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Looking for Best Holiday Reads for Summer? Cover to Cover has it… Covered!
Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass
Schoolteacher Rosie Winter is dying. Something is growing in her – a cancer, a hard knot, a thing alien and malevolent. This story started off as an idea Deborah Orr had but she knew that her own cancer diagnosis would make it impossible for her to write the novel. Instead, her publishers decided to commission Emma Glass to write it, and what a fantastic novel it is. Orr would be absolutely delighted with it, I’m sure. Loosely based on ‘The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, a staple of many an English classroom for years, this quirky tale takes us on Rosie’s emotional rollercoaster as she is diagnosed with cancer and takes time off from her job as a primary teacher to process this. Her husband Charlie is in many ways the ideal mate: attentive, caring and patient. But Rosie is changing.
I loved the references to the original – sometimes as chapter headings, sometimes more subtle – and any scholar of Stevenson will find this immensely enjoyable. It’s a bit steamy at times – Mrs Hyde isn’t prone to clubbing elderly gentlemen to death but has other things in mind for the men she meets. Poor sods. The transformation is well handled, and I won’t say anything more or I’ll ruin it. Circumspection is one of my New Year’s resolutions and it’s not exactly something I’m famous for. I’d highly recommend this novel as you’ll fly through it in a couple of days, I’m sure.
Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire
“Evan crouched down and held his palm under the water. As soon as its toes were wet, the crab ran from his fingers and into the bright space. Luca was crouching on the rocks beside him, so close to the pool that his nose almost touched the water, his chin on his hands. The sun was high in the sky now, and a lone seagull circled overhead. Time had stopped…” To lose yourself in a rock pool, to be totally immersed in nature, in the small things, in the miracle of life. What a blessing, and especially so during lockdown, when this novel is set.
Evan has hired an Air BnB up on the Causeway coast to get out of Belfast and away from his wife and son for a while, the reasons for which are revealed gradually as the plot unfolds. However, lockdown hits and he’s stuck. What seems like a disaster at first turns out to be a boon as he quits his job during a zoom call made from the pub, since that’s the only reliable wi-fi. ‘A pub during lockdown’, I hear you cry? The rules in the countryside were a little bit more relaxed. Evan starts to appreciate the joys of sitting on the beach for hours on end, taking long walks and simply staring into space, contemplating his future.
Then he meets Grace.
She’s odd, even for this wee village on the coast. She’s grumpy and so’s her dog! All of her aura screams for people to stay away. There are rumours of a complicated past and trauma, and she’s clearly a damaged woman. They dance around each other, two spiky individuals scarred and scared, but nevertheless drawn together in the gyre of their loneliness. Add to the mix his deaf young son who is sent to him as his wife is a key worker. At first his son, Luca, is miserable, but the local shopkeeper takes him under her wing, Grace shows him how to explore rockpools, and Abbie supplies him with a steady supply of food.
Luca is pacified and doesn’t want to leave when his mother comes from the city. But what about Evan? “Turning to look at the land from the sea, he saw the streetlights of the village flare like a string of cheap beads along the top of the headland. A single plane flew overhead, a rarity now, its red and green lights flickering among the white stars, and there was a new flame of joy in his heart in the place that had been hollow, before.” What ignited the flame? What caused the hollow? You’ll have to read it to find out.
How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien
Something has gone badly wrong in Britain. Our relationship with the truth has been seriously distorted. Our trust in politicians has been irrevocably damaged. The tendency to lie, cheat and philanderer seems worse than ever. And why is this? Mainly due to the ten people in this book. James O’Brien is a stalwart of LBC and a star of YouTube (check out his mauling of Farage). In this thoroughly depressing but fascinating book he eviscerates one by one the people who have broken Britain over the past ten years especially.
He starts with Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre because the fourth estate is where much of the trouble stems from. The right-wing press has supported crooked, incompetent politicians and almost revelled in their dishonesty and mendacity. It sells papers, after all. O’Brien then moves on to the politicians themselves – Cameron, Johnson, Farage, Corbyn and Truss – and details their litany of arrogance, hubris and sheer chutzpah which led to Brexit, years of Tory rule and £33 billion lost in the matter of weeks thanks to Truss.
Now Truss is not entirely to blame. If you believe O’Brien, Truss couldn’t have happened without all those others previously mentioned. She was the apotheosis of all that sheer privileged incompetence where she and members of her cabinet, like many of the other politicians mentioned in this book, were promoted well beyond their capabilities. Oh, and there’s a chapter on Dominic Cummings too, in case you were wondering.
Books available from Waterstones Byres Road
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