Kjell Ola Dahl’s summer reading picks
I read Norwegian fiction mostly so I have to search a bit to find what is translated into English. Among those I found I recommend The Therapist by Helene Flood, a tremendous psychological thriller, and The Seven Doors by Agnes Ravatn, a nice mix of whodunnit and psychological thriller. Or you could pick up something by Gunnar Staalesen, e.g. Wolves in the Dark or Fallen Angels. Get these and you’ll be fully entertained this summer.
Simone Buchholz’ summer reading pick
Department of Mind-Blowing Theories – Tom Gauld
If you need one thing to mentally survive the last complicated part of this f***ing pandemic, then it’s the hilarious smartness of Tom Gauld’s brain and pen, and all his crazy assistants (only God knows who they might be).
David F. Ross’ Sumer reading picks
My summer reads are perhaps a bit narrow in terms of subject matter; all include music as a route to the good life before the inevitable come-down; ambition and loss; young idealism and obsession, etc. Perhaps they’re a bit stereotypically male. Perhaps not.
Kitchenly 434 – Alan Warner
What the butler saw. The undisciplined life of globe-spanning seventies rock god Marko, as viewed from the perspective of Crofton, the ever-faithful ‘help’, who tends to Kitchenly Mill Race, Marko’s rambling Tudorbethan pile.
Who They Was – Gabriel Krauze
This is a blisteringly authentic debut that has drawn favourable comparisons with A Clockwork Orange for its depiction of young men growing up and blowing up in the pressurised urban war zones of a big city. Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
The first David Mitchell book I’ve read (although not sure why I’ve avoided the others for so long). A story founded on the intoxicating notion that the future will be shaped by young people and the power of music. Hope I die before I get old? Yep, fucking right on!
Lilja Sigurdardóttir’s summer reading picks
I have to recommend that people postpone reading until they have finished watching Katla on Netflix. (Blowing my own trumpet here!) But after that I think people should go for some of the amazing Orenda books on offer; next on my reading list is Simone Buchholz’s Hotel Cartagena. I love the Chastity Riley series. She is one of my fave characters, and there is something Chandleresque about Simone’s writing that is so cool.
My current read is The End of Her by Shari Lapena. She is the queen of domestic noir and I really enjoy her books.
I found this a devastatingly beautiful and powerful novel. It’s so much more than a thriller, though yes, it is one – the kind that has you glued to the page, having to read just one more. (For the record, I read it in two sittings.) As with Dean’s previous books the language is what sets it apart. He has a gift for keeping it simple, and yet it is deviously layered too. The setting is claustrophobic, the characters pulse off the page, and it’s dark, dark, dark, the way I like even my summer reads. But it’s hopeful too. It is excellent, and I strongly recommend it.
In complete contrast to the darkness of Dean’s book is Fenwick’s captivating and beautiful tale. Once again, she has proved she is the mistress of pure escapism. Spanning generations, with an achingly intense love story and unearthed secrets about ancestry at its core, this novel is just what the world needs right now. The immersive dual timeline whisks you away, and the country setting is perfect for this time of year. It’s a glorious summer read and is definitely one to look out for in 2021.
![Dead Man’s Grave: A breathtaking, chilling, Scottish crime fiction mystery thriller (DS Max Craigie Scottish Crime Thrillers, Book 1) by [Neil Lancaster]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51UBfTh7UGS.jpg)
I’m reading this at the moment and it is the definition of a page-turner. Creepy, intriguing and compelling.
A beautifully written thriller with a highly original setting and cast of characters. Terse, tense and packed with heart.
![Written In Bone: hidden stories in what we leave behind by [Sue Black]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41DACnz5zVS.jpg)
Nothing combats bone-chilling cold like talk about bones! I’m enjoying anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black’s Written in Bone. The case studies and very human stories she weaves around them are fascinating.![The Liar's Dictionary: A winner of the 2021 Betty Trask Awards by [Eley Williams]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41jALH6nc5S.jpg)
I adore words and their origins and playing with them, so I got immense pleasure from The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams. In this novel we have two viewpoints – nineteenth-century Peter Winceworth inserting fictitious words into a new encyclopaedic dictionary, and the present day Mallory, tasked with finding these Mountweazels. But of course it’s not that straightforward.
![A Rattle of Bones: A Rebecca Connolly Thriller (Book 3) by [Douglas Skelton]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51u6IrX5PDS.jpg)
This has the Highlands of Scotland, a plot that zips along, fascinating characters – and did I mention the Highlands of Scotland? Dare I say it … a rattling good read (out 5 August).![The Blood Divide: The must-read race-against-time thriller of 2021 by [A. A. Dhand]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/418aLKuh2nL.jpg)
If I read a better thriller this year I’ll be surprised – and delighted. From the first page you know you’re in the hands of a master of their craft. Loved it!
