Five Great (New and Old) Books to Read in This Summer

Whether you are lucky enough to be on the beach somewhere or just hanging out in the local park, summer is prime time for lying down and spending hours engrossed in a book. Here are five suggestions for all tastes this month. 

SALT WATER, Charles Simmons

Pushkin Press, pp. 192

Set over the course of one fateful summer—Salt Water centres on Michael, a 15-year-old who makes the mistake of falling for the girl next-door, 20-year-old Zina, while vacationing at his family’s New England beach house. 

Summer, I find, is all about wistfulness and yearning. So I am glad I have been able to feature this lesser-known classic of American literature which, adapting Ivan Turgenev’s First Love to 1963, the year before JFK’s assassination, knowingly plays with the trope of coming-of-age as shedding one’s innocence and transports us back to that summer where we first experienced the pangs of unrequited love.

THE MARK, Fríða Ísberg

Faber & Faber, pp. 320, pp. 304

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. Set in near-future Reykjavík, The Mark explores this age old theme by imagining a scenario in which a foolproof way to measure people’s morality — a so-called “Empathy Test” — is invented. It has proven so reliable that the Icelandic government has decided to indict a referendum to turn it into something mandatory – a sort of universal “social score” that will qualify or bar people from jobs, loan applications, housing, and even some parts of the city. 

This is a bit of a cheat, as the hardback edition was actually published last year. But I thought it was worth highlighting again since it seems to have gone under the radar and feels like a prescient diagnosis of our times: where one’s own values have become a form of currency to be broadcast on social media and the imperative to be “moral” and “good” at all times has never been stronger. 

Translated from Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer.

THE GIRL WITH GOLDEN EYES, Honoré de Balzac

New York Review Books, pp. 112

When starting this column I was given a handful of directives, one of them being not including 19th-century heavyweights. But given that Balzac is one of my all-time favourites I thought I could make an exception. (Like the young boy in The 400 Blows I have, rather snobbishly, an effigy of him I acquired in Bath right by my desk). 

What’s more, this little novella is nothing like the realist fiction he is generally known for, like The Lost Illusions or Pere Goriot (which I also invite you to check out) except perhaps for the opening in which 19th-century Paris is depicted as a den of lust and greed. Rather, it is an orientalist yarn, a tale of love and death – as ludicrous and over-the-top as is it gripping. 

Translated from French by Carol Cosman.

ON NATURAL CAPITAL, Partha Dasgupta

Witness Books, pp. 288

Just this morning, I was reading a Guardian article on the fact that so-called “climateflation” – price spikes due to ever frequent extreme weather – could drive up the price of food by a third, and consequently thrust a million people into poverty in the UK by 2050. Yesterday, I was reading an FT longread detailing how the next financial crash might be caused by climate shocks occurring more and more often.

Originally published as a report commissioned by the UK treasury, which appeared under the name “The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review” in 2021, On Natural Capital, by professor Partha Dasgupta, might be the most accessible, economically-informed case outlining how these events are not unfortunate byproducts, but rather direct consequences of a flaw in the design in our economic thinking. In other words, the idea that nature is at once infinite and free for the taking.

EVERYONE STILL HERE, Liadan Ní Chuinn

Granta, pp. 160

I came by this debut from non-binary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn after reading Chris Power’s glowing endorsement, but nothing prepared me for this collection. One in which the raw, relentless quality of the prose is matched only by the willingness to look painful histories straight in the face.

Ní Chuinn was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, but the six stories herein burst with a desire to not let go of the Troubles and the scars they left on the people of Northern Ireland. It ends with a striking catalogue of the dead, which communicates the magnitude of the suffering as well British repression and subsequent impunity.

Bartolomeo Sala is a writer and reader based in London. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Vittles, and The Brooklyn Rail. You can find all of Bart’s writing for Something Curated here.

Header photo: taken from Salt Water by Charles Simmons