Best new books: July 2021

By Madeleine Feeny on 2/7/2021

If you’re dreaming of blue skies and Mediterranean heat (aren’t we all?), dive into Margarita Liberaki’s Greek coming-of-age classic, Three Summers, or jump onto a yacht in St Tropez with Whitman Tagore, the A-list heroine of The View was Exhausting.
But it’s not all cocktails and sunsets. Samira Sedira’s People Like Them will transport you to a French mountain village whose dark undercurrents disturb its tranquil surface. Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms moves from cramped rented quarters in Oxford to London, reflecting on the true cost of a room of one’s own for a young person today. Meanwhile, Isy Suttie makes her fiction debut with a funny, poignant novel about anxiety and control, and Natasha Lunn investigates love’s many faces in her non-fiction book, Conversations on Love.

Conversations on Love, by Natasha Lunn

Journalist Natasha Lunn had lost hope of finding love. Founding the newsletter Conversations on Love, she began speaking to writers and experts about their romantic lives. This book draws on those interviews and her own experiences to paint a nuanced and diverse portrait of love’s myriad forms, examining how we find and maintain it – and move on when it comes to an end. It includes Philippa Perry on falling in love slowly, Dolly Alderton on vulnerability, Candice Carty-Williams on friendship, Lisa Taddeo on the loneliness of loss, Esther Perel on unrealistic expectations and Roxane Gay on redefining romance. This essential read could change your perspective on relationships, offering reassurance and hope.

(Viking, 15 July)

Three Rooms, by Jo Hamya

This incisive, acerbic meditation on possession, politics and privilege is among the summer’s hottest debuts. Unable to find adequate employment after graduating, a young woman takes a research assistant role at Oxford University. There, as nation and government squabble and stagnate in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, she grapples with the visible trappings of privilege with which she is surrounded – Oxford being the alma mater of much of the Cabinet. Finding herself living in the Victorian essayist Walter Pater’s house, she invokes his spirit as she engages with the digital age, from dating apps to Instagram stalking. Eight months later, she’s in London, working a temp job and paying £80 per week to sleep on a stranger’s sofa. As rising political tensions mirror her disintegrating relations with her flatmate, and stability seems more elusive than ever, she begins to wonder if it’s all worth it.

(Jonathan Cape, 8 July)

Jane is Trying, by Isy Suttie

This debut novel exudes all the offbeat humour and acute observation you might expect from the actress and comedian who first stole our hearts as Dobby in Peep Show. Jane Wildgoose and her fiancé Jonathan had been trying to have a baby. Trying so hard, in fact, that the rest of their relationship had withered without Jane really noticing. Until suddenly, the jigsaw pieces clicked into place and she realised Jonathan had been cheating. So now she’s living with her parents in the village where she grew up, slave to a hypervigilant brain that needs to check every lock multiple times, and goes into overdrive when she receives some unexpected news. This beguiling tale captures how modern pressures fuel anxiety, and how it feels when your life falls into the gap between expectation and reality.

(Orion, 22 July)

The View was Exhausting by Mikaela Clements and Onjuli Datta

The View was Exhausting, by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta

Malibu Rising meets Call My Agent meets Succession. Whitman Tagore is one of a kind: a British Indian actress whose talent and drive propelled her out of northeast London and onto Hollywood’s premier cast lists. But Win has a secret: the on-off romance that keeps the tabloids salivating and fans swooning is a sham. Leo Milanowski, a wealthy international playboy, rescued Win’s career from the doldrums after an ex betrayed her and is the perfect decoy from any scandal. Determined to control her own narrative, Win’s also keen to keep the relationship strictly professional behind closed doors, but are the lines blurring? Crackling with sexual tension, this smart, escapist page-turner explores fame, ambition, privilege and prejudice, asking: how far can you manipulate the truth without getting in too deep?

(Headline Review, 6 July)

Three Summers, by Margarita Liberaki

Originally released in 1946, this Greek coming-of-age classic is also popular in France, where it was published in 1950 on Albert Camus’s recommendation. It is still taught in Greek schools and has been voted one of the country’s favourite books of all time. As Polly Samson, author of A Theatre for Dreamers, suggests in her introduction, its English equivalent might be Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Narrated by the sensitive, imaginative 16-year-old Katerina, it follows the adolescent dreams and yearnings of three sisters growing up in the countryside outside Athens across three languorous summers before the Second World War. With its sensuous prose, nostalgic charm, playful humour and evocation of burgeoning sexuality, this novel is the literary equivalent of a sun-soaked holiday in Greece.

(Penguin European Writers, 8 July)

People Like Them, by Samira Sedira, translated by Lara Vergnaud

Set in a sleepy French mountain village, this psychological thriller – inspired by a real case in 2003 – is a mesmerising portrait of the escalating tensions that culminate in a family massacre. Algeria-born writer and actress Samira Sedira drew on her experience of working as a cleaner to write this book, her first to be translated into English. There isn’t much wealth or diversity in Carmac, so when the affluent Black Langlois family arrives, it causes ripples. Locals Constant and Anna Guillot forge a friendship with the newcomers, despite envying their chalet and cars. But Constant’s life has been marked by disappointment since his promising pole-vaulting career was cut short by injury. Faced with further humiliation, he snaps. As compulsive and unsettling as Lullaby and Little Fires Everywhere, this novel won the French Prix Eugène Dabit and, in Leïla Slimani’s words, explores ‘racism and jealousy in a very subtle way’.

(Raven, 8 July)