‘A novel to lose yourself in’
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Fiction, Bloomsbury (2020)
Piranesi is the literary equivalent of a rock pool – a wondrous micro-world. It’s the tale of a house: a seemingly infinite tangle of once-grand rooms. Inside these crumbling walls, a captive ocean ebbs and storms, and a nameless man searches for clues to a mystery he has long forgotten.
Piranesi is a shapeshifting marvel. It can be read as an eco-fable, a study in solitude, a sly-Narnia spin-off, a high-fantasy whodunnit, an awestruck allegory or a half-remembered dream. A novel to lose yourself in. – Beejay Silcox
‘Perfect for a beach afternoon’
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Fiction, Hamish Hamilton (2002)
Any Human Heart is the cradle-to-grave story of William Boyd’s fictional Logan Mountstuart, whose life spans every decade of the 20th century and some of its momentous events. Mountstuart – novelist, art dealer, husband, friend to a band of eccentrics from schooldays, lover and elderly pauper – takes flight through first-person journals superbly imagined by Boyd.
I think it’s his finest novel; it gripped my imagination so tightly I felt like I was Mountstuart’s accomplice as he rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming and Jackson Pollock. Perfect for a dreamy beach afternoon. – Paul Daley
‘Poignant, savagely funny’
What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
Fiction, Viking Press (1994)
Few books are as gut-wrenching, poignant or savagely funny. Nebbish author Michael Owen is commissioned to write a biography of the Winshaw family – scions of power and privilege, peddlers of heart attack-inducing frozen foods, arms dealers to Saddam Hussein (and worse!); he finds himself caught up in a murder mystery that is also a panoramic, crazy-quilt satire of Thatcherism.
What A Carve Up! is a book you simply cannot put down, even when the covers do finally close – the luminescent set pieces, marvelous characters and abject hilarity will replay in your head, year in, year out. – Declan Fry
‘Intensely trivial’
The Mapp and Lucia novels by EF Benson
Fiction, Hachette (1920)
Do you revel in the seething underbelly of gentility investigated by Miss Marple and Poirot, but the covers have fallen off your Christie collection? Then you might like novels covering the intensely trivial social-climbing snobbery between EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia that never quite gets homicidal. Bickering rivalries escalate to feuds over petty moments that could be lifted straight from NextDoor – but these people dress for dinner. – Viv Smythe
‘Bittersweet escapism’
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Fiction, Text Publishing (2012, translated by Ann Goldstein)
Of all the yesteryear’s bestsellers lining op-shop shelves around Australia, few do bittersweet escapism better than Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga and its opener, My Brilliant Friend. An easy but elegiac read, Ferrante follows two clever young girls growing up poor in postwar Naples, who dream of transcending the small, grim future lives embodied by their parents and neighbours (the results are … complicated).
Evocatively translated into English by Ann Goldstein, you might find yourself awake at 4am on a hot January night having accidentally pushed through to the final chapter in one sitting. Not to worry – there are three more entries, and decades of Lenù and Lila, to see you through February. – Walter Marsh
‘Effervescent, wildly original’
The Lucky Galah by Tracy Sorensen
Fiction, Pan Macmillan (2018)
Why this effervescent, wildly original novel hasn’t yet been transformed into a kitsch slice of Australian cinema à la Priscilla or The Dish is beyond me. Perhaps it’s because the narrator – a flightless pet galah who shreds through literary classics such as Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country – is not exactly easy to cast.
Set in small-town coastal Western Australia in the lead-up to the Apollo moon landing, a parade of quirky characters – radar technicians, bird fanciers, stolen generations survivors, racist politicians and burgeoning feminists – find themselves at cultural crossroads, jostling for freedom, meaning and a slice of the Australian dream. – Janine Israel
‘Funny, scary and utterly hypnotic’
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Fiction, Knopf (2002)
In a humid Mississippi town in the late 1970s, precocious, bookish 12-year-old Harriet Dufresnes and her dorky but loyal mate Hely set out to discover the truth behind the unsolved death of Harriet’s young brother a decade earlier. Their investigations entangle the pair in a landscape they’re not prepared for – a seedy netherworld of evangelical snake handlers, white-trash meth addicts, crumbling families and cunning pool sharks.
