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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Good books: The 20 best holiday reads this summer
The Compound by Aisling Rawle (Borough Press, £16.99) Working in a dead-end job in a near future plagued by wars and environmental catastrophe, Lily just wants an easier life. Which is why she applies to be part of a hugely popular reality show in which men and women spend months in a constantly filmed compound in the middle of an unnamed desert, competing challenges in order to get everything from basic food and furniture to luxury items. As the group forms alliances and the challenges get darker (we're told no violence is allowed until only five contestants are left, but then all bets are off apart from actual murder), Aisling Rawle paints a chillingly convincing picture of what people will do for material gain. The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O'Donnell (W&N, £15.99) Seven years after their first outing in The House on Vesper Sands, Inspector Cutter, his sensitive sergeant Gideon Bliss and journalist Octavia Hillingdon return in another atmospheric tale of dark deeds in late Victorian London. Rich and powerful men are being murdered in deeply mysterious circumstances – but does something bigger lie behind these deaths? O'Donnell's ability to create a convincing 19th century world is as strong as ever, and this ripping yarn doesn't disappoint. [ The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O'Donnell: Brilliantly compelling Opens in new window ] Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane (HarperCollins, £9.99) A funny, swoon-worthy love story in which the characters behave and feel like real people is the romantic comedy goal, and no one delivers it quite like Mhairi McFarlane. In Cover Story journalist Bel gets a tip-off that could lead to the biggest story of her career. She decides to do some undercover investigating – but then the paper's annoying new intern Connor nearly blows her cover. Forced to improvise, Bel pretends he's her boyfriend, and the two unwilling colleagues have to work together to get the story. A satisfying and witty romance with emotional depth. It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara (Bantam, £16.99) When Susan O'Donnell accidentally sends a bitchy message about a neighbour to a local community WhatsApp group instead of her sisters, she's horrified and embarrassed. But she doesn't realise that she's set in chain a series of events that will end up in more than one death. Andrea Mara's new thriller is so full of carefully choreographed twists and turns that I literally gasped more than once. Just don't read it before bed if you want an early night because once you start reading, it's hard to stop. READ MORE The Treasures by Harriet Evans (Penguin Viking, £16.99) Summer is the perfect time to curl up with a big family saga and they don't come much bigger or more satisfying than The Treasures, the first in what will be a trilogy by Harriet Evans. It tells the ultimately intertwining stories of Alice Jansen, who grows up by an orchard in upstate New York in the 1960s, and her contemporary Tom Raven, who moves from a remote corner of Scotland to London. Fate will bring them together in a city that's changing by the second. A compelling and richly evocative tale. The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor (Vintage, £15.99) In 1944, Rome is occupied by the Nazis. But under the nose of the Gestapo's Paul Hauptmann, an escape line known as the Choir is hard at work, smuggling out refugees and Allied POWs to safety. Its members include the glamorous and aristocratic Contessa Giovanna Landini, who attracts Hauptmann's vindictive attention. Like O'Connor's last novel My Father's House , The Ghosts of Rome draws inspiration from real people and true events to create a brilliantly realised historical thriller. [ Joseph O'Connor: 'I don't know what modern Ireland is yet. I'm suspicious about the new sacred cows' Opens in new window ] Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin (Manila Press, £16.99) Jay is on a train in London when she gets a phone call from her father saying that her brother Ferdia is being considered for canonisation. It's 13 years since her devoutly religious brother died suddenly, and as far as Jay's deeply religious parents are concerned, him becoming a saint would be a wonderful thing. But Jay has long ago left a church from which, as a queer woman, she feels utterly alienated. As she's forced to confront the canonisation process, Jay also confronts her relationship to her family and her own past. Ní Mhaoileoin writes about these big issues with warmth and humour as well as sadness. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £15.99) Nadia is an academic working in criminology who has appalled her conservative Muslim mother by abandoning religion. Sara is a sarky young woman who joined Islamic State as a teenager. But when they meet in a UN-run camp in Iraq, where Nadia has been tasked with establishing a rehabilitation centre for 'Isis brides' from around the world, they gradually form a rapport that turns into a friendship. Because Nadia, despite all their ostensible differences, can see herself in this angry, sweary young woman. A funny and provocative novel. The Last Ditch: How One GAA Championship Gave a Sportswriter Back His Life by Eamonn Sweeney (Hachette Books Ireland, £16.99) In 2023 the sports writer Eamonn Sweeney was asked by his publisher to travel around Ireland, following the GAA championships, retracing the journey he'd taken in his 2004 book The Road to Croker. Sweeney loved the idea, but he was sure he couldn't do it. Because since that early odyssey, he'd developed a travel phobia that meant even buying a train ticket was an ordeal. As Sweeney decides to tackle his fears