Perfect summer reads 2014

Summer - the sun is shining and you're looking for something to read on the beach/on the plane/in the park/in the garden. Here are my top summer reads, some out already, and some coming out in the next couple of months. Most importantly, all are perfect for the hot weather.

1. The Storms of War by Kate Williams
Billed as Downton Abbey meets Atonement, this First World War-set novel is the sweeping first book in a series that, if justice is to be served, will go on to do big things.
Out July 2.

2. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell's second adult novel, Landline, has a tinge of nostalgia perfect for a hazy summer day. Through its ups and downs it'll sweep you away like a warm breeze.
Out July 31.

3. The Secret Place by Tana French
Intrigue, murder, and the vagaries of teenage girls - Tana French brings those ingredients and more together in The Secret Place, the most perfect crime novel I've read for some time. 
Out on August 28.

4. Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little
If you like your news in short sharp snippets and you like you celebrity gossip with plenty of commentary, Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little is the perfect book. Its narrator is full of snark, and its premise will have you guessing to the surprising end, so get your sunglasses and paparazzi face on.
Out on August 14.

5. The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman
Forget everything you know, or don't, about boxing and delve into Anna Freeman's The Fair Fight, a swashbuckling novel about female fighters, feminism and standing up for yourself.
Out on August 28.

6. Her by Harriet Lane 
Chilling enough to help keep you cool through the hot summer months, Harriet Lane's Her is addictive and filled with tension that builds and builds to a horrifying climax.
Out now.

7. Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Surprisingly, for a book with an 82-year-old protagonist, Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing will have you on the edge of your seat from the beginning.
Out now.

8. The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby
For fans of fashion, icons and history, The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby is a brilliant, easy-to-read novel about one of the most famous outfits in memory.
Out now.

Review: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

There are big books, and then there are books that are big before they're even released, and Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing is one of the latter.

Bought by Viking in a hotly contested auction (I met one of the unsuccessful bidders recently, who more than a year on is still sad they didn't win), I haven't heard one bad thing about Elizabeth is Missing from anyone who's read it.

Maud, 82, is getting forgetful. Living alone, the only people she regularly encounters are her carer, and her daughter, Helen. Even then, she sometimes forgets who they are, or what they're doing. And she always forgets that she's made herself a cup of tea, and is constantly puzzled about the rows of cold tea at the bottom of her stairs. Maud does know one thing though, and that is that her friend Elizabeth is missing. No one else will believe her, but Maud's investigations, written on countless pieces of paper, means she knows Elizabeth is definitely missing. But how will Maud find Elizabeth?

I wasn't sure at first how I'd warm to an 82-year-old narrator with whom I had nothing in common, but Healey has created Maud with such a wonderful voice that I found myself immediately drawn in. Maud is an unreliable narrator, but not a classic one - she's not unreliable because she's hiding things from other characters or from the reader, but because her brain is letting her down in some respects. Maud's repetition of things she's forgotten but we know could be annoying, but instead Healey uses that repetition to add layers to the novel, subtly building up the evidence which, if only we were clever enough, would help us to solve the mysteries within (all those objects, all those clues). Maud wants nothing more than to get to the truth, and her struggle to get there is both fascinating and sad. 

Talking of sad, I found my heart twisting slightly every time Maud's condition worsened. Healey injects some humour in to the novel, with Maud's obsession with tea and peaches, but Elizabeth is Missing is also a portrait of someone who is losing their memory, and of the ways in which that affects them and the people around them. For Maud, I felt sad because she so clearly was able to understand at times what was happening, and then at other times was so lost. For Helen, I was sad because she was losing her mother, while not physically losing her. At times, I was frustrated at Helen for not acting more to help her mother, but it's clear through the glimpses we get of her that Helen is finding it difficult to come to terms with the changes dementia has wrought in Maud, and when she does finally act it's with consequences that rapidly help solve the central conceits of the novel.

Obviously, the title of the novel shows the focus is on finding Elizabeth, but Healey weaves in a secondary narrative which is as intriguing, if not more, than that of the present day. While Maud is unable to remember parts of her day-to-day life in the present, she has a perfect memory of her younger years, and particularly of the time her sister Sukey went missing, never to be seen again. Here, Healey paints a picture of a post-war family, adjusting to life in peacetime, travelling the line between nostalgia and modernity, while also presenting a second mystery.