Orenda
‘We have been absolutely 
A highly anticipated follow-up to her indie-favourite A Modern Family, Helga Flatland’s One Last Time, translated by Rosie Hedger, is an elegant, perceptive, warmly funny novel focusing on fractured family relationships that come under the spotlight when a woman – grandmother and mother – discovers she has terminal cancer. Winner of the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize and a number-one bestseller in Norway, this is an exquisitely moving book and a perfect example of why Joanna Cannon has dubbed Helga the ‘Norwegian Anne Tyler’.
Ex-Guardian columnist, Katie Allen’s immensely accomplished debut, Everything Happens for a Reason, was inspired by her own experience of still birth, and is both a profoundly moving portrait of grief and a quirky, laugh-out-loud story about a woman becomes obsessed with the idea that saving a young man’s life on the day she discovered she was pregnant is the ‘reason’ why her baby was born sleeping. Fans of Rachel Joyce and Eleanor Oliphant will love the zany characters, the moving themes and the gloriously uplifting messages.
Award-winning Hull author Louise Beech has written the searingly emotive and mesmerisingly beautiful This Is How We Are Human, sure to be her breakthrough novel with 100 five-star reviews on Goodreads before publication. In this breathtaking book, we meet Sebastian, an autistic young man who yearns for a relationship and all that this entails. Driven by love and a desire to make her son happy, his mother hires a high-class escort, whose own determination to get through the night, to pay for her father’s medical bills and her own nursing degree is absolutely heartrending. When these three lives collide, everything is changed. For everyone. This is a timely, thought-provoking story about love in its many forms. We are enchanted.
Everything Happens for a Reason is Katie’s first novel. She used to be a journalist and columnist at the Guardian and Observer, and started her career as a Reuters correspondent in Berlin and London. The events in Everything Happens for a Reason are fiction, but the premise is loosely autobiographical. Katie’s son, Finn, was stillborn in 2010, and her character’s experience of grief and being on maternity leave without a baby is based on her own. And yes, someone did say to her ‘everything happens for a reason’.
Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards.
Alex Clark is a journalist and broadcaster, often seen in the pages of the Guardian, the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement, and heard on BBC R4 programmes such as Front Row and Open Book. An experienced chair of live events, she has also worked as an artistic director at the Bath Festival is a Patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival. The literary awards she has judged include the Man Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize. Alex lives in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Orenda Books has teamed up with Jonathan Ball Publishing in South Africa, to celebrate publication of Michael Stanley’s chilling, sophisticated, warmly funny and absolutely nail-biting thriller Facets of Death –prequel to the award-winning Detective Kubu series. The Times said, ‘The local colour is as delightful as the intriguing investigation’.
It’s Sunshine Noir meets Nordic Noir, as the Queen of Icelandic Suspense, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, guides the proceedings, introducing readers to the South African writing team who make up Michael Stanley – Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip – and quizzing them about the Botswanan setting, the breathtaking plot and everyone’s favourite detective, David ‘Kubu’ Bengu, who makes his first appearance in Botswana CID! Yrsa will also give us a preview of her chilling new thriller, The Doll, out in July.
Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Both were born in South Africa and have worked in aca- demia and business. Stanley was an educational psychologist, specialising in the application of computers to teaching and learn- ing, and is a pilot. Michael specialised in image processing and remote sensing and taught at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Author of the bestselling Thora Gudmundsdóttir crime series and several standalone thrillers, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1963 and works as a civil engineer. She made her crime fiction debut in 2005 with Last Rituals, the first instalment in the Thora Gudmundsdottir series, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her work stands ‘comparison with the finest contemporary crime writing anywhere in the world’ according to the Times Literary Supplement. In 2011 her standalone horror novel I Remember You was awarded the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award and was nominated for The Glass Key, and has been made into a film starring Jóhannes Haukur. In 2015 The Silence of the Sea won the Petrona Award for best Scandinavian crime novel, and The Legacy, the first novel in the Freyja and Huldar series, was nominated for The Glass Key and won the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award. All of her books have been European bestsellers.
was performed at a small festival in Hull. It was inspired by the real-life difficulty I had when my daughter Katy, having been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes aged just seven, later had a complete breakdown and refused her life-saving injections. The only way I could get her to have them was via storytelling – and the only story good enough to keep her attention was that of my grandad’s survival at sea during the second world war. We not only bonded over the shared discovery of our ancestry, but Katy found the courage to fight, just as Grandad Colin had done for fifty days on a cramped lifeboat, under searing heat, with little food and water.
