it in their own name, this book explores the politics of art, race and ownership without ever being cliche.

A book about book publishing, Kuang holds the reader in her hand

Victory City

BY SALMON RUSHDIE

It’s Rushdie, so you know it’s gonna be good, but this is really good. Framed as a translation of a 15th Century Sanskrit epic poem about the founding of the fictional Bisagna empire, Victory City is a metafictional masterclass in storytelling.

with the characters. But if you stick till the end, it will be full of precious surprises.

Elena Siniscalco

and tells them so. Yellowface is funny, gripping and written right on the cutting edge, I wanted it to go on and on. AM

Sascha O’Sullivan

It does so without sacrificing on a thrilling narrative, as a young environmentalist Mira tries to figure out if she can trust billionaire Robert Lemoineto keep her group, aptly described as a ‘guerilla gardening collective’ a secret. The latter half is almost entirely consumed with plot, occasionally straying into the unbelievable, but gripping all the same.

Small Worlds

BY CALEB AZUMAH NELSON

If you don’t mind weeping, Small Worlds is the choice for you.

Azumah Nelson’s second novel retains all the lyricism and sensitivity of his debut Open Water, but takes a father-son relationship as its central subject.

Set over three summers in London and Ghana, this novel looks at the intimate connections that define us all, yet never once teeters on the overly sentimental.

If you’re tired of London, and perhaps of life, this book will remind you of the city’s magic promise and, most of all, its music (you can even find a Spotify playlist to accompany this book).

Steeped in nostalgia, grief and heartbreak, yet somehow still hopeful, this is one of the best books I’ve read all year. AM

A dystopia written in 1967, this novella may not seem the obvious poolside choice, but for those of you who don’t mind a dose of catastrophic dread with your pina colada, consider Termush. Set in a luxury hotel reserved by the ultra wealthy in the case of nuclear disaster, Termush is a biting satire that explores rhetoric around borders and infection –no prizes for

Money

BY MARTIN AMIS

Asked how a writer conceives the idea for a novel, the late Martin Amis described “a throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition”. One “may even be secretly appalled or awed or turned off by the idea”.

In spawning the creative genius behind his masterpiece Money: “I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all.” It wouldn’t be all. Money would become the ultimate comedycritique of 1980s consumerist Britain. Anti-hero John Self – a “semi-literate alcoholic” – is a grotesque parody of the transatlantic businessman. Thrilling, probing, postmodern, why this has been reissued. At just over 100 pages, Termush is small but packs a punch. AM

The story centers around the 237year long life of Pampa Kampana, a demi-goddess and prophet who breathes Bisagna into existence and whispers its inhabitants’ lives into their ears. That this is a story about storytelling is not exactly subtle, but nor is it meant to be: Victory City is a bold and vibrant read. To pastiche an epic is a ballsy choice, lucky this is in capable hands. Combining tragedy, comedy and romance, this is what an epic is meant to be. AM

The Shards

BY BRET EASTON ELLIS

As new authors make their mark on the literary landscape, Bret Easton Ellis reminds you nothing is more exciting than the revival of an old master. After years of tiresomely banal postmodernism, Ellis has returned with The Shards –his finest work since he freshened up the fiction scene with the powerful onetwo punch of Less Than Zero and American Psycho three decades ago.

The Shards is a provocatively lurid, semi-autobiographical novel centred around the hedonistic lives of wealthy high-schoolers in the Hollywood Hills in the 1980s, disrupted by the arrival of the serial killer ‘The Trawler’.

What follows is a schlocky but engrossing narrative, that makes you question everything you’re told.

Nicholas Earl

THE NAME walks into the room long before you. So it brings baggage, for want of a better word,” Hannah Rothschild tells me. A businesswoman, philanthropist and writer, I am meeting with Hannah to talk about her latest novel High Time, but I can’t help but also ask about her extraordinary upbringing.

A primogeniture-led family, it was expected that Hannah’s brother would grow up to be active in the family businesses, but it is Hannah who now finds herself more involved as a board member of RIT among countless others. On top of that, Hannah has also always been a keen writer, though only turned to fiction in her fifties, something she tells me she’d always dreamed of doing but found too daunting.

Recalling memories of being briefed on how to “talk finance” at nine years old ahead of family dinners with potential donors, that finance forms the backdrop to Hannah’s latest novel High Time is no surprise, though her ability to make it quite so fun was certainly not as guaranteed. Asked whether her own experience of business has proven as exciting as her novels, punctuated by the likes of high camp swindlers and multimillion pound art hoaxes, Hannah is unequivocal in her answer –“No! Thankfully,” she tells me.

“You know, you want nice returns, you want capital preservation, you don’t necessarily want to shoot the lights out. I mean where I come from anyway. So I would say the experience in High Time is very different. And some of that comes from sitting in quite a lot of board meetings and imagining what would happen if we weren’t just always focusing on, I don’t know, what the yen is doing.”

Writing about the business world is also a means of escape from it then, though it is clear Hannah takes neither her role as writer or businesswoman lightly.

“I should say, I don’t want to sound pompous, but I do take the positions I have on boards very, very seriously. Because it is, it’s very serious business… As I say, in my kind of writing world, I think that’s nice, I can have an alternate existence,” she says.

Yet Hannah proves as scrupulous about her writing as she is about business. Hannah knows she can’t pull one on her readers, she tells me, and is meticulous about the details. Cryptocurrency, which finds a surprising place at the heart of her latest novel, is something Hannah didn’t understand when she started writing her pitch.

“I didn’t get it. And then you might say, well why on earth would you write about it? Well, I think I did it because I wanted to understand it,” she tells me.

Speaking to investors, foraging through chat rooms, Hannah says she taught herself about cryptocurrency “right from the bottom up” to ensure she got the details

THIS month, the City A.M. Book Club proved its breath, going from bonkbuster to Booker as it traded in Cleo Watson’s Whips for this year’s international Booker prize winner Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Written originally in Bulgarian in 2020 and translated into English this year by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is an expansive novel about time, memory and nationhood.

The story begins in a “clinic for the past”, a place in which each floor recreates a different decade as a way to treat Alzheimer sufferers by transporting them back to a more secure past, and progresses to a European-wide referendum on time, in which each country votes for which year they’d like to return to.