No beach bag is complete without a juicy paperback to weigh down one end of your towel, writes Eleanor Black
TEARJERKER
We All Want Impossible Things
by Catherine Newman
(Doubleday, $37)
Beach reads: Eleanor Black’s top paperback reads for sun and sand
NZ Herald
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Long Hot Summer, by Barbara Anderson
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Death comes for us all but that doesn’t mean we want to read about it, except in rare cases such as this. In Catherine Newman’s first novel for adults, she tackles a nightmare diagnosis and the beautiful friendship that makes it bearable. Edi is dying from ovarian cancer. Her lifelong best friend Ash has practically moved into the hospice, where a golden retriever named Farrah Fawcett roams the halls and tunes from Fiddler on the Roof play on a loop. In the weirdly slow-but-fast pace of hospice life, Ash and Edi laugh and cry and wait for the inevitable. Newman does not shy away from the ugly details of cancer or the heartbreak of false hope: “Jonah and I are talking about what we always talk about, which is inventions that would save Edi’s life.”
COMEDY
The Guncle
by Steven Rowley
(Simon & Schuster, $38)
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Patrick, a once-famous sitcom star, lives in Palm Springs recovering from a lost love and the sadness of a faded career. After he unexpectedly ends up responsible for his niece and nephew, he panics. At first. Then he decides that these bereaved children could do with a dose of his good humour and fabulous lifestyle, so he commits to the role of beloved guncle (gay uncle). The book owes a debt to Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame and, like that beloved novel, is being adapted for film. It’s a heartwarmer but any treacly tendencies are kept at bay with caustic humour. “The dog wore little booties to protect his paws from the hot pavement and Patrick looked back, Can you believe those? And the whippet, in fact, could not.”
CRIME
In Her Blood
by Nikki Crutchley
(HarperCollins, $35)
Cambridge writer Nikki Crutchley has delivered her fifth mystery novel just in time for the summer wave. The action revolves around a creepy small-town hotel with dark secrets and a long history. (“The silence in here was warm, heavy…”) It’s where a girl disappeared 21 years ago and it seems to be connected to the contemporary disappearance of main protagonist Jac Morgan’s sister Charlie. The pace is sharp – there’s a body by page 14 – and the story is told from multiple perspectives, which helps the pages fly. Another solid entry in the growing pantheon of Aotearoa Noir.
SHORT STORIES
Send Nudes
by Saba Sams
(Bloomsbury, $33)
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British writer Saba Sams’ spunky young women hang out in grubby flats, dive bars and family-friendly holiday parks. They drink snakebites, eat crappy food and have sex with bad people. They don’t have the time or patience for niceties, and you can’t blame them. “The sex hadn’t gone as I imagined but it had gone, and that was the main thing,” says the protagonist in Tenderloin, which was shortlisted for the White Review short story prize. Despite the apparent grimness of their situations – manipulative relationships, unwanted pregnancies, broken families, poverty – these women seem to always come out right in the end, which is actually kind of amazing considering the world they live in.
BIOGRAPHY
Edda Mussolini
by Caroline Moorehead
(Chatto & Windus, $40)
Benito Mussolini once said of his daughter, “I managed to bend Italy to my will, but I will never bend Edda.” He admired this about her (she was his favourite child) and, when he became the leader of Italy in 1922, Edda – not her mother – was his constant companion, close to power but lacking any of her own. By the time she was 34, her husband and father had both been executed, she did not know the fate of her mother, sister and two brothers, and she was responsible for raising three children alone. Edda is not a woman you exactly warm to but, thanks to Caroline Moorehead’s meticulous archival work, you come to understand how she came to be the “mercurial” and flinty creature that she was.
RETRO
Long Hot Summer
by Barbara Anderson
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
This Kiwi classic came out more than 20 years ago and is still one of my all-time-favourite summer reads for its seemingly effortless scene-setting and elegant characterisation. You can feel the sun belting down and the ennui of the Hopkins family, who holiday in the same Hawke’s Bay beach community every year. But in this, the summer of 1936, there is some excitement to be had thanks to an attempt to make a romantic cowboy film called Lust in the Dust. It is true to the attitudes of the 1930s that local Māori are hired to act as Native Americans in the film and a real-life love affair between a Pākehā woman and Māori man is seen as scandalous.
