Reading List On the horizon 9


Recommended summer reads


The Bookseller has been at the heart of the book trade for 160 years, delivering news, views and analysis of the publishing industry in print form every Friday. Each week its expert previewers assess review upcoming books: here, Alice O’Keeffe, Caroline Sanderson and Fiona Noble share the titles they are most excited about in the next three months...


ability to marry the tightest of plots with characters so rounded and believable that they come to feel like people you actually know. This is the story of Lisa Evans, and it begins at Peterborough Station at 4 a.m. The only people around are a security guard and the customer services manager, and they fail to notice the bulky middle- aged man who makes his way to the edge of the platform and steps in front of a freight train. Lisa is the only one to try and stop him—ineffectu- ally, as she is a ghost: she died on the same platform 18 months earlier. This riveting thriller is near-impossible to put down.


NON-FICTION


The Heartland (Faber, £14.99) by Nathan Filer, author of Costa Book of the Year- winning novel The Shock of the Fall, is an


FICTION


Big Sky by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £20) is her first novel to feature Jackson Brodie in nine years, and the fifth


overall, following Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog. Brodie is an ex-policeman turned private investigator but, as fans of the series know, all human life is here. As ever, Atkinson’s plot- ting is phenomenal: she takes a cast of disparate characters living on the North Yorkshire coast and weaves their indi- vidual stories together, pulling the narrative threads tighter and tighter, to form one


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entirely pleasing whole. It’s another triumph. David Nicholls’ Sweet


Sorrow (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) comes 10 years after One Day elevated him from bestseller status to household name—it’s sold 1.7 million copies to date. His latest is set in 1997 over one life-changing summer. It is narrated by Charlie Lewis, looking back at his 16-year-old self, who has just left school with no firm plans for the future, other than a part-time, cash- in-hand job at a petrol station.


Until the day he meets a girl, Fran, who is part of a theatre collective led by two Oxford graduates who want to bring the Bard to the masses. Fran is playing Juliet so Charlie, reluctant but desperate to get closer to Fran, joins too. As ever, Nicholls is spot on when writing about love. As big as One Day? Don’t bet against it... Louise Doughty’s Platform


Seven (Faber, £14.99) is the ninth novel from the author best known for Apple Tree Yard—and it’s as gripping and brilliant as anything you’ll read this year. Doughty has the rare


immersing, deeply humane non-fiction book about schizo- phrenia—how we perceive it, and how we treat people who have it. In exploring this widely misunderstood condi- tion, he invites us to spend time with world-leading experts and some extraordi- nary ordinary people living with such a diagnosis. They include a journalist who believed MI5 was tracking her via her contraceptive coil; an ex-soldier with “special one” delusions; and a mother reflecting on the short, tragic life of her first-born son. A thoroughly illuminating book. The début of prize-winning journalist Lisa Taddeo takes biographical writing to new heights. For eight years and over thousands of hours, she recorded the lives of three “ordinary” women in different locations in the US. The result is Three Women (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99), a compelling, scorching piece of reportage which lays bare Lina, Maggie and Sloane’s thoughts, disap- obses


pointments, hopes, obsessions and unmet needs. This is a book is about how women often


NICHOLLS DAVID


DOUGHTY LOUISE


ATKINSON KATE


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