My third novel, Maria in the Moon, was actually the first one I wrote way back in 2007 after the devastating floods in Hull. We were living in temporary accommodation after our home was submerged beneath four feet of sewage-rich, muddy rainwater. I created Catherine-Maria at a rickety, makeshift, metal desk because mine had been destroyed. I poured my pain into her experience, her voluntary work at Flood Crisis, her despair at what the water had taken, and what it flushed out from her past.
My own life has infiltrated some of my other novels, even in small ways. My voluntary work with children going through the care system helped shape The Mountain in my Shoe, and my own care records helped me create young Conor’s documents. I also moulded him around quirks and characteristics my own son had at that age.
My radio work inspired Call Me Star Girl. I’ve volunteered at community radio and then at BBC Radio Humberside for over ten years, and often thought – when doing the night-time show – how spooky the studio is when it’s d
My role as a theatre usher had me create I Am Dust. Ushers steal about backstage, in the shadows, barely noticed. Invisible, we see everything. I’ve read theatre books where the actors are the protagonists and I wanted to give voice to those who work behind the scenes. When I wrote Chloe, and the musical world of the iconic show ‘Dust’, I wanted to create a claustrophobic place where only the theatre building exists.
I knew I had to do this one justice. Had to get every nuance of This Is How We Are Human right. A few people thought I shouldn’t write it, especially when I mentioned autism. But Fiona insisted that I was giving Sean a voice – after all he didn’t want to write it, but he was happy for it to bewritten. This isn’t an #OwnVoices story, and I don’t claim it is. But I worked closely with both Fiona and Sean. We got together and acted out scenes. I listened carefully to how Sean spoke, what he thought, and how he felt. Fiona read each chapter as I went and offered guidance and feedback. It was a truly emotional journey. I couldn’t have done it without the two of them. In fact, I never would have written it at all but for them.
Kate Fox is a ‘gentle activist’ and campaigner for the voices of northerners, the working class, women, and the neurodiverse. She is a Cultural Ambassador for the 
Shtum is a heart-wrenching and honest novel written by Jem Lester, inspired by his experiences with his own autistic son. He said, ‘A lot of the behaviours and the feelings that Jonah inspires in the book are very close to my feelings, because I couldn’t really see the point of reinventing an autistic character when I had one so close to home.’
Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty was one of my favourites of last year. Dara is autistic and a teacher once told him he couldn’t write. Did he ever prove them wrong. This glorious book, with writing that is wise and beautiful, chronicles Dara’s experiences as he turns fifteen, and describes his love of and connection with nature, this love of wildlife intense and inspiring.
What Cares The Sea? is the true account by the other man lost at sea with my grandad, Kenneth Cooke. It’s out of print and hard to get hold of, but there are a few copies floating around. It’s a brutal, searing, honest account of isolation, bravery, survival against the odds, and friendship.
Deon Meyer takes us to the scorching Karoo for Fever. This is more a post-apocalyptic coming of age story than a traditional mystery or thriller. The Times and Steven King both raved about it. The small community remaining after a deadly pandemic sets up their new home near the Gariep dam, hopeful that the water and hydroelectricity will help them keep the remnants of the old civilisation, but also build a better one.
Put on your dark glasses and indulge in armchair travel with Jeff Siger’s Murder in Mykonos, the first of the Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis mysteries, all set in Greece. Unpopular with the powers that be, Kaldis is sent to peaceful, tourist haven Mykonos. When two young women are murdered, the pressure is on, not only to solve the murders, but also to save the island’s tourist industry.
Femi Kayode’s Lightseekers is a stunning debut. The first line paints the scene: ‘The October sun is as hot as the blood of the angry mob.’ Three young men are mercilessly beaten before being set alight. The question is not who committed the crime, but why and who was behind it. One of the grieving fathers hires Philip Taiwo, an investigative psychologist who specialises in the motives behind crimes and mob violence. He soon finds he’s taken on far more than he bargained for.
Step back a hundred years and meet Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s only female lawyer, as she makes her debut in Sujata Massey’s multiple-award-winning The Widows of Malabar Hill. When she raises questions about the validity of a will, Mistry is thrown into the complexity of religious and legal diversity in a country struggling to free itself of British rule.
