Don’t do it. (Shakes head). Don’t leave it till you get to the airport/train station/in-law’s house. You’ll make bad reading choices. (Sad, patronising smile). You always do.
Instead, pick up a book from this finely-honed edit of summer fiction, including the latest from big-hitters Irvine Welsh and Stephen King and a whole heap of fantastic first books from young British writers with thrillers, sci-fi and lush, literary epics all covered.
Men In Love (Irvine Welsh)
Irvine Welsh is back to remind us he is a WRITER. Men In Love is another title in the Trainspotting Literary Universe, this time picking up just after the first book ended with Mark Renton making off with all of Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie’s cash. Oof.
These characters are still such a good hang. We spend time inside their heads in Leith, London and Amsterdam as they pinball around jobs, the dole, prison, drugs, raves and yes, their love lives. There’s so much life and wit and humour and danger in every line. Welsh is a master who can do it all, mixing quotes from Romantic poets with his trademark Scots dialect and some of the most misogynist, racist, homophobic slurs and jokes collected in one place. (Similar to It’s Always Sunny on TV, Welsh draws his characters so strongly, these rightfully stay as part of the fabric of the time and place).
The most laugh-out-loud funny fiction I’ve read in a long time - there’s a running gag about a Cadbury’s Flake that had me in stitches - it’s at times disgusting, at times profound bringing together themes of class, betrayal, repentance, sex and infidelity, fathers and father figures. The whole book is full of people running full speed into each other in various ways, which by the end of the chaos makes you want to go out and get fucked up and make mistakes yourself. Stick some Iggy Pop on and crack this open.
The Catch (Yrsa Daley-Ward)
Yrsa Daley-Ward has written a brilliant memoir (The Terrible), some poetry (bone), a sort of self-help book (The How) and she collaborated on Beyonce’s visual album Black Is King. But The Catch is somehow, actually her fiction debut and it’s from Stormzy’s Merky Books imprint.
It’s a great London novel of buses, bedsits, hotels and open mic nights, following 30-year-old twin sisters Clara (a trendy author) and Dempsey (an anxious work-from-home bod) through a tale of ghosts (or is it doppelgangers or is it gothic doubles?)
Switching between perspectives, Clara is so mean and Dempsey is such an overthinker, it’s a juicy dynamic even before you throw in the rest of the complicated cast with Daley-Ward, who now lives in LA, zooming in on literary types, petty criminals and wellness gurus. The only book in this summer batch which crept into my dreams while reading it, The Catch is dark and disorienting and sad and funny. This isn’t tied down by any one tone or genre, it’s entirely its own thing.
The Expansion Project (Ben Pester)
Labelled part of a wave of ‘Severance lit’ by The Sunday Times, Ben Pester’s book is a melancholy slice of sci-fi, with shades of Kazuo Ishiguro, glimmers of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. This is his first novel, after a short story collection titled Am I In The Right Place? which, to be honest, could also serve as a subtitle to this one.
The premise: A copywriter named Tom Crowley takes his kid to Bring Your Daughter To Work Day at the Capmeadow business park and loses her. What follows is a series of accounts of tired employees, tasks that don’t make sense and people who really need to go on mute during meetings. Pester carefully captures something specific of the alienation and disintegration that comes from ever-expanding ‘work’, all while making his central family story touching without veering into sentimental. Never has the phrase “I’m on the stairs” filled me with such dread.
Saraswati (Gurnaik Johal)
Another first book - it’s a particularly good season for them - is Saraswati. This is West London writer Gurnaik Johal’s ambitious, multi-generational, interconnected story of seven distantly related characters in India and the Desi diaspora. Full of folklore and mythology from various regions and religions of India and South Asia, the focus is on the ‘lost’ holy river of the title.
The plotlines - whether it’s Hindu nationalist politics or male social media influencers - are confidently constructed, the character dynamics are crunchy with short, punchy emotional beats and, with scenes taking place in a Canadian forest, a remote farm in Punjab, icy mountain lakes and the depths of the ocean, this is a summer read you can really sink into. He’s as interested in an old world of fables and legacies as a new world of DNA kits, eco-activism and vaccine warfare. This book is on Waterstones’ Debut Fiction Prize shortlist for good reason: Gurnaik Johal is the real deal.
Slags (Emma Jane Unsworth)
Born in Bury and now living in Brighton, you might know self-described “ex-barmaid” Emma Jane Unsworth from her second book Animals, which was made into a film starring Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat.
Sticking with the one word theme, Slags is a kind of arrested development, coming-of-age story as two sisters in their late 30s/early 40s take a week-long campervan trip around Scotland. Whipping between the lochs, walks, campsites and creepy B’n’Bs and the teen obsessions of their Mancunian schooldays, we get loads of relatable stuff about sex - as you’d imagine - the hook-ups, the clinics, the affairs, the Simpsons underpants. (Side note: for anyone who grew up in Greater Manchester, this must be how posh people feel every time they read a book: the 135 bus! Pilsworth!)
