What makes a holiday read? For some it's frothy enough to follow after mucho margaritas, for others it's the kind of meaty prose you can only get stuck into with a clear mind and no morning alarm clock.
We've read our way through 2019's best new books (in hardback and paperback) to find the titles to suit every kind of holiday – from breezy beach reads to cerebral stimulation for city breaks.
All you have to do is find space in your suitcase.
We gushed about this book back when it came out in hardback. Now it's out in paperback and has grown in momentum thanks to the Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist and glowing recommendations all over Instagram. Ordinary London lives are captured with lyricism and integrity in Diana Evans’s story of two couples at turning points. In Crystal Palace, Melissa and Michael negotiate the sacrifice of personal ambitions for family gain and the the hypocrisy of intimacy. In the Surrey suburbs beyond, Stephanie and Damian find their quiet family life in crisis. Against the backdrop of Barack Obama’s victory and London’s shifting racial landscape, this is a quiet, vividly-drawn novel about the the moments of angst and joy that make up everyday life.
Nobody writes an engrossing summer read like the author of Eat Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert is back with a thrilling new story, which looks back on the glamour of 1940s New York. Ninety-five-year-old Vivian shares her life story. Arriving in Manhattan as a 19-year-old virgin, she soon gets swept up in the sex and backstage scandals. City of Girls starts out a hedonistic riot and ends on a more reflective note. But its magic comes from Gilbert's unapologetic exploration of female pleasure and emancipation. And it serves as a shining reminder to live a life you'll be proud to remember on your death bed.
After bestsellers including One Day and Starter for Ten, David Nicholls is master of coming-of-age comic romance. This hotly anticipated new novel revolves around first love. With no qualifications and a chaotic family life, Christopher leaves school feeling dejected. But a production of Romeo and Juliet and a bright new love interest bring a flash of hope and excitement to his summer. Nicholls captures the exhilaration and embarrassment of adolescence with evocative warmth, taking even the oldest, most jaded reader back to the giddy throes of that formative first relationship.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is one of our favorite journalists thanks to juicy celebrity profiles and her debut novel bursts with the same wry observations and pithy prose. Toby Fleishman is 41 years old, below average height and newly single. But this time around, women seem to want him. Then Toby's new life of Tinder hook-ups and part-time parenting is interrupted when his ex-wife disappears. Dating, discovery and self-acceptance in the digital age come into sharp focus in a story that's full of surprises, wit and vibrancy.
Is your life everything you hoped it would be? Having written two historical novels, Anna Hope turns her attention to the contemporary zeitgeist in a story of three women at the beginning and end of their twenties. Expectation contrasts the excitements of early adulthood with the knotty reality of difficult marriages, professional failures and infertility. Though it touches on difficult themes, it remains an engaging portrayal of friendship and growing up.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad – even if they do everything right. Claire Lombardo's insightful debut novel follows four sisters with vastly different lives, united by a fear that they may never find the Big Love their parents have. Spanning 40 years in a weighty 550 pages, The Most Fun We Ever Had is a story to sink your teeth into. But the gregarious prose and dramatic plot developments are more than engrossing enough to justify achy wrists holding a heavy hardback. It's rare that a long book leaves you wanting more, but we would spend much more time with the Sorenson family if we could.
This year's winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction is at once an intimate study of one couple and an eye-opening representation of race and gender bias. An American Marriage follows Celestial and Roy as their promising future and happy marriage gets stifled by tragedy and injustice. Tayari Jones writes with unsettling candour, drilling into all-too relevant issues of discrimination with prose that's as potent as it is poetic.
An American Marriage has just come out in paperback, which is much more convenient for carrying around in a basket bag.
Laura Sims's searing debut novel is about a woman who becomes obsessed with a glamorous actress who lives opposite. It sound like a thriller of the Woman at the Window / Girl on the Train genre, but this story is a deeper and altogether more nuanced study of deteriorating mental health. Sims taps into our instinct to measure our own failures against others' demonstrable successes and the way in which curiosity can crystallise into obsession.
As perceptive as it is vivacious, Candice Carty-Williams's debut novel has been dubbed Bridget Jones's Diary meets Americanah. Queenie is a 25-year-old straddling two cultures and navigating heartbreak, anxiety and systemic racism. Her subsequent downward spiral of casual sex, conflict and rejection starts off fiercely funny but soon twists into something altogether more disturbing. And it's the darker aspects of Queenie's mental heath and treatment by others that makes this story so illuminating and thought-provoking.
Modern, ancient, fantasy and realism swirl together in Mark Haddon's contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Pericles. The Porpoise begins with a plane crash that leaves baby Angelica without a mother. Brought up in isolation by her domineering father, she retreats into a world of literature until a rescuer sails in aboard the titular Porpoise. It's a strange, tangled web of a story, drawing on ancient mythology and expanding into time travel. Haddon's ambitious scope will not be for everyone, but this innovative novel offers escapes into multiple worlds.
The Heavens starts as a sweet romance, then spirals into a mediation on time, destiny and dreams. Kate and Ben meet at a Manhattan party in the year 2000. But Kate's recurring dreams about Elizabethan poet and muse Emilia pull the story into 16th-century England. Soon the dream and reality, past and present, melt together. It's a bombastic, ambitious plot, but Sandra Newman's deftly detailed prose makes this strange story shine with life.
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