10 Very Good Books To Read This Summer

The summer read has long been a kind of subtle insult, a synonym for a book that doesn’t really require much of you. They’re for dipping in and out of, some say, like a particularly genre-heavy pool. This collection of page-turners, from memoir to short stories, affecting fiction to crime, doesn’t prescribe to that definition. These books are by turns juicy and interesting, tender and thrilling, for long days that you wish were longer (if only to get through this reading list).

Liberation Day by George Saunders

George Saunders’ body of work has a mythic quality, widely held as a talisman of how far short stories can go in their relative shortness. The new nine-story collection from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo is another accomplishment, a far-spanning mix of fantasy and reality that’s precise and abundantly good, powered by humour, ethics and a lens through which to see our world in small-scale. A brutal middle-management office rivalry unspools in ‘A Thing at Work’; a grandfather pens a tender, cautionary missive to his grandson, set in a dystopia, in ‘Love Letter’; and a creepy amusement park created underneath a small town in ‘Ghoul’ is intended to preserve humanity. Bloomsbury, $33

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Set in an alternative present-day America, the third novel from Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere) centres on the experiences of 12-year-old Noah “Bird” Gardner. In an authoritarian society splintered by the coinciding of PACT, the Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act, and a crippling recession known as The Crisis, our half-Chinese protagonist receives a cryptic drawing from his mother, Margaret, a famous artist who left him and his linguist father years ago. Toggling between speculative drama and detective tale, Ng is a deft chronicler of censorship and racism, particularly towards east Asians, as Noah goes in search of his mother. Cue, among other things, an underground resistance movement of plucky librarians. Abacus, $38

Fight Night by Miriam Toews

Stay True by Hua Hsu

In a richly layered memoir, New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu offers a paean to memories, music and youth, and also to grief, as he reflects on the friendship that came to define his adolescence: the long car drives and longer late-night conversations with his college friend Ken, who was killed in a car-jacking after leaving a party. Now 45, Hsu looks back on his 20s, while an undergrad at university, in a book that tenderly observes a time when you’re young and trying to figure out who you are, and the delicate ecosystem of people that give shape to that. Doubleday, $55

Double Exposure by Ava Barry

Private investigator Rainey Hall, the protagonist of this taut crime novel, which unfolds after a case of grisly murders befall the van Aust family, is tasked with aiding the victims’ daughter, Melia, who begins receiving violent messages related to the killings of her parents — ones she suspects are coming from her brother, who disappeared after their deaths. The rabbit hole Rainey falls down is a knotty, characteristically dangerous one that makes for a refreshing neo-noir. Simon & Schuster, $47

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Former iCarly and Sam & Cat actor Jennette McCurdy smirks into the distance, holding an urn. It’s the kind of celebrity memoir that was destined, as many are, to become a runaway bestseller, with a provocative title and a generation who grew up with the warm petulance of her character, Sam Puckett. Yet her book is one that warrants its instant success, candy-coloured on its cover and candid in its interior, a detailing of her troubled relationship with her mother and the perils of child stardom in a full, complexly drawn confessional. Simon & Schuster, $45

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Gil, middle-aged and oil heir, is going through a bad breakup. He decides, as any exorbitantly wealthy person with time and an existential crisis might, to spontaneously buy a house in another city and walk 25 miles a day getting there. With amiable new neighbours and a penchant for birdwatching, what unfurls is a surprisingly charming tale of a person trying to bring depth to their life, to assert their personal worth for fear of “occupying space, a slot in the world, for no good reason”. W.W. Norton & Co, $48

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

Having grown up together in rural France, teenagers Agnès and Fabienne, whose hothouse relationship this book orbits, hatch a plan: to write a book of stories, with the help of the local village’s postmaster. Recounted from Agnès, who garnered fame as a child prodigy after the book was published in her name, more than a decade on, this eerie, shimmering novel has drawn comparisons to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, probing truth, exploitation and the messy depths of obsessive friendship. HarperCollins, $33

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins

In 2016, Canadian reporter Matthieu Aikins left aside his passports while in Afghanistan in order to pass as an Afghan migrant fleeing war-ravaged Kabul, to be shepherded by smugglers across Central Asia and Europe. Accompanying 30-something Omar, an interpreter, Aikins pens a startlingly vivid, immersive account of a harrowing journey, constantly aware of his own biases and privilege as an undercover journalist opting for something that for many isn’t optional, and offering scores of educational information on the refugee crisis. A meticulous must-read. Fitzcarraldo Editions, $33

Dear Dolly by Dolly Alderton

Described as “Nora Ephron for the millennial generation”, Dolly Alderton secured her place as an eminent agony aunt with her Sunday Times Style column. Her latest book is a distillation of this, a prismatic composite of some of her relatable letters and answers about life during her tenure, providing an empathetic, buoyant, witty foray into problem-solving. Fig Tree, $40