Unsworth also digs into the sticky, tricky clash between the workaholic hot mess and the sensible mum of two with dog, cat and husband waiting back home - as Vice once memorably put it, when your life choices become an eff you to the other side. And yet, this perfectly balanced tragicomedy is very funny, very silly, true-to-life and not heavy going at all, even when our slags get serious. Movie adaptation when?
Never Flinch (Stephen King)
For this detective thriller, Stephen King said he wanted to try something different - and 65 books in, frankly he can do what he likes - and go all-in on plot. And there’s a lot of it, with two main strands: a serial killer in the fictional Buckeye City is trying to avenge a wrongly accused man Alan Duffery, who was killed in prison, by killing 13 innocent people, while a women’s rights activist named Kate McKay is being stalked from town to town on her controversial US speaking tour.
What links these two cases is fan favourite private investigator Holly Gibney, from Mr Mercedes, the Bill Hodges trilogy and other King works. Now, this isn’t god-tier Stephen King but he has such an instinct for drama - here, an iconic scene in an abandoned ice hockey rink - he has interesting things to say about addiction and careless ‘invincibility’ complexes, and the way he brings together his large cast of supporting characters - assistants, police chiefs, roadies, Alcoholics Anonymous members, asshole firefighters - is seriously satisfying.
False War (Carlos Manuel Álvarez)
In Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s interconnected stories set in Miami, Cuba, Mexico City and elsewhere, the prose is so immediate, so vital, you feel like you’re right there with the characters, wandering around town thirsty on a baking day or breaking into a house at night and raiding the fridge.
In False War, we ride along with immigrant characters - who are all at varying stages of their journeys - including Fanboy, Barber, Instrumentalist, Juan, Elis and Rodriguez through first days, earthquakes, flatshares, nights out and prison stints.
Translated here by Natasha Wimmer, Álvarez isn’t afraid to follow his impulses on pace or tone, whether that takes him to mystery, grief or comedy: there’s a particularly virtuosic section where Fanboy gets lost in the Louvre. Álvarez has been writing fiction and essays about Cuba for over a decade and in 2020, he was arrested in Havana for being part of San Isidro, protesting against government censorship. If you want a book that feels quite like nothing you’ve read before, try this.
Groundwater (Thomas McMullan)
John and Liz have just moved to a rustic lakeside house when they have her sister Monica, her husband Harrie and their two kids Ciara and Finn to stay. Before all the furniture has arrived. Tensions arise. Groundwater, though, is a cut above the usual story of a middle-class couple falling apart when they have family to stay. The main pairing are quiet and introspective, this being set during the slow, ruminative end of summer, which gives Thomas McMullan space to muse on his themes of legacy, competition and our relationship to material possessions, as John and Liz second guess one another, withholding their private struggles and mangling their feelings when they do try to share them.
Groundwater moves between languid and downright creepy as a sequence of low-stakes drama unfolds by the lake. There’s a mysterious warden named Sweet who knew the old inhabitants and three students from a nearby campsite who bring their loud opinions and romantic squabbles into the mix. McMullan has written a beautiful, poetic coda as a counterweight to each chapter which makes the gentle sense of a breaking of the clouds all the more potent when it arrives.
Sunstruck (William Rayfet Hunter)
A second Merky Books title, and another first novel on the Waterstones shortlist, Sunstruck takes a Saltburn-style premise - our unnamed narrator is a young, mixed-race, working-class guy who goes to visit his university friend Lily’s wealthy family in the South of France.
There’s a debauched midsummer party, a secret gay romance with her brother Felix and a tantalising sense that he could somehow fit into the world of the Blake family and their hangers-on. (Plus crucially he doesn’t magically know the names of all the wines, trees and stones he encounters in his descriptions of ‘the Chateau’).
British-Jamaican writer William Rayfet Hunter lets this web of delicate relationships play out in the aftermath, allowing for a deeper look at dating dynamics when there’s a power imbalance. So that’s back to the real world of London: Lily and Felix’s bougie creative careers, the protagonist’s shabby flatshare in Tooting with his friend Jazz - who calls him WhiteBoy - and their black friendship circles at Notting Hill Carnival. It’s an intense, slightly stressful mix of lust, drugs, spats, confusion, subterfuge and waiting for the shoe to drop... so... most people’s early twenties, then.
Oh, and the ending? Chef’s kiss. Sunstruck does what Saltburn could never.
Gunk (Saba Sams)
Straight off her award-winning short story collection Send Nudes, we have Saba Sams’ excellently titled Gunk. Set in Brighton, where Sams grew up, it’s a love triangle of sorts between club manager Jules, young newbie Nim and the drug-addled Leon. Sams - who is now in her late 20’s - is interested in complicated, undefined relationships (friends? employees? surrogates?) and self-sufficiency versus codependency: who we live with, how much we let other people care for us, what’s transactional and what’s not.
In Gunk, she explores this through a young marriage with a power imbalance, largely conducted in and around a skanky student nightclub and the very early days of parenting a newborn baby in a nontraditional family setup. She’s also very interested in bodies, particularly when it comes to pregnancy and mothers, which is where we get some of her boldest writing. Nicely weird stuff from a writer with lots of potential.
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