and write this powerful and moving book, he witnesses and celebrates a changing Ireland, and a changing GAA. Eat The Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin (Titan Books, £9.99) Shell is at a crossroads in her life when she takes a job in a florist's shop at a crumbling north Dublin suburban mall. She's immediately drawn to her charismatic new boss Neve – but she doesn't realise that Neve's heart already belongs to a strange orchid that grows in the mall's terrarium and whose tendrils extend throughout the building, a creature known only as Baby. Gorgeously written and incredibly atmospheric, this very Irish horror story is a brilliant exploration of desire, fear and belonging. Love In Exile by Shon Faye (Allen Lane, £20) After a heart-rending break-up, the writer Shon Faye gradually realised that maybe her feelings of romantic failure weren't based on any fault of her own. Maybe the fault lay in how society presents love itself, and what we expect our romantic relationships to give us? In this beautifully written, thoughtful, moving and ultimately hopeful exploration of love in the 21st century, Faye draws on her own experiences as a trans woman, as well as everyone from Ovid and Engels to bell hooks and Lana del Ray, to draw up a new blueprint of what love can mean. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker, £14.99) Claire O'Connor is an academic who breaks up with her English partner Tom and moves home to the west of Ireland to care for her dying father. Years later, Tom shows up in the neighbourhood to work on a book, and his return not only disrupts Claire's new life but brings out memories of her past. In this superb novel, Elaine Feeney examines everything from intergenerational trauma and violence to tradwives with insight, wit and compassion. [ Elaine Feeney on her new novel: 'I was pushing a sort of Chekhov dinner party in the west of Ireland' Opens in new window ] Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang (Raven, £16.99) Julie Chan works in a supermarket. Her identical twin Chloe, who was adopted by a rich white couple after their parents died in an accident when the girls were young, is an influencer with millions of followers. The sisters have only met once since then, when Chloe used Julie in a viral stunt – but when Julie finds Chloe's lifeless body, she's genuinely horrified. And then she realises her face can unlock Chloe's phone … Julie declares herself dead, takes over Chloe's life and joins her inner circle of mega-influencers – but she'll soon discover the darkness that lies behind their perfect facades. A darkly comic satire that's as gripping as a thriller. Long Story by Vicki Notaro (Penguin Sandycove, £14.99) Irish movie star Tara O'Toole is devastated – and humiliated – when her famous husband leaves her for another woman. She turns to Alex Curtis, her best friend since their teenage days in a Dublin stage school, for support. But then she discovers that their old schoolmate, rock star Sean Sweeney, is publishing a memoir – and what he's written about Tara could destroy her friendship with Alex, who's never quite got over her time with Sean. There's grit as well as gloss in this entertaining read, as Notaro touches on some dark issues as well as delivering a glittering depiction of the high life. The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, £22) Introducing an immediately likable new detective to the fictional crime canon, this is a gripping murder mystery with a difference. Ali Dawson is part of a secret London police department that investigates very, very cold cases, travelling briefly back in time to find evidence. When she's asked to spend a longer than usual time in Victorian London to clear the name of a government minister's ancestor, Ali finds herself trapped in the past – while, in the 21st century, her son finds himself accused of a crime that might just be connected to the one she's investigating. Words for my Comrades by Dean Van Nguyen (White Rabbit, £25) When the future hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur was 10 years old, he was asked by a religious minister what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer? 'A revolutionary.' Irish writer Dean Van Nguyen's fascinating new book tells the story of a musical icon's political life, looking at the influence of his Black Panther activist mother Afeni and showing how his life influenced his political sensibility. Insightful, readable and thoroughly well researched, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of politics and pop culture. The Marriage Vendetta by Catherine Madden (Eriu, £13.99) Eliza Sheridan was once an acclaimed concert pianist. But she abandoned her career to focus on her daughter Mara – and support her playwright husband Richard. When Richard gets an all-consuming job running a Dublin theatre, Eliza finds herself becoming more and more resentful. She consults a marriage counsellor – but she doesn't get the advice she expects. Inspired by the relationship between the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his musical wife Elizabeth Linley, this is an original and darkly funny exploration of marriage – and how to escape a bad one. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Hutchinson Heinemann, £15.99) You don't have to be interested in the space programme to be immediately gripped by the new novel from the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, which begins with a horrific disaster aboard a space shuttle in the 1984 before jumping back four years to astronomer Joan Goodwin's first days as a Nasa recruit. The training programme is intense, but Joan forges strong bonds with some of her colleagues – especially the charismatic aeronautical engineer Vanessa Ford. Both a deeply touching love story and a heartfelt homage to human ingenuity, Atmosphere is, simply, stellar. When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter (Grove Press UK, £20) Graydon Carter became editor of Vanity Fair magazine in 1992, an era in which 'the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted'. Those days are long gone for any magazine, but they live again in this entertaining, gossipy memoir, which tells Carter's story from his Canadian student journalism days to his infamous teasing of Donald Trump at Spy magazine ( his description of Trump as a 'short-fingered vulgarian' clearly haunts the autocratic president to this day) and eventually his reign at the ultimate celebrity-filled glossy. City Girls Forever by Patricia Scanlan (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) Irish commercial fiction as we know it wouldn't exist without Patricia Scanlan's groundbreaking City Girls novels, which made north Dublin suburbia feel as glamorous as any international blockbuster. In City Girls Forever, the iconic City Girl Gym and Spa is celebrating its 35th anniversary – and old friends Maggie, Devlin and Caroline are planning to celebrate in style. But fate has other plans. Full of drama and warmth, this is vintage Scanlan. [ Author Patricia Scanlan: 'I'm working on an unanticipated project of healing from breast cancer' Opens in new window ]
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey review – this dystopia could have been extraordinary
In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child's-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women's prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a 'found' novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman's life over a year. The Axeman's Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand's most prestigious prize twice. The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her 'first foray into dystopian fiction' and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey's alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps. The shadow of those atrocities lingers over 13-year-old identical triplets Vincent, William and Lawrence, the last three remaining occupants of a secluded New Forest children's home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme. Supervised by three 'Mothers', each working an eight-hour daily shift, the boys do their lessons and their exercises and take their medicine, in constant battle with a sickness which, though its symptoms vary from boy to boy and month to month, is referred to only as the Bug. They long to get well so that they will finally be granted the wish of every Sycamore child before them and be sent to the Big House in Margate, an earthly seaside paradise with sun-soaked golden sands and unlimited access to the Dreamland amusement park. But though the boys pore over the dog-eared Margate brochure, 'we never dreamt of trying to escape', an older, wiser Vincent confesses as the novel opens. 'Those were happy days, before I knew what I was.' Since then the Scheme has been abandoned, the Sycamore homes sold off. People do not like to talk about it, Vincent admits. Nobody wants to feel guilty. If all this sounds reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's most famous novel Never Let Me Go, that is because, in many ways, it absolutely is. The similarities go far beyond the late 1970s institutional setting. Like Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, Ishiguro's trio of students at Hailsham, the Sycamore boys know they are different, special even, and yet their lives share Hailsham's whiff of wartime make-do-and-mend, where the lessons are rudimentary and everything is secondhand. Like the Hailsham students, the triplets are sheltered not only from the truth of their circumstances but also from any meaningful contact with or grasp of the world that fears and exploits them. Like them, they will only gradually and painfully come to understand their real purpose. Vincent's first-person narration addresses the reader directly, recalling Kathy's conversational style. And yet, for all the inevitable comparisons, it becomes clear as Chidgey's novel unfolds that it is by no means a clone of Ishiguro's. While both novels take as their starting point the grave dangers posed by unfettered scientific advancement, Never Let Me Go is, at its heart, a meditation on mortality, an exploration of humankind's profound resistance to the idea that we must all eventually be parted from those whom we love. Ishiguro does not seek to rationalise or explain the world in which the book is set. His interest is personal, not political. The Book of Guilt, by contrast, unfolds an alternate political reality, intercutting Vincent's account with two other parallel narratives. Nancy is a girl held as a kind of prisoner by her adoring parents, while the harassed Minister of Loneliness is charged with winding up the Scheme. They combine to create a compulsively readable story that raises profound questions not only about the power of the state to dehumanise parts of our society but about our complicity in that power, the doublethink that permits us simultaneously to know a truth and not know it, to see and somehow contrive not to believe, dehumanising us in its turn. These questions run through all Chidgey's work: they are the connective tissue that binds her seemingly contrasting projects and, in 2025, as the US turns its back on the world, they are more urgent than ever. The Book of Guilt is written with insight and brio, deftly balancing darkness and light, depth and pace. Set in its own distinctive time and space, it could have been extraordinary. Instead the ghost of Ishiguro stalks its pages, dragging behind it the inevitable clanking comparisons and fatally undermining the integrity of the world Chidgey has so painstakingly created. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
