7 Hot, European Summer Reads
Say ciao to a new stack of holiday reads: this is your ultimate hot, sticky, summer reading list, all set across blissful, languorous and complicated European summers, full of love, lust, and friendship. Embrace the heat, senses and indulgence of summer life and put these reads on your TBR piles now. Viva la vida!
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other.
They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.
Authentic and loved by many, the first of Elena Ferrante’s Neoplitan novels is a refreshing splash into the Italian past, exploring the life-long, intertwined friendship of Elena and Lila. In this Sun-soaked summer, coming-of-age novel, the heat burns like the simmering tensions of the novel.
Milk Teeth, Jessica Andrews
A girl grows up in the north-east of England amid scarcity, fearing her own desires and feeling undeserving of love. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she meets someone who offers her a new way to experience the world. But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering Mediterranean heat, she is faced with both pleasure and shame, and must find out if she is able to change.
Richly tropical and sensual, Jessica Andrew’s breathtaking Milk Teeth is a searing look at relationships and the body, exploring the varying cultures of Europe, and their attitudes to la buena vida. A bittersweet peach of a novel.
Last Summer in the City, Gianfranco Calligarich
In the late 1960s, Leo Gazzara leads a precarious life in Rome. He spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between hotels, bars, uninspiring jobs, romantic entanglements and the homes of his rich friends. Leo drifts, aimless and alone. But on the evening of his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna. All night they drive the city in Leo's run-down Alfa Romeo, talking and talking. They eat brioche for breakfast, drink through the dawn, drive to the sea and back. A whirlwind beginning. What follows is the story of the year Leo fell in love and lost everything. Intense, romantic, witty and devastating, Last Summer in the City is a forgotten classic of Italian literature which offers an intoxicating portrait of two lonely people, pushing and pulling each other away and back again.
Soak in la dolce vita, the hot metropolis and fiery romance in Rome, mottled with tragedy and bite, in this Italian classic. A dance of summertime excitement and love.
Swimming in the Dark, Tomasz Jedrowski
You were right when you said that people can't always give us what we want from them. Poland, 1980. Anxious, disillusioned Ludwik Glowacki, soon to graduate university, has been sent along with the rest of his class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz - and together, they spend a dreamlike summer swimming in secluded lakes, reading forbidden books - and falling in love. But with summer over, the two are sent back to Warsaw, and to the harsh realities of life under the Party. Exiled from paradise, Ludwik and Janusz must decide how they will survive; and in their different choices, find themselves torn apart.
Exploring forbidden love over a hazy and glorious summer, Jedrowski’s beautiful work of fiction explores the struggle of those caught between the personal and political. A poignant dive into desire in all of its complexities.
Hot Milk, Deborah Levy
A transfixing novel where lives are held in strange, changeless abeyance; like stones beaten over and over again by the same relentless tide. A mother and daughter arrive in a small Spanish village, caught between the desert and the dark blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Rose, struck down by a mysterious illness that has left her incapacitated, is hoping for miraculous treatment from the mysterious Dr Gomez in his clinic. Her daughter Sofia is trapped by her mother’s illness; paralysed herself by a life in which she is chained to her mother’s hypochondria, neurosis and immobility.
As the hot sun beats down, these two women’s lives simmer with pent-up resentment and bitterness. As Sofia struggles against the confines of the caged existence her mother has created for her, exploring her own sexuality and independence she threatens to tear the fragile threads that hold these two women’s lives together.
Sensual and sticky, Levy’s wordplay and imagery is unparalleled. Exploring identity, sexuality and dependency, all against the jelly-fish studded seas and arid desert plains of Southern Spain. Essential summer reading if you’ll be by the ocean this summer.
Six Days in Rome, Francesca Giacco
Emilia, an artist, arrives in Rome alone. What was supposed to be a romantic trip has, with the sudden end of her relationship, become a solitary one. Six days lie ahead. She wanders the streets, surrendering herself to the music, food and beauty of the city. But when she meets John, an American living out a seemingly idyllic existence in Rome, their instant connection challenges how she sees her past, her family and herself. As their intimacy deepens, can Emilia begin to imagine life anew?
Following a melancholic artist on the continent as she processes her breakup, Emilia basks in the sensual and the evocative, potentially finding new love along the way. Lust after Rome, travel, and unexpected connections.
The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish.
Decades later, Kostas returns - a botanist, looking for native species - looking, really, for Defne. The two lovers return to the taverna to take a clipping from the fig tree and smuggle it into their suitcase, bound for London. Years later, the fig tree in the garden is their daughter Ada's only knowledge of a home she has never visited, as she seeks to untangle years of secrets and silence, and find her place in the world.
Exploring heritage, politics and family history, Defne Suman’s evocative and lyrical novel is set on the shores of the Mediterranean, amidst the dappled shade of fig trees. The depth of nature to provide solace and strength materialises in the island's ancient trees and rugged landscapes.
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