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Here’s a list of cracking good reads to get you through the summer

 

Ever since I was a child, I looked forward to summer holidays because they meant I could spend long, uninterrupted days reading all my favourite authors. Even now that I am all grown up and cannot take entire weeks off for the summer, I still stock up on books to read late into the sultry, sticky nights of the hot months. 

 

Just in case you are inclined to do the same, here’s a handy list of the books that have been keeping me entertained of late. I do hope you enjoy them too!

 

A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz

 

Setting a murder mystery on an island on which the characters remain trapped is an old trope made most famous by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. But Anthony Horowitz breathes fresh life into this format with this book, in which he casts himself as the dim Watson-like figure to the Sherlock figure played by ex-detective inspector Daniel Hawthorne. The two men are invited to a literary festival hosted on the tiny island of Alderney and with a certain inevitability, a body is discovered. Nobody can get on or off the island, and it is up to Hawthorne and Horowitz to unmask the killer. As locked room mysteries go, this one is rather fun.

 

The Love Of My Life by Rosie Walsh

 

What if you wake up one morning and realise that you are married to a stranger? That the woman you love, the mother of your daughter, is not the person you believe she is? Is there any coming back from the discovery? Can any marriage survive such knowledge? This book by Rosie Walsh examines these questions through the love story of Leo and Emma, as they bring up their daughter Ruby and a dog, somewhat improbably named John Keats. Leo, an obituary writer, is assigned to write a stock obit of his wife, as she battles cancer. His research sheds light on secrets that Emma has never shared with him – and their lives begin to unravel from that point on. Nothing is as it seems in this book; and the big reveal – when it comes – will leave you gobsmacked.

 

Anna The Biography by Amy Odell

No journalist has ever had more power in the world of fashion than Anna Wintour, who made her name as editor of Vogue – though she now runs pretty much all of the editorial at the Conde Nast publishing company. Unusually for a fashion journalist, she is now a household name in America and more of a celebrity than many of the people Vogue writes about. She is also as feared as she is admired with tags like Nuclear Wintour being applied to her (the film, The Devil Wears Prada, was famously based on her). This broadly sympathetic biography tries to work out what makes her tick. And though it doesn’t have all the answers it is an enjoyable read as it captures what life can be like for a woman who rises to the top of her profession.

 

The Widow by K.L. Slater

 

Life for Kate and Michael is near idyllic as they bring up their young daughter, Tansy, is a scenic village in the English countryside. But the peace and tranquility they revel in is shattered when a young Polish single mother suddenly goes missing and suspicion begins to fall on Michael. Kate tries hard not to believe the worst of her husband, even as the evidence against him mounts. But when he is killed – run over by a truck as he leaves the police station after an interrogation; begging the question whether it was an accident or a suicide – Kate devotes her attention to safeguarding his memory for her young daughter, no matter what it takes.

 

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown

 

I picked up this book wondering what new information Tina Brown could possibly have about the British royal family, a topic she has already mined for all it has. As it turns out, she has a lot of fresh dirt to dish, from plumbing the depths of Camilla’s mind to examining what made Harry and Meghan bolt across the Atlantic. All of this information is dished up in a chatty, gossipy style that Brown has made her own from her Tatler and Vanity Fair days, making this a cracking good read.