The Missing American is the first novel in Kwei Quartey’s new series featuring female private investigator, Emma Djan. The plot revolves around the activities of the young men who make fortunes scamming people on the internet with the assistance of witchcraft from traditional priests. Along the way, one of their targets goes missing. Emma has to find out how and why. It’s up for an Edgar award this year.
Step back another hundred years, and watch Investigator Yashim become embroiled in a plot to overthrow the Ottoman Empire in Edgar-winning The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, the first of five Investigator Yashim novels. You will be able to hear the sights and sounds of the city, smell the spices of the souk, as the wily inspector plies his trade.
Mike Nicol’s crime fiction is a treat. Take Power Play. Staccato prose, tense plotting, intriguing characters. Don’t even think of crossing one of Nicol’s villains. The sun beats down on beautiful Cape Town, but this isn’t the city tourists see. Abalone smugglers. Secret agents with hidden agendas. Chinese smugglers. Rival gangs for whom murder is just part of the job. And a nod to Shakespeare thrown in.
In Ned-Kelly-Award-winner Candice Fox’s first novel in her Crimson Lake series, itself titled Crimson Lake, ex-detective, Ted Conkaffey, teams up with private investigator and convicted murderer, Amanda Pharrell, to help her solve a case of deception and obsession. What a pair! Beware of crocodiles when you set out your deck chair on the beach to read the story.
Pick up Jonathon King’s Edgar-Award-winning The Blue Edge of Midnight, the first of the Max Freeman Mysteries. Ex-cop Freeman exiles himself to the steamy Florida Everglades, wracked with guilt over the death of a twelve-year-old. When he finds the body of a young girl in the swamp, he becomes the prime suspect and has to dig into his own past to prove his innocence.
Writing letters to an old friend in Australia, a British academic tells the story of how he meets and falls for the woman novelist he has studied and taught on throughout his career. The academic and his subject become closer and a toxic mix of idolisation, envy and distrust develops. Our narrator also longs to write fiction, wishes he could crack “the trick of it”. The letters are natural, hilarious, touching and, at times, dark. Wonderfully done.
I found my way to Frayn’s The Trick of It via this book by novelist David Lodge. A collection of essays on topics such as Surrealism, the Unreliable Narrator and Ending, the book is packed with examples from writers including Orwell, Ishiguro and Austen. It’s less a how-to guide and more an entertaining eye-opener to the tricks of the greats. For readers and writers alike.
This story of a fictional terror attack on London is told by a grieving wife and mother in letters to Osama bin Laden. The plot is twisty and intriguing and the feel is apocalyptic given the scale of the attack that launches the story. But it’s the voice that made this book so superb for me. The letters are packed with turns of phrase that are simultaneously unique, funny and devastating, and everything is told with such directness that I have rarely felt so close to a narrator.
This funny, moving novel is written as a mix of emails, articles, first-person accounts and other documents. Semple gives us just enough of each character’s perspective and weaves everything together into a great page turner. The eponymous Bernadette is a wonderfully cynical character with a heart and her story is a clever reflection on missed opportunities and our conflicted feelings about fitting in.
I re-read this part of the Adrian Mole series while writing my book because I wanted to pick apart how Adrian sounds and feel in his thirties – a similar age to my narrator Rachel. I love the way returning to Adrian Mole is like meeting an old friend whose jokes I already know or anticipate, but I laugh at them just as hard anyway.
A book for children and adults alike, this is the darkest tale in the Moomin series. It’s effectively the account of a father’s existential crisis – though children probably see it as an adventure story. Moominpappa’s family have grown up, worse still, they have grown independent. His realisation that he is no longer the chief protector is beautifully shown in a scene where the rest of the family put out a fire without his knowing. His response? To move the entire family to a remote, rocky island, where once again he is needed. My book is largely about our search for purpose – aren’t so many books? – and Moominpappa’s quest to make his life make sense was an unexpected source of inspiration.
Full of dark humour and big themes of family tensions, this is one of my favourite books. It was on my desk throughout writing Everything Happens for a Reason. If I felt stuck, I would pick it up and read a few pages as a break and as inspiration. Holmes has a way of paring back and saying just what’s needed and of saying the unexpected, in dialogue particularly. Her characters can be brutally honest but are also vulnerable and kind.
I just love everything about this book. The writing is a beautiful mix of poetic and blunt, the characters are flawed but loveable, the setting is vivid, the backstories are so complex. The book I am working on now is also about someone returning to where they grew up so I had mixed feelings when I started David’s brilliant book – so much there to inspire me but it’s also mightily intimidating! I tell everyone to read this book – consider yourself told too.