Maud may be the unreliable narrator, but with the missing Elizabeth and the missing Sukey, it is all the other characters who are untrustworthy. Wonderfully, Healey crafts her story in such a way that at one time or another I suspected that just about every major character was involved in one or other of the disappearances. While I did solve one mystery pretty much perfectly, the surprise twists in the last quarter of the book were things I never saw coming. They were so cleverly done, and fit so well, that had Healey been in the room while I was reading, I'd have given her a standing ovation.

Elizabeth is Missing has been nicknamed Gone Gran. As much as I love Gone Girl, which reinvented the unreliable narrator/domestic thriller genre, I think Elizabeth is Missing is a more sophisticated book, because it reinvents the genre again. It's stunningly written, and will give you palpitations, and it's worth every penny (and I believe there were a lot of them) that Viking stumped up for it.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Viking. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison

Oh, the domestic thriller. Once you've read Gone Girl, you've read them all, right? Wrong. Because A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife offers up a whole new chilling and delicious take on the genre.

Jodi and Todd's marriage looks idyllic from the outside, but from the inside things could not be worse. As Jodi heads towards becoming a murderer, and Todd heads towards imminent death, Harrison explores how the couple got to the point they are at, with the run-up reaching surprisingly far back.

The Silent Wife is unusual in that you know how it's going to end from the very beginning - Todd will die, Jodi will kill him. Where in any other novel those actions would be the most exciting part of the novel, in The Silent Wife the best bit is the build up, and the reader's intimate view of the destruction of a relationship.

Jodi, despite being an insightful, clever, well put together (in all aspects of her life) woman (and Stepford Wife-esque person), actually lives in a dream world. I'd go so far as to say that most of the time she's delusional. It's interesting getting to a know a character who is so willfully ignorant of what is happening in front of her, even as she's acknowledging Todd's wrongdoing (although she never acknowledges her own stunted emotional growth).

And Todd's not much better. The phrase "having his cake and eating it" was invented for him. In fact, Todd is a more extreme, less funny, uglier, darker version of Roald Dahl's Bruce Bogtrotter - while Bruce ate one massive chocolate cake and got lauded for it, Todd keeps going, gorging on chocolate cake after chocolate cake and never expecting to get fat.

For two grown-ups, Jodi and Todd have all the emotional awareness of toddlers, made even more ironic by the fact that Jodi is a psychologist. Her job is to listen to people and help them, but even in that Jodi just skims the surface, like in so much of her life. After one bad experience with a client Jodi chooses to just see people with "easy" problems, and see them in her own home, surrounded by her own beautiful, very superficial life. Both Jodi and Todd place great importance on physical appearance (their own, others, their surroundings), yet another sign that they prefer not to delve into life's uglier layers - if they did, perhaps they wouldn't have got into the mess they did.

Harrison's book, however, does explore the layers of Jodi and Todd's lives, with interesting revelations. As we hear more about Jodi's past and her relationship with her family, it's clear there is something hidden very deep that is at least partly responsible for Jodi being the way she is today. And as we learn more about Todd's past, we wonder how Jodi could ever have fallen for him the first place, until we cycle back to Jodi's past, and then it's a vicious circle.

Vicious circles are core to The Silent Wife, in which many actions come back round to haunt people who don't learn from their mistakes, or who don't pay attention to them. "Ignorance is bliss", to use a second well-known phrase in one review, is something that Jodi (and Todd) like to live their lives by. In the end, it definitely doesn't work out for Todd, but for Jodi, it's more complicated. The journey to their separate final chapters will make your heart quicken and miss beats, but it's worth it to see two characters so unlikeable yet so addictive to read about get their comeuppance.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Headline. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert

I've been thinking a lot recently about the term "women's fiction" and what is meant by it - is it fiction where the protagonist is a woman, where the author is a woman, which deals with "female themes"? Why does such a term exist?

One publisher who tackles the term head-on and without mercy is Virago, which publishes great books by women, but which couldn't be classed as women's fiction, since the term is meaningless and would do Virago's selection of work down.

Coming to Virago's incredibly strong list (Virago is Maya Angelou's UK publisher) this year is Rachel Sieffert, a Man Booker-shortlisted author. I confess I'd not read her previous novels, The Dark Room and Afterwards, so I had few expectations or ideas about what I was getting.

In The Walk Home, set in Glasgow, "now or thereabouts", a young man called Stevie gets a job on a construction site a few miles down the road from his family, but none of them know he's back. In the early 1990s, Stevie's parents Graham and Lindsey meet and move to Glasgow to be close to Graham's parents.

