The Ultimate Summer Reads

A Note From Melinda

“Time is short. Good books are fun, but great books are astonishing. Yes, it’s wonderful you’re already away and on holiday, but a truly brilliant book will transport you into a completely alternative reality. There is never enough time for all the great books in the world, but don't panic! Start here…”

Melinda's Picks

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

I think of this book all the time. The true and extraordinary story of a young girl growing up in Jamaica with a strict Rastafarian father, it’s a memoir that hurts and holds. But Sinclair also has the pen of a poet. It’s a strange regret of mine in life, pretty niche considering, but my only true sense of remorse is not having underlined the sentences in books that spun language on its axis. This book would be full to the brim with them.

There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak

I feel like Shafak is the leader we’d have if the world was actually a reasonable place. I’m such a fan of her work, I went to a literary festival once where she was being interviewed. Firstly, it was as if Gaia was speaking directly to us, like her omniscient humanist heart and understanding of our nature and nature itself spoke of all that was sacred and essential. I asked her a question about her writing process. She said she did wild amounts of research, and then set off with no plan. Extraordinary! This book spans multiple characters and epochs, as intricate and meticulous as a bloodstream. Secondly, of course, I fell in love with her. She is beautiful in person, but her heart floored me.

Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman

I know this is cheesy, because some little splice of Whitman gets wheeled out in most teenage movies of a certain pretentious, angsty faux-intellectualism. But… I read these poems myself as a teenager and I still dunk into to them often. When I am sad and when things don’t make sense, there is this: the exuberance, the joy, the abundance and the wonder! And – with teenage, pretentious, angsty faux-intellectualism as my natural state – they also make me feel as close to a kind of religion as I ever will.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

I like to think I have a good sense of humour, but I’ve only ever laughed out loud reading two books: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and this. In truth, it took me a couple of attempts to get into – I just couldn’t get a handle on it. And then… bang! What a wild ride. My favourite books are like spells, and this is one crazy incantation. Brilliant.

A House In The Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

A young journalist gets kidnapped in Somalia and spends 460 days in captivity. I don’t know how Lindhout remembers all the intricate details of her incarceration bearing in mind she was in a cell with nothing, but it’s an astonishing account for many reasons, not least the grace she displays in the telling of it. Humans can behave terribly; they are also capable of an extraordinary divinity.

The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller

There are two books here – which I know is cheating. And yet. They both exist in a kind of demigod/goddess realm, but in both I’ve never read anything so tenderly and viscerally poignant about what it means to be mortal. I Google this writer the whole time. A woman writing about characters from ancient Greek mythology. Who is she? How does she do this? Does she have special powers? How can I get them?

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Young artists making their way in New York in the late ’60s early ’70s. Ah, the characters, the creative process, the clubs, the dark stars, the city itself! See also: Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries of New York in the ’80s. See also Joan Juliet Buck’s The Price of Illusion in Paris, Rome, Milan, Ireland and more from the ’50s to the ’90s. See also: Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by punk girl-band guitarist Viv Albertine, in ’70s London. Searing observational brilliance which kicks you in the stomach with a nostalgia for cities in times you never knew and lives you never lived.