What books should you read this summer? Labouring away for days, clutching my aching back, ignoring calls from the dozens of people who call me to offer advice, eating poorly and drinking not at all, I trawled through the catalogues of the English-language publishers that are still solvent to make a list of summer reads for you. Some of these books will delight you and others may bore you to death, but I hope they’re not going to be the same books in each instance.
Bookworm: From serious non-fiction to pulp fiction, there’s something for all kinds of readers this season. Conceptualpictures.com
FICTION
Four years after Never Let Me Go, his striking novel about a world in which human beings are cloned to provide organs for donor transplants, Kazuo Ishiguro returns with Nocturnes (Faber and Faber). The “five stories of music and nightfall” of this book are set across Europe and America, and there is every reason to look forward to new work from such a reliably ambitious writer.
Indeed, a number of novelists seem to be turning to the pleasures and freedoms of the short story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning Nigerian author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half Of A Yellow Sun, returns in June with the collection The Thing Around your Neck (Knopf). Adichie’s book shuttles between Nigeria and America, exploring ties between those who have left and those who have stayed at home. Similarly, Alaa Al Aswany, the author of the best-selling The Yacoubian Building and Chicago, is also back in June with a collection of short stories about Cairo, Friendly Fire (Fourth Estate). Characterization has always been Aswany’s strong point—even his novels feature casts of a dozen or more protagonists—and so one suspects he is not moving that far from home.
And then there are the short-story writers themselves. All through his life the prolific John Updike, who died earlier this year, turned out dozens of short stories in and around his many novels. In June, Knopf is releasing a new collection of them called My Father’s Tears and other Stories, followed in August by a collection of 18 classic Updike stories, The Maples Stories. Closer home, Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s widely anticipated debut short-story collection, set in Delhi and Dehradun, Eunuch Park, will be published by Penguin India in June.
Monica Ali, whose novel Brick Lane won so many hearts, returns in June with her third novel In The Kitchen(Scribner), the story of the troubles of Gabriel Lightfoot, a chef in a big hotel in central London. The Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage made a striking debut in 2006 with De Niro’s Game, which won the 2008 Impac Dublin Literary Award. His new novel Cockroach (Hamish Hamilton, June), a story about an Iranian immigrant in the underworld of Montreal, promises to be just as intriguing.