What’s Your August Read?
Picking a good book to read can always be a bit of a challenge. What if you pick the wrong one? How do you know if you’re choosing the right one? You don’t, but that’s the beauty of reading: you never know what is going to lie between the front and back cover. Who you’ll meet, where you might go and how you might be changed after.
We love helping people find a story that’s suited to them. There are so many enticing new titles coming out each day, sometimes you need a helping hand in sorting through them all. We’ve compiled a small list of different stories, providing you with the benefit of options.
Maybe you want something of a romance with the perspective of reality. Taylor Jenkins writes stories that surround relationships. When they’re good and when they’re falling apart. After I Do is a story “about modern marriage, the depth of family ties, and the year that one remarkable heroine spends exploring both.” Lauren and Ryan have fallen in love, gotten married and when