Elizabeth Buchan’s Holiday Reading picks

This is a Book Week guest post from Elizabeth Buchan, author of Separate Beds and Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, amongst others.

If you are like me kindle-less, holiday reading is a tricky problem. One false choice out of the five books allotted by the baggage allowance and one can be left restless and very grumpy indeed. Then there is that well-known whistling gap between the intention to read the whole of Proust and the holiday torpor which smothers any chance of even lifting A La Recherche du Temps Perdu from the pile. Thus, if one is not to be driven to the shelf of sand-and-water stained, ancient bonkbusters left by previous guests in the hotel/villa/gite/tent a careful culling of the bookshop is required.

For sharp, funny and pretty much unputdownable, Laurie Graham’s At Sea (Quercus) is one choice. If the dutiful Lady Enid rather wishes that her enigmatic, handsome professor husband, Bernard Finch, was less exalted in his tastes, she quite understands that his vibrant intellect chafes against the limits of his audience to whom he is lecturing on board the Golden Memories en route from Turkey to Venice. But, when a fellow passenger, Frankie Gleeson of the (vulgar) multi-million dollar corn-snack empire, insists Bernard is in fact his old pal, Willy Fink, from Painted Post, New York State, Enid discovers that her loyalties are disconcertingly rattled. Who is Bernard? The author’s satiric gifts and comic timing are superb.

Equally gripping, Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love (Faber) opens with Laura grieving for her nine-year-old daughter killed in a hit-and-run accident, a situation for many too terrible to contemplate, let alone read about. Yet, such is the author’s skill and the depth of feeling in her writing that any reservations become secondary. Combining thrillerish ingredients – anonymous letters, a revenge vendetta, a sea-side town seething against the immigrants – with a history of Laura’s passionate love affair, her failed marriage and her joyous discovery of parenthood, it probes the psychodrama of bereavement and shines a light onto a dark internal landscape.

The historical novel can be especially hit and miss. A bad one is agony. A good one, magic. In The Traitor’s Wife (PanMacmillan) the author Kathleen Kent invokes the horrors of the past with unflinching exactitude. This is the hard and brutal past. Whether it is her description of fighting mastiffs, or the hell hole of below deck crossing the Atlantic, little is spared the sensibilities – but it all rings true. In 1673, Martha Allen is working as servant for her cousin in New England where she meets the mysterious Welshman, Thomas, who is rumoured to be a regicide. Gradually, their mutual distrust is turned by their determination to survive into something far more powerful. Back in the England, a vengeful Charles 11 commissions bounty hunters to hunt his father’s killers down. Can the bounty hunters endure the rigours of the sea journey and will Thomas manage to elude them in a colony where nothing is secret? It is up there with the best historical novels.

Finally, the reissue of The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe (Penguin, £9.99) is a delicious treat. In 1952, four young women make their way to New York to build their careers in an age which is only just beginning to accept that women have careers. They are poor, optimistic and good-looking – and, of course, innocent. They live in tiny New York apartments, drink Martinis, smoke like chimneys, have sex and fall in love with the wrong men. With a dash of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, it is frank, funny and never sentimental. It is absolutely perfect holiday reading.

You can find Elizabeth Buchan on Twitter, Facebook and her blog. You can also buy her books at Amazon, and in all good bookstores. Check back later today for my review of Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman.