Hello! It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? But there’s something about the 20 Books of Summer challenge that I find irresistible, so a big thank you to the wonderful Annabel for hosting it again. And yes, I know, I posted my choices about this time last year and then disappeared off the face of the blogworld until this moment, but I did read quite a lot of those books and I will return to them another time and put down a few thoughts. There’s much to say about the previous year, but for now, let’s just get on with the books as I’m excited about this summer’s reading.
Fiction
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – A tradwife influencer finds herself transported back to 1855 in this buzzy new novel that mixes the cynical publicity games of the internet with a brutal reappraisal of traditional gender roles. I understand there’s a disappointing twist though? Well, I’m just curious to know what all the fuss is about.
North Woods by Daniel Mason – This is one of those novels that follows the fortunes of a rural house in New England over a couple of centuries’ worth of inhabitants, from the earliest American colonies to the present day. Every review I’ve read of it praises the writing, and so this has been on my list to read for a while, waiting for me to have time to devote to it. Rather than wait for that time, it’s on the list now!
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bains – A novel about the ever fascinating Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, that follows the final year of Sylvia’s life through the eyes of the people who surround her in the Devon village to which the couple move. I’m not tired of books about Sylvia Plath yet and by many accounts this sounds like a good one.
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine – Another novel that I’ve been wanting to read for a while. This is a polyphonic novel, set in Belfast, which revolves around various accounts of a sexual assault on a teenage girl and its aftermath. Longlisted for the women’s prize, but again it was good reviews from people I trust that drew me to this one.
Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje – I heard about this first from a dear friend who read it and loved it. Set in Croatia it follows the differing fortunes of a divorced couple who reconnect in later life.
The Performance by Claire Thomas – Set in Melbourne during the 2019-20 bushfire season, the novel concerns three women who are all watching a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days while fires rage around the theater outside. It’s an innovative narrative that braids the thoughts of the three characters together while the performance takes place. I’ve been loving the more experimental memoirs that I’ve been reading this past year and wanted to try some fiction in the same vein.
Whistler by Ann Patchett – I’ve been on a roll with Ann Patchett novels, loving her last four in a row. Fingers crossed this one doesn’t break the spell. It’s about the reunion between a woman and the stepfather she knew only for a year when she was nine. I really appreciate the way that Patchett seems committed to writing mostly happy books about ordinary life. It shouldn’t be radical or questionable to do that, but some days it seems like it is.
Endling by Maria Reva – This is a bit of a punt for me, not really the kind of thing I would normally choose, but the thought of endangered snails and the Ukrainian marriage industry together in a novel makes me laugh every time. So I decided I had to try it.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – This book came from nowhere, it seems, and burst onto the scene by being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Again, not a big fan of epistolary novels but the fact it’s had so much word of mouth success makes me want to read it.
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan – A novel I’ve had on my shelf for several years, which does not in any way correlate to a lack of desire to read it! De Vigan writes autobiographical fiction, and in this book she recounts a time in her life when she hadn’t written for three years and was extremely psychologically fragile. At her most vulnerable, a charming new friend, L., comes into her life and gradually takes it over, dressing like de Vigan, answering her emails, eventually giving a talk in her name. It’s Single White Female with a meta dimension, and I am so there for that.
Red Rose, White Rose by Eileen Chang – My son married last year and my new daughter-in-law is Chinese, which has sent me and Mr Litlove on a Chinese reading kick. In this novella, an upright and emotionally constipated man is led astray by his friend’s passionate, spirited wife. Which sounds kind of French to me, but we shall see.
Non-Fiction
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud – It was Simon at Stuck in a Book who reviewed this and made me want to read it. Also, the fact that I’ve lived in East Anglia all my life, the ultimate flat place. And I like books about post-traumatic memory and depression and working through them. So, hopefully lots of interest here.
Famesick by Lena Dunham – it’s been lauded as an excellent memoir, and is mostly about complicated and debilitating chronic illness, which is why I want to read it, but – and it’s a big but – I’ve never watched an episode of Girls. Will I understand anything that’s going on? This one has been on and off the list, but currently I’m intending to try it.
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson – When Nelson is on form, there’s no one else like her. But when she’s not, it can be excruciating. This is one of her early texts, about the murder of her aunt which remained unsolved until the moment that Nelson was about to publish a book on her life and death. Suddenly an unexpected DNA match was discovered and the case was reopened. This book considers the trial, but also the effect this mystery had on Maggie Nelson’s family over the course of her upbringing, and the fascination the media has with dead white women. Hopefully it’s a good one.
Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth – This is a book I’ve dipped into over the past couple of years but never sat down properly to read. However, I’ve wanted to give it some consistent attention because everything I’ve read in it has been absolutely brilliant. I suppose you could call it linked essays, all of them exploratory and innovative, that circle around a traumatic experience of giving birth. It’s wide-ranging and disparate in a good way and I’m looking forward to it.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston – A classic of the memoir genre, five linked stories of autobiography and folklore as Hong Kingston comes to terms with growing up in the USA as a child of Chinese immigrants. An exploration of voice and silence as she hovers between two cultures both of which have different ways of obliterating her story.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison – Written in the wake of her failed marriage, Leslie Jamison explores what it means to be a divorcee, a mother and an artist all at once, and negotiates the arrival of a new love in her life as she considers the patterns that have so far created her. Jamison is an interesting writer, and I rather love that easy, open American style of writing about the self.
Metamorphoses by Ovid – A book I’ve been meaning to read for a long, long time. Back in the days when I was teaching, I read the parts of it about Narcissus and Echo, Cupid and Psyche, and promised myself I’d return one day to read it in its entirety. My knowledge of the classics is dismal! I should do something about that.
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock – I have a thing for Fitzcarraldo and I’ve been going back and forth between this one and This Little Art by Kate Briggs about the business of translation. I think I will stick with Greyhound, but I might change my mind. Anyway, it details two parallel journeys across America that Pocock took, one as a young woman who had just suffered a series of miscarriages, one seventeen years later in her 50s as she traces the footsteps of certain women writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Irma Kurtz.
Indignity by Lea Ypi – Having come unexpectedly across an image of her grandmother on honeymoon in the Alps in 1941, a photo that she’s been told could never exist, Ypi is forced to reconsider all the old family stories. She embarks on a re-imagination of her grandmother’s past as the Ottoman aristocracy gives way to the birth of the Balkans and a communist state. I’m intrigued by the question in the blurb about what moral authority we have in the present to judge our ancestors in the past. Yes, that’s worth considering.
So that’s my list for 2026. It’s women almost all the way this summer, with only two male authors in the mix, but I’m okay with that. What do you think of my choices?