The Walk Home is not a book where something happens, and then is resolved, and there is an ending, but it is a book about something happening, and the consequences of that. It's a book about how the past can haunt families, even without their consciously realising that the mistakes of the people before are what is damaging the present.

In the present, most of what we see of Stevie is through the eyes of Polish construction manager Jozef, an immigrant to Glasgow whose life is affected by his move to a strange country, his ties to his family and his struggle to fit in with the culture he's left behind, and the culture he's moved into. Jozef's story mirrors the story of Stevie's mum, Lindsey, who moved from Ireland for a better life, but finds that it catches her up in Glasgow in ways she never imagined.

We don't spend an awful lot of time with present-day Stevie, but we do spend a lot of time with Stevie as he grows up, and our relationship with him is built on what we know about his upbringing, which shaped him into the human being he is today. His relationships with his parents and grandparents are key to this, but so are the relationships of the people in his life to each other - they affect him just as deeply as those he is directly a part of.

The most fascinating character in The Walk Home is Graham's maternal uncle Eric, whose past life choices have affected the dynamic of his whole family. From his sister Brenda, to his nephew George, to Lindsey and then finally to Stevie, Eric acts as a warning, a threat and a comfort all in one.

Love is at the centre of The Walk Home - love between siblings, love between a husband and wife, and most importantly love between parents and their children. That last one is at the heart of what happens to and forms each character - starting from how the love between Eric and his father was not enough to sustain their relationship, going through to Brenda and Lindsey creating a mother-daughter love, to Stevie being abandoned by his mother despite his love for her.

The only thing I found awkward about The Walk Home was the Glaswegian accent used for the speech. Reading it, I found it very difficult to hear in my head, and it was only occasionally I could hear the right voice. Most of the time, I just gave up and read it as it would have been without the dialect.

Apart from that, The Walk Home was a moving read. Sieffert has captured a portrait of a family affected by love and loss perfectly, and despite how sad it is, I'm left with hope at the end of the novel that the walk home will be completed.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

This time last year, hardly anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. The Cuckoo's Calling was just another crime novel, and its sequel, The Silkworm, should have passed off in the same way.

But then it was leaked that Galbraith was in fact J.K. Rowling - yes, THAT J.K. Rowling - and the publication of The Silkworm became a huge event.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of The Silkworm (while I was still two thirds of the way through reading The Cuckoo's Calling) and read the book in just under five hours. Luckily it's pacy with good characters and a compelling storyline, so my speed read (conducted at work, on a train, at midnight at home, then on another train early in the morning) was relatively painless (I'll admit to being a little bleary-eyed at work afterwards).

The Silkworm is the second book featuring war veteran and private detective Cormoran Strike. Having successfully discovered the murderer of a model in The Cuckoo's Calling, Strike's fortunes have changed - he's got plenty of well-paying clients and is no longer sleeping on a camp bed in his office. When a tearful woman turns up at his office, Strike finds himself delving into the case of an author who has gone missing after writing an unpublished book skewering everyone he knows. And when that author, Owen Quine, is found brutally murdered, the case takes a darker and more dangerous turn.

Rowling is on fine form here, starting the novel with Strike meeting a sleazy tabloid reporter - in just a few pages Rowling makes clear her already well publicised feelings on the hacking scandal. It seems as though The Silkworm will follow the path its first chapter sets out, but instead Rowling chooses to focus on an industry much closer to home: publishing.

As he finds out more about Quine's novel (titled Bombyx Mori - silkworm in Latin), Strike finds himself caught up in the world of publishing. As someone who's been working in the publishing industry for around eight months, I loved every bit of Strike's inauguration into a world so foreign from those he has previously encountered. He meets an agent, an editor, the head of a publishing company, and numerous people lower down the totem pole. While there are no easily identifiable figures from the world of UK publishing (at least, I can't see any), it's clear Rowling has taken stereotypes of publishing folk and used them to form her characters. So we have an eccentric battleaxe of an agent whose office is a mess of books, an editor who is all about books and not business and has turned to drink, writers whose egos are huge and who need mollycoddling, and a managing director who is cold and thinks about the bottom line first. For all her examination of publishing though, Rowling best sums it up when Strike says: "They love their bloody lunches, book people." Why yes, Strike, we bloody do!

The mystery at the centre of The Silkworm is one that kept me guessing right until the very end, when Strike arranged a showdown with the murderer(s). It's clever, because there are only a certain number of people who could have killed Quine, so you have a narrow pool to guess from, but at any one time one of them could have done it, or none of them could have done it, or a few of them could have done it.