Charles Dickens mixed with Flannery O’Connor, it’s long, atmospheric, funny, scary and utterly hypnotic. – Chris Womersley
‘Escapist and salacious’
Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex by Ian Littlewood
Nonfiction, Da Capo Press (2003)
Escapist and loaded with salacious detail, reading Sultry Climates will make you the smuttiest smarty-pants at the dinner party. Drawing on letters and private diaries, Littlewood’s alternative history lays out the hot and heavy but rarely explored relationship between travel and sex, from the Grand Tour through to the 20th century.
Some passages describing the tourists of yore are so funny and mean that I laughed out loud. You’ll also come away with Oscar Wilde’s take on *smooth brain, just vibes*: “Have you noticed that the sun detests thought?” – Alyx Gorman
‘The original hot mess’
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Fiction, Penguin (1999)
Is Bridget Jones the original pre-internet hot mess? (Close contender: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but she made it nowhere near as fun. ) As a teenager, Bridget’s romance dramas and slovenly nights out with friends were a fantasy; in my 20s they were a reality. And in my 30s, as I near Bridget’s fictional age, her whip-smart musings on work, relationship and life aspirations as an inner-city woman hold water. In the words of Bridget herself: vvg. – Yvonne Lam
‘Rich and engrossing’
The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili
Fiction, Scribe, (2020, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin)
For a 944-page novel, I devoured The Eighth Life in what felt like a breath. Not before nor since have I been so immersed in a story, which traverses six generations of love, loss and broken dreams among the Jashi family in Georgia. The epic tale starts with a master chocolate maker in Tbilisi at the turn of the 20th century and continues to Moscow and the rise of the Soviet empire.
The true joy is how author Nino Haratischwili so expertly carries the reader through history, her characters so rich and engrossing you mourn the ending of a chapter. – Caitlin Cassidy
‘All-consuming’
The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman
Fiction, Penguin (2012)
In 1920 on Janus Rock, a remote island off the Australian coast, Tom Sherbourne begins a new job as a lighthouse keeper. Destined for a quiet existence, he and his young wife Isabel make a life together – until a boat washes ashore carrying a baby.
Taking the child in as their own, Tom and Isabel’s innocent secret slowly becomes an all-consuming moral dilemma, holding you in its clutches on every page as they battle the rough seas of right and wrong. – Maddie Thomas
‘Entertaining historical reads’
Two Arabic Travel Books by Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī and Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān
Nonfiction, NYU Press (303-310/915-922)
If you want short, entertaining historical reads, then the medieval travel diaries of Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān (an Arab diplomat sent to Volga, Russia) and Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (an Arab merchant traversing India and China) are a must. Translated into English by NYU press, these two diaries offer colourful insights into areas of the world seldom visited at the time by western Europeans.
You’ll get a rare glimpse into the Russian Vikings and how horribly they treated women, and observe a delightful exchange with a Chinese emperor who doesn’t hold back on his views of the Abrahamic religions. To paraphrase: “What Noah’s ark? We had no floods in China.” – Antoun Issa
‘The ideal holiday mood’
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Fiction, Penguin (2018)
When you spend most of your nights not sleeping, you spend most of your days thinking about sleeping, which makes you long for death (not speaking from personal experience or anything). You begin to read Ottessa Moshfegh’s rapturously received novel – about a waifish twentysomething brat who sleeps for a year, aided by a queasy cocktail of drugs – as an instruction manual. You scour the pages for clues, hoping that you, too, might be lulled into total oblivion: the ideal holiday mood. – Michael Sun
What’s the engrossing, delightful, escapist book you return to on holidays? Join us in the comments and we’ll compile a list of readers’ picks
