Booktrust's seasonal survey of the newspaper critics' summer reading roundups has revealed that Sarah Waters' chilling country house mystery The Little Stranger (Virago) is the most popular choice for the beach this year.
In second and third place came two of Sarah’s rivals for this year’s Man Booker Prize – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) and AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book (Chatto & Windus).
The critics clearly saw the summer holidays as a time for readers to reflect on the world’s tumultuous past and present as, in a bumper year for non-fiction, Anthony Beevor’s D-Day (Viking) proved the most popular, with Gillian Tett’s Fool's Gold (Little Brown) – an analysis of the global financial crisis – not far behind.
Other popular novels were Colm Toíbín’s Brooklyn (Viking), David Nicholl’s One Day (Hodder & Stoughton), Giles Foden’s Turbulence (Faber), Anita Brookner’s Strangers (Fig Tree) and Kate Atkinson’s aptly titled When Will There Be Good News? (Black Swan).
It was good to see some translated novels recommended in several papers, although sad to realise that the authors of the four most popular are dead. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire (MacLehose Press) is the sequel to his bestselling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Alone in Berlin (Penguin) is a new translation of a wartime novel by Hans Fallada (he died in 1947); Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl has been republished by Sort Of Books; and 2666 (Picador) has posthumously consolidated Roberto Bolaño’s reputation in the English-speaking world as one of the most extraordinary writers of the last fifty years.
There were also nods to a number of short story collections which have garnered good reviews this year: Booktrust favourites It’s Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun (Jonathan Cape) and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury) were joined on the list by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (Faber) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate).
For children, titles by the ever-popular Julia Donaldson, Stephenie Meyer, Louise Rennison and Emily Gravett received multiple mentions.
The list was compiled by Booktrust’s website editor James Smith, from over 780 recommendations from 11 publications.
He said, 'Each year, our roundup of the newspapers’ summer reading recommendations highlights the season’s big new titles, but it’s as interesting to find out about the books that you’ve never heard of, or have always meant to read but somehow never found the time. Personally I’ll be reading the Dovecote Press' lovely reissue of The South Country by Edward Thomas, as recommended by Robert Macfarlane.'
If you would like to see the full list of recommendations, please email james.smith@booktrust.org.uk
