Whether you’re loading them on your kindle or wedging paperbacks into your suitcase, choosing the perfect holiday read is always a challenge. Here’s our list of the Best Beach Reads for 2013.
Constance Moofushi, Maldives
1. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Sitting comfortably in all the bestseller lists this summer is the first novel for six years from Khaled Hosseini (‘The Kite Runner’). This moving family saga follows a brother and sister born in Afghanistan as they journey through life moving from Afghanistan to Paris, San Francisco and Greece. A beautiful depiction of love and the family bonds that shape us.
2. Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell
Following all the hype around the release of the Baz Luhrman Hollywood production, the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ will be on many people’s reading lists this summer. If it’s on yours this is definitely a book to read alongside it. Sarah Churchwell’s thorough research attempts to put together the true characters and places that inspired Fitzgerald’s novel. The result is a fascinating insight into the affluent, social climbing and turbulent human stories behind the glittering roaring Twenties.
3. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
A darkly atmospheric, menacing tale from the author of ‘After the Fire, A Still Small Voice’ this novel follows the reclusive Jake Whyte as she sets up home on a remote and seemingly deserted British island. Jake wants to be alone with no one but sheep and her untamed companion Dog but when something starts brutally killing the sheep, one by one, she begins to question her solitude.
Constance Tsarabanjina
4. The Infatuations by Javier Marías
Every morning María, a publisher’s editor, has breakfast in the same café and watches the same couple at the next table. She grows increasingly attracted by their obvious infatuation until one morning they’re simply not there and she feels oddly deprived. Seeing a picture of the man murdered in the papers María feels compelled to get involved. Spanish author Javier Marías lures us into a world of desire and infatuation with such graceful beauty and ease that the reader becomes as entranced by the playing out of the inevitable murder as María herself.
5. Soon by Charlotte Grimshaw
Tensions arise as two families are thrown together for the summer in a palatial beach house in New Zealand belonging to the Prime Minister. The intense inter-personal relationships are further complicated by emerging tales of corruption and political intrigue in this page-turning novel which has sat at the top of the New Zealand bestseller lists since publication.
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