However good the murder mystery is, The Silkworm is mostly as good as it is because Strike is such a complex and likeable character. He's stubborn, and can be stupid and a bit clueless emotionally at times, but you can't help but want to read more about what he's thinking, and you can't help but be awed at how clever his mind is at joining together the dots.

The Silkworm is better than good when Strike is interacting with his assistant Robin. The pair's relationship has deepened since The Cuckoo's Calling, and they're on a much more even footing than they were in the first book. Both understand each other a lot more, and have fewer secrets. But as their relationship develops for the better, Robin's relationship with her fiance gets worse, which gives an interesting dynamic to the story. I like that this is a love triangle without being anything like a love triangle - the mutual respect and friendship between Strike and Robin are better than any cliched encounters.

A year ago (yes, I'm back where I started), no one could have suspected that Rowling could write one good crime novel. The Silkworm proves that she can't - she can write at least two good crime novels, and if she carries on in this vein, the Cormoran Strike series will be talked about with the same enthusiasm that her Harry Potter novels are talked about. And we'll be doing that talking over lunch.

•The Silkworm is released in the UK on June 19.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Sphere. This did not affect my review.

Fim review: The Fault in Our Stars

How to review The Fault in Our Stars without breaking down into a puddle of tears at the memory of the film - that's the tough question.

What's not a tough question is whether or not the film is good, because it is. Phew.

Adhering closely to John Green's novel of the same name, The Fault in Our Stars (let's just call it TFIOS from now on) follows cancer sufferer Hazel Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), who is forced to join a teenage cancer support group by her mother. There, she meets Augustus 'Gus' Waters (Ansel Elgort), who had one of his legs amputated after getting cancer, and finds herself reluctantly falling in love.

Woodley is excellent as the sarcastic, witty Hazel. I know people have said this before, but Woodley just has this face you want to watch, it's so full of expression and she uses all of it to get a point across. TFIOS is told through Hazel's point of view, and Woodley creates a Hazel true to the book, and who you want to hear from.

Wearing a tube connected to an oxygen tank that she carries around with her at all times, Woodley makes you manage to simultaneously forget that Hazel is always literally carrying the weight of her cancer with her, while also making you constantly aware that she's not a typical teenager. However, while Hazel is not a typical teenager, she is a normal one, and her cancer only heightens that - she rolls her eyes at her mum's behaviour, sulks at not getting her own way, and is overly dramatic when her mum tells her that she's depressed. In the midst of a story about two teenagers with cancer falling in love, Woodley's Hazel can make you belly laugh.

Elgort is a great Gus, with his charm and cheekiness. He's good looking, but not too good looking, and has a smile that could light up the sky. Elgort is at his best during one-to-one scenes with Woodley, when he's playing to a group his Gus occasionally veers into supreme cheesiness and cockiness. On the whole though, he's easily the 18-year-old boy every 17-year-old girl should fall in love with, because he's sweet and kind and intense but not too intense.

I loved watching Hazel and Gus's journey, metaphorical and literal, which took them, as in the novel, to Amsterdam to meet Hazel's favourite writer, the reclusive and mean Peter Van Houten (played as both comedic relief and villain by Willem Defoe). Seeing both Hazel and Gus change over the course of the film alternately made me feel hopeful, and desperately sad. There were parts that made tears well up in my eyes that I really didn't expect (the restaurant scene in Amsterdam, Hazel climbing all those stairs with steely eyed determination), and parts that made me laugh that I didn't expect (Van Houten being a complete arse, the guy who leads the support group). TFIOS is a rollercoaster of emotion, which is what makes it such a great film.

The other thing that makes it a great film is the relationships it explores. Of course, there's Hazel and Gus, but there are plenty of other relationships that stab at your heart and make you feel. Hazel's parents (played by Sam Trammell and Laura Dern) are funny and loving, and Dern is responsible for one of the most heartbreaking interactions of the film. Hazel and Gus's separate friendships with Issac (Nat Wolff - probably the best male actor in the film) are nuanced - each gets something different from Issac and gives something different to him - and as a trio they're fabulous. And Van Houten, the most antisocial character in the film, who acts as a counterpoint for all the emotion filled relationships we see, is also unexpectedly revealed as a man to whom relationships are important.

TFIOS is a gorgeous film, and the reason it's gorgeous is because it's full of heart and because you care about all the characters on screen. But, as a warning, you're not going to be okay after seeing this film. Okay?