The Booklist: I do like to be beside the seaside…
Summer is upon us, and we will flock to the coast to enjoy the breeze and avoid the worst of the heat, thronging on the beaches and piers, riding the rollercoasters and swimming in the sea. This month’s Booklist features titles with a seaside theme, though not necessarily donkey rides and sticks of rock.
The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave
Bunny is a salesman in search of a soul. He is soon to discover his days are numbered . . . Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the dream of hope to lonely housewives along the south coast of England. Set adrift by his wife’s sudden death and struggling to keep a grip on reality, he does the only thing he can think of – with his young son in tow, he hits the road. While Bunny plies his trade and his sexual charisma door-to-door, nine-year-old Bunny Junior sits patiently in the car, exploring the world through the pages of his encyclopaedia. As their bizarre and increasingly frenzied road trip shears into a final reckoning, Bunny finds that the ghosts of his world – decrepit fathers, vengeful lovers, jealous husbands and horned psycho-killers – have emerged from the shadows and are seeking to exact their toll. A tender portrait of the relationship between father and son, The Death of Bunny Munro is a stylish, angry and hugely enjoyable read, bursting with the wit and mystery that fans will recognise as hallmarks of Cave’s singular vision.
The Gathering Night, by Margaret Elphinstone
Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disaster. This gripping novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable for our troubled planet 8,000 years on.
Seven-Tenths, by James Hamilton-Paterson
Seven-Tenths is James Hamilton-Paterson’s classic exploration of the sea. A beautifully written blend of literature and science, which includes the acclaimed essay ‘Sea Burial’. Hamilton-Paterson writes about fishing, piracy, ecological crisis and many other subjects, and is especially good on the melancholy fascination of those border places and moments when the sea and land meet, and human experience seems transient. At a time of growing concern about our degradation of the oceans, this extraordinary book retains all its relevance and power.
This is How, by M.J. Hyland
All actions have consequences. This is how life goes. Patrick is a loner, an intelligent but disturbed young man struggling to find his place in the world. He ventures out on his own, and, as he begins to find happiness, he commits an act of violence that sends his life horribly and irreversibly out of control. But should a person’s life be judged by a single bad act? This is How is a compelling and macabre journey into the dark side of human existence and a powerful meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption.
The Widow’s Tale, by Mick Jackson
A newly widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she’s rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless sympathy and insincere concern.
She’s not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is that she can’t sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought to.
But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by running away to this particular village she might actually be making her own personal pilgrimage.
By turns elegiac and highly comical, The Widow’s Tale conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decides what has real value and what she should leave behind.
Read an interview with Mick Jackson
This Striped World, by Emma Jones
With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and transitory lands.
Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings: of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Daphne tells of her new leaves, ‘They sing, and make the world.’ The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless and memorable search for belonging.
Listen to an interview with Emma Jones
Our Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas
‘I was reading about the end of the universe when I got a text message from my friend Libby . . .’ If Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But for Meg – locked in a dead-end relationship and with a deadline long-gone for a book that she can’t write – this thought fills her with dread. Meg is lost in a labyrinth of her own devising. But could there be an important connection between a wild beast living on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time, a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe and the Cottingley Fairies? Or is her life just one long chain of coincidences? Smart, entrancing and buzzing with big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, and how a story might just save your life.
How to make the fabric of the universe
