Summer fiction

Sally Morris selects the best poolside novels

The Three Graces

Amanda Craig

Abacus, 416pp, £18.99 thriller. Alex, 22, an escort on the run, hooks up with wealthy Simon, 50, who invites her to spend August with him at his summer house on Long Island. There she commits an embarrassing faux pas and is ordered back home. Instead, Alex spends a week drifting and grifting, hoping to worm her way back into favour as the odds stack against her.

The House Of Doors Tan Twan Eng

Canongate, 320pp, £20 daughter reinvents herself in 1940s Soho. Bristling with life, as random moments clash with historical events.

The Writing School Miranda France

Corsair, 224pp, £18.99

The Tuscan countryside plays host to a wry examination of generational, political and national disparities in Amanda Craig’s latest state-of-the nation satire. Three white, wealthy, octogenarian women friends retired to Italy await the arrival of relatives attending the marriage of one character’s grandson to his ‘influencer’ fiancée. Cue crises of age vs youth, liberalism vs racism, love vs pragmatism, past vs present. It skewers with pinpoint accuracy but retains an optimistic belief in human connection.

Trespasses Louise Kennedy

Bloomsbury, 320pp, £8.99

The backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles may seem well-mined territory for contemporary novelists, but Kennedy’s award-winning debut goes beyond the familiar to create something deeply moving and surprising. Young Catholic schoolteacher Cushla begins a passionate affair with older, married, Protestant lawyer Michael, who defends young Catholic boys, but it’s in the detail of everyday trauma and the effect of love and kindness on one of Cushla’s pupils that raises this above the rest of the pack.

The Guest Emma Cline

Chatto & Windus, 304pp, £18.99

A sultry dissection of wealth, privilege and the commodification of sex could easily descend into cliché but Cline’s control of her material keeps everyone on edge in this psycho-

In Malaysia, 1911, a woman shoots dead a man visiting her house – a crime that inspired The Letter, a short story by W. Somerset Maugham. In this complex novel, Maugham is a character who visits friends in Penang in 1921, where he is told about the trial by his unhappy host, Lesley. This triggers a cascade of long-hidden secrets, woven stories, culture clashes and challenged memories. All written in highly descriptive prose - echoing Maugham - it’s as much about how and why writers write as about infidelity, lies and empire.

The Story Of The Forest Linda Grant

Virago, 288pp, £18.99

The history of a Jewish family is traced from Latvia via Liverpool to London in this multi-generational novel. In 1913, fourteen-year-old Mina stumbles across drunken Bolshevik men in a forest, a foreshadowing that leads her and her brother to sail for America, although they wind up in Liverpool. Mina’s encounter is retold so often it enters into folklore as the Jewish diaspora unspools through the war and Mina’s

Miranda France blends memoir and fiction in this entertaining and thought-provoking story of a creative writing teacher running a residential course in a remote valley, which France has done. There’s a curious mix of students – Peter tries to blackmail her by pointing out errors in her book on Spain - but she is haunted, unexpectedly, by a ghost of her own; the suicide of her brother as a teenager. How this affects her writing leads to wider reflection on life imitating art and how memories resurface. Funny and warm.

Whips Cleo Watson

Corsair, 400pp, £20

Cleo Watson was Boris Johnson’s aide throughout the pandemic, a role she described as being his ‘nanny’, so there’s no shortage of insider knowledge in this bonkbusting romp around the corridors of Westminster. Malevolent press officers, sexually incontinent MPS, flatulent dogs… When three young women sharing a flat all become involved in the male-dominated world of government, they discover that the people really holding the whip hand are women and that they exercise that power in scandalous ways.

The Choice Michael Arditti

Arcadia, 416pp, £18.99

Contemporary moral debate underpins this clever, provocative novel that asks whether art can be separate from the artist. In the 1980s, Clarissa Phipps, unable to join the priesthood, interviews Seward Wemlock, a church artist, for the BBC. Fast forward thirty years and she’s now rector of that same Church where she discovers the chief bellringer, her best friend’s husband, is molesting a 15-year-old boy. She does the ‘right’ thing, but reflects on the rumours she ignored years ago that Wemlock was an abuser of his teenage models.