3 Books for Vacation Reading

Although set in Ireland, where you might expect the usual green/rain/cool weather, the entire novel takes place during a blazing dry heat wave. If you haven’t read Tana French, well what the heck are you waiting for? She’s as good as it gets. Her prose is muscular, poetic, and so deeply observed that I couldn’t help but want to scream at the characters, or shake them, or just push ’em off a cliff.

Speaking of cliffs, if you ever wanted to know what’s meant by making the setting a character, read this book. The mountains, hills, gorse, cottages, trees, and stone walls in this novel vibrate with meaning and sentience. They are no more simple setting than an ermine-trimmed velvet coronation robe is a shrug.

Caveat: this is a sequel to The Searcher, which I also highly recommend.

This is a sort of a sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a book I didn’t read and quite possibly will never read*. Unlike that book, this one is for adults, with adult themes. Told from multiple timelines, this book imagines what it may have been like to be the daughter of the commandant of Auschwitz. I chose it because I absolutely adore John Boyne, and have read many of his other novels and loved them. But in the wake of the success of Zone of Interest (the movie), I was intrigued by this concept as well.

Boyne’s fiction is ridiculously readable, with vivid, realistic characters. I inhaled this in one day. He has frequently tackled the theme of culpability in his novels, to great effect. He is not so much interested in writing about monsters, but rather about the people attached to the monsters–their children, their friends or colleagues–who recognize the monstrosity of their actions, but fail to act. I loved this book.

This one is pure escapism. If you like Jane Eyre AND Rebecca and enjoy sharp-witted appraisals of upper middle-class culture, then this is for you. Rachel Hawkins’s prose is fun, her characters are layered and flawed, and she knows how to ratchet tension.