We just now learned that a celeb like Kendall Jenner actually uses an unofficial books consultant. Specifically an unofficial books consultant named Ashlea Gonzalez, whose job it is to curate hot, new literary picks for the model-millionaire to be seen out and about with.
Shocking stuff.
Gonzalez is a senior talent agent, whose debut poetry collection Fake Piñata was published in 2024. Anyway, you don’t have your own literary consultant for high-brow FaceTime book brainstorms, you’ve got us. Reading is in trouble again! Get to it.
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Villa Coco (Andrew Sean Greer)
This is it, the summer’s most gorgeous novel. The American writer Andrew Sean Greer, known for his prize-winning 2017 book Less, has helpfully categorised the book himself as a ‘charm novel’. Think Gerald Durrell, Nancy Mitford or something like Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, a stone-cold classic. The criteria: eccentric characters, shenanigans, a dash of wisdom, funny stories.
Villa Coco is beautiful and charming, without being at all shallow, and the same can be said of its iconic cast of characters. ‘Giovedi’, as he’s swiftly nicknamed, is a young American archivist who lands at the door of the 90-odd-year-old Baronessa, in Guadagnino-like Tuscan hills, in order to catalogue her treasures. He learns his Italian from the cook, refined taste from a refined guest of the villa and the art of conversation from a principessa and, of course, his new employer herself. Then there’s the handsome cousin Giacomo-Giacomo. Age vs youth, old world vs new, moxy vs melancholy, it’s all here. As delicious as a Neapolitan sfagliotelle.
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A Violent Masterpiece (Jordan Harper)
If it’s crime thrills you’re after, Jordan Harper’s excellent, epic neo-noir A Violent Masterpiece is a great way to celebrate America’s 250th. This plotty page-turner is set in a Los Angeles of grime, heat and glitter. We follow Jake Deal, a tattooed, live-streaming nightcrawler; Kara Delgado, a private concierge fixer with a missing friend, and Doug Gibson, a public defence lawyer, as they get mixed up in the brutality of the city’s filthy-rich.
The detecting here is of the hard-boiled variety, keeping a long lit tradition alive. Harper writes about night-time drives through neighbourhoods like Inglewood and Encino, Eagle Rock and Beverly Hills with all the passion and precision of a nature writer studying their chosen habitat. The taco trucks, the gas stations, the shoot-outs, all lit up by “cop car cherries”. Concerned by big ideas about who wins, who loses and why, Harper chews up all manner of contemporary scandals and spits them back at us in his upturned LA that’s teeming with creepy-crawlies.
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Underdogs (Louise Powell)
Louise Powell is a working-class writer from Middlesbrough, with nine plays and an essay in Kit de Waal’s excellent Common People anthology under her belt. For her first novel, she’s taken inspiration from her childhood memories of racing greyhounds with her family at County Durham’s ‘flapping tracks’ i.e independent racetracks. The story in Underdogs follows ten-year-old George and his dad Reg, who has been out of work for a while. That’s why he’s willing to take a gamble secretly racing a greyhound for Bertie, the gold-covered, larger-than-life local god who’s half-banned from the tracks himself for rinsing out the bookies with his dogs.
Powell writes in a lovely, lilting North East dialect – which is “fuller” “summat”, “nowt” and “bairns” “an all”. And with small, commonplace tragedies on almost every page, you’re rooting not just for the father and son pair but the rest of the community, to make good. The betting ring and race scenes at the “meetins” swallow you whole in the sights, sounds and smells and Powell has a generous eye for detail: the CV on teabag box cardboard, the “boo-kay” of flowers, Bertie and Reg sharing physical scars, the colours of notes of cash flying around. Honestly, there’s a line of dialogue from young George, who can’t believe the size of a Dairy Milk chocolate bar, that’ll break your heart. An author to watch.
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The End of Everything (M John Harrison)
The End of Everything is an unsettling, near-future dystopia that’s not for the squishy-brained reader who needs everything spelled out. If you’re willing to, instead, space out and go with the weirdness, though, it’ll stick with you. For those who haven’t heard of M John Harrison, he’s an 80 year-old speculative fiction stylist, who lives in Shropshire. He’s been compared to J.G. Ballard and John Wyndham and this latest book has something of the vibes of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.
At the outset, we follow Philip Tennent, a beachcomber on the Kent coast by the Channel, and his semi-reclusive aunt Marnie. There has been some sort of crisis about a decade earlier in this strange new world and Harrison pulls off the trick of fully realising this slightly slanted England of his, while conveying the sheer fuzziness with which the population relates to the shift. Social dynamics are off, one’s sense of time is warped and ‘artefacts’ are emerging from the sea. Philip and Marnie look for clues in diary entries and old emails, with one particularly striking horror motif which Harrison shapes out of shadows and a thrilling, bravura section mid-way through that’s amongst the best things you’ll read all year.
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Sail Away Land (Ben Pester)
While we’re wigging out with The End of Everything, Ben Pester’s new collection Sail Away Land, published by Granta, pairs quite nicely with it. You might remember his terrific, must-read novel The Expansion Project from 2025; these short stories share that creeping sense of alienation and dislocation employed to great effect in both that book and the M John Harrison above, but they also expand on the altogether tricksier domestic, emotional side of things.
A few of the surreal-AF stories, including the opener ‘Around the time of my promotion’, dig deeper into this confusing collision of work selves and personal lives. Others take social cues and daft experiments to their logical, uncanny conclusions: an indulgent, courses-long dinner at a bougie restaurant in ‘Catmint’ or a guy who is too polite not to help a stranger with a shed in ‘You, Me and Russell Palomet’. We’re still giggling to ourselves at where some of these stories end up. Stepdads? Briefcases? WTF? But Pester shows, in something like ‘An improvement in the light’, that he can still his over-active imagination and deliver a miniature masterpiece when he feels like it. We’ll read anything he writes.
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Short Circuit (Wolf Haas)
What a gem. German writer Wolf Haas’s Short Circuit, translated into English by Jamie Bulloch, is a twisty, turny treat that’s just over 200 pages. A funeral orator named Franz Escher – nudge, nudge – and a man on the run from the Italian mafia named Elio Russo are both reading books… about each other. The literary equivalent of, say, MC Escher’s Drawing Hands.
The less we spoil the better, really, except that: this is very much a book of two halves (cryptic, we know) and if you fuck with Calvino, Borges, high-concept puzzles, Lynchian mysteries or the history of art, you’ll quickly have a face like a particularly pleased monocle-wearing emoji. The audiobook scenes had us outta our seats. You’ll race through this in one afternoon, then want to read it all over again. Genius and fun, no mean feat.
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Son of Nobody (Yann Martel)
This one’s a title we didn’t quite get to in Spring. But whatever, it’s our list and this book will be jammy for those tropical rainy days when you need something with substance. And Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody is an extremely ambitious novel. The Life of Pi author has constructed a fictional lost epic poem of the Trojan War, focusing on a commoner named Psoas, and then built a Nabokovian footnote structure around it to tell the story of the Canadian academic who discovers and reconfigures the fragments. Phew.
There’s not much Pale Fire-esque silliness here, though. Son of Nobody is much more earnest an undertaking, reaching for grand themes of love, loss, family and heroism. (When he gets there, he gets there). Our scribe, Harlow Donne has left his wife Gail and daughter Helen behind for a year-long scholarship in the libraries of Oxford. There’s some high-fan-fiction retellings of Helen of Troy’s ‘abduction’ and the whole horse of it all, with musings on connections to the New Testament and clever, at-points brutal symmetries between the two stories. Sumptuous stuff if you’re a sack of wine who’s into classical Greece, with a side of class consciousness you might not be expecting.
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Sky City (Jacqueline Crooks)
Reddit asks ‘Is Sky City, Wood Green the maddest estate in London?’ Author Jacqueline Crooks, who once lived in a flat in the complex above the North London shopping centre, would probably answer: hells yeah. Her protagonist, a mixed-race young woman named Jaycee, in Crooks’ semi-autobiographical novel Sky City, looks down at the courtyards, walkways and crowds in the early 90s and feels alien -distanced by her childhood trauma. Through lyrical language, weaving in and out of past and present, Jaycee finds some solace in DJ Macca’s radio sets, soft, live-alone routines and phone calls to her hyper, mile-a-minute old friend in New York, Ella-G.
This is heavy but ultimately hopeful stuff, shot through with shape-shifting imagery, sometimes urban, sometimes natural, sometimes Sun Ra-style cosmic, sometimes musical. The sea is “cold water electricity” on her head or “she’s missed a break-beat, fallen through boom-bap time”. As with Powell, Crooks is deliberate about her delicate charges, whether that’s the girls’ sugar highs as stress responses, an obsession with an old record cover or Ella-G’s maxim on needing to “quantify, quantify” how much a person cares about her. When one of Jaycee’s breakthroughs bursts tentatively from the page, it’s cathartic, well-earned and will no doubt be inspiring for anyone who feels stuck, tired and bored of themselves.
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Queenie Is Working On It (Candice Carty-Williams)
Candice Carty-Williams’ 2019 debut Queenie became both a bestseller and a Channel 4 TV series of the same name. So no surprise that she’s back with a follow-up, Queenie Is Working On It, which sees her British-Jamaican protagonist all grown up at the age of 33, kinda. Queenie Jenkins is still something of a hot mess, living in London and working as a journalist for the Black women-owned publication The Good Sis.
She’s got more than a ‘TFL man’ situationship, run-ins with an ex, cringey racist editors and nightmare Jane Austen-themed hen-do to deal with; there’s also her ticking biological clock and the ‘no thanks’ fertility appointments she’s attending as a single woman. In relatable and conversational style, Carty-Williams brings us along for Queenie’s goofy, awkward and genuinely upsetting romantic and workplace escapades, various layers of family dysfunction and explores the pitfalls of so much main character syndrome. Not the most subtle writing, sure, but stuffed full of talking points.
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