SUMMER READS WITH MEG MASON
There is a time for novels with heft, of the intellectual and physical kind; the 1000-page Pulitzer winners and experiments in form translated from the original Swedish. But there is also time, and it’s now, summer, for lighter things. These four slender volumes are no less moving (funny, poignant or challenging) for being so easily slid into a bag for the beach.
ASSEMBLY, bY NATASHA BROWN
An unnamed narrator is invited to meet her boyfriend’s parents at their annual garden party, set in the grounds of their estate in the English countryside. She is a woman of colour, the family is white; she is wealthy from a job in finance, they are vastly privileged, old money. In fewer than 100 pages of short, sharp vignettes, Brown, a debut author, explores the complexities of family, race and wealth, while the heroine also grapples with the nature of success and how our definitions change with age and shifting circumstances.
SECOND PLACE, bY RACHEL CUSK
For a long time, Rachel Cusk seemed under-sung as an author. All that changed with the publication of OUTLINE, in 2018, the first in what ended up an autofiction trilogy - TRANSIT and KUDOS followed. But still, there remains a secret handshake quality about her work – that is, when two Cusk fans meet, there tends to be ecstatic clutching of forearms. Her newest novel, SECOND PLACE, released this year and longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a letter to her friend by a middle-aged woman, contending with an empty nest, an unrealised career in art, and a husband who tends always to be outside. Which is to say, it is bitterly funny, and a salve in life moments of feeling unsatisfied.
CRUDO, bY OLIVIA LAING
Absolutely acceptable is buying CRUDO just for the cover. But crack the spine for a deceptively simple but arresting story, set over the hot Northern summer of 2018. About to get married, the forty-something heroine lies on hotel sun-lounger in Italy, alternately scrolling doomsday news sites and Instagram wedding inspo. Laing wrote the book in real time – in those same three months – which gives it the potency of non-fiction, cut through with a unique kind of humour.
BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK,
bY BARBARA TRAPIDO
This 1982 novel, about a clever, naïve suburban teenager who meets and is instantly folded into a vast Bohemian family of her philosophy professor is the fiction equivalent of a mood ring – funny and deeply charming when you need it to be, otherwise a much darker story about love and heartbreak, as Katherine falls in love with first, the oldest Goldman’s boy, and following their obliterating break-up, his younger brother. And as well as being joyously racy, it’s also one of so few novels to make a virtue out of the protagonist’s love of fashion. ‘I have a great love affair with clothes’ says Katherine, ‘they are consumingly important to me, and I often pull off a successfully Voguey look.’ Required, by means, to turn out her wardrobe, and preferring ‘crafty clothes’, she quilts cuffs, crochets, cord-pipes her own seems and ‘I can’ she boasts, ‘knit prodigious landscapes into my jerseys.’
SUMMER READS WITH MEG MASON
There is a time for novels with heft, of the intellectual and physical kind; the 1000-page Pulitzer winners and experiments in form translated from the original Swedish. But there is also time, and it’s now, summer, for lighter things. These four slender volumes are no less moving (funny, poignant or challenging) for being so easily slid into a bag for the beach.
ASSEMBLY, bY NATASHA BROWN
An unnamed narrator is invited to meet her boyfriend’s parents at their annual garden party, set in the grounds of their estate in the English countryside. She is a woman of colour, the family is white; she is wealthy from a job in finance, they are vastly privileged, old money. In fewer than 100 pages of short, sharp vignettes, Brown, a debut author, explores the complexities of family, race and wealth, while the heroine also grapples with the nature of success and how our definitions change with age and shifting circumstances.
SECOND PLACE, bY RACHEL CUSK
For a long time, Rachel Cusk seemed under-sung as an author. All that changed with the publication of OUTLINE, in 2018, the first in what ended up an autofiction trilogy - TRANSIT and KUDOS followed. But still, there remains a secret handshake quality about her work – that is, when two Cusk fans meet, there tends to be ecstatic clutching of forearms. Her newest novel, SECOND PLACE, released this year and longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a letter to her friend by a middle-aged woman, contending with an empty nest, an unrealised career in art, and a husband who tends always to be outside. Which is to say, it is bitterly funny, and a salve in life moments of feeling unsatisfied.
CRUDO, bY OLIVIA LAING
Absolutely acceptable is buying CRUDO just for the cover. But crack the spine for a deceptively simple but arresting story, set over the hot Northern summer of 2018. About to get married, the forty-something heroine lies on hotel sun-lounger in Italy, alternately scrolling doomsday news sites and Instagram wedding inspo. Laing wrote the book in real time – in those same three months – which gives it the potency of non-fiction, cut through with a unique kind of humour.
BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK,
bY BARBARA TRAPIDO
This 1982 novel, about a clever, naïve suburban teenager who meets and is instantly folded into a vast Bohemian family of her philosophy professor is the fiction equivalent of a mood ring – funny and deeply charming when you need it to be, otherwise a much darker story about love and heartbreak, as Katherine falls in love with first, the oldest Goldman’s boy, and following their obliterating break-up, his younger brother. And as well as being joyously racy, it’s also one of so few novels to make a virtue out of the protagonist’s love of fashion. ‘I have a great love affair with clothes’ says Katherine, ‘they are consumingly important to me, and I often pull off a successfully Voguey look.’ Required, by means, to turn out her wardrobe, and preferring ‘crafty clothes’, she quilts cuffs, crochets, cord-pipes her own seems and ‘I can’ she boasts, ‘knit prodigious landscapes into my jerseys.’