Some like it hot: best holiday reads
Whether you’re looking for tender first love, steamy romance or spine-tingling suspense, we have your summer beach reads sorted
Image credit: Dave Lidwell
Whether you’re looking for tender first love, steamy romance or spine-tingling suspense, we have your summer beach reads sorted
Bantam hardback RRP: £16.99
Ah, the Maldives! A crystal-clear Indian Ocean, white sand, all the cocktails you can drink… Super-fit Camilla and writer Kate have come with Darcy to celebrate her midlife divorce.
The friends were brought together more than 20 years ago by unimaginable trauma. Surely a break in this island paradise will be healing? But here’s the problem with paradise: there’s always a serpent.
And girly jaunts can be murder.
Also available as audiobook
Try a Saga holiday to the Maldives
Profile Books paperback RRP £9.99
There is a special charm about vintage fiction in which crimes are solved not by forensics, in the laboratory, but by intuition and deduction.
The latest collection in the Vintage Murders series transports us from the English seaside to Corfu and Alsace and to that famously foreign country, the past, in the company of Simon Brett, Ellis Peters, Michael Innes and Arthur Conan Doyle – such great storytellers, it’s criminal.
Phoenix hardback RRP £20
A move to Cornwall promises a new start for Ann, whose vicar husband, Tim, is married to the Church. But the vicarage is ghastly. Tim is joyless and distant with Ann and their 11-year-old son, Sam. Ann’s to-do list is all ‘make chilli, clean bathroom, change beds’.
No wonder she is led into temptation, but will she be delivered from evil? An impeccably written, nuanced novel, that is old-fashioned in the very best ways.
Also available as audiobook
Riverrun hardback RRP £20
Kent’s ‘desert’, the remote landscape around Dungeness, provides the evocative backdrop for another DS Alexandra Cupidi investigation.
The body of wild swimmer Mimi Greene has washed up on the beach – and her death was no accident. Meanwhile, Alex’s good friend Jill Ferriter has a convicted murderer claiming to be her father.
This is a gripping whodunnit peopled by the good, the bad and the ugly.
Also available as audiobook
Apollo hardback £RRP £20
‘A woman must nourish her soul, keep her spirits fresh with little adventures, right?’
Art historian Melike has a devoted husband, a lovely Istanbul home – and a hole in her soul. Inveigled by seductive stranger Petro, she travels to Cyprus via Athens for a confrontation with turbulent history, a reunion with her errant father, and far more than a ‘little adventure’.
A heady mix of horror and romance.
Also available as audiobook
Penguin hardback RRP £16.99
Miami, Florida. Ten-strong Team Aurora, each of them guarding a secret, are on a lavish executive jolly. They’re variously rivalrous, venal, deceiving – and that’s just the good guys.
The big reveal from their oddball CEO is that they are each in line for a fortune, but when one of them is found dead, the deal is in jeopardy. Rosenblum pits a fantastic cast of characters against one another in the weird world of tech.
Also available as audiobook
W&N hardback RRP £20
A place of sun-warmed childhood memories, the cove in North Cornwall where she scattered her parents’ ashes draws Lynch back and back in all weathers. We walk with her in Tennyson’s footsteps, as she shares dreams and fears, literary allusions, nature notes on the ingenious limpet, the starfish, intimations of the sublime and of peril.
The Cove is a mesmerising, elegiac mix of meditation and memoir.
Hodder & Stoughton hardback RRP £25
The devilishly clever King has been freaking us out for 50 years, since his debut novel, Carrie, and these 12 stories will have you on the edge of your deckchair.
He’s a genius at dialogue, mixing the mundane and the macabre, the bog-ordinary and the bizarre. Expect extra-terrestrials, psychic dreams, alligators, snakes, and – with a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style – a family car ride to hell.
Also available as audiobook
Our pick!
Orenda paperback RRP £9.99
Faleri, falera… The camper van is packed for the Büchner family holiday, but 16-year-old Frieder will be left behind. He flunked his exams and must study for the resits, staying with his Nana and his strange step-grandfather, ‘Herr Professor’.
Still, at least he gets to hang out with best friend Johann and clever sister Alma. And when he meets Beate at the pool it’s love at first dive. So begins a summer of joys and sadness that will sear itself into his memory, as this prize-winning coming-of-age novel sears itself into the reader’s.
Funny, touching, troubling, with the growing bond between Frieder and the Professor at its heart.
Also available as audiobook
Whether your perfect beach holiday is just sun, sea and sand, or if you like a bit of sightseeing, shopping or snorkelling thrown in, one of these might be your ideal destination.
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