Summer really has begun! If you have decided to avoid airport stress and spend some time in the garden reading (or indeed to brave Heathrow) then I have some excellent summer reading picked out for you, and all are £2 off the marked price. Please do visit the shop or website for a broader selection. Wayne
The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak
A tale of love and division moves between post-colonial Cyprus and London, exploring themes of generational trauma and belonging. Shafak tells the moving story of Kostas and Defne Kazantzakis, young lovers in a painfully divided post-colonial Cyprus – one Greek and Christian, the other Turkish and Muslim – and the emotional price they continue to pay after moving to England. A beautiful novel made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy.
Silverview – John Le Carré
Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. A Polish émigré shows up at his door with a lot of knowledge about Julian’s family history.
The great spy novelist’s final full-length book is a precision-tooled cat and mouse chase from a bookshop in East Anglia to the old eastern bloc. Crisp prose, the heady sense of an inside track on a shadowy world … all his usual pleasures are here.
The Women of Troy –
Pat Barker
In the sequel to her retelling of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls (told from the perspective of captured queen Briseis), Barker moves on from war to its aftermath.
Clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel sometimes reads like a children’s version of the legend of Troy.
But its conclusions are definitely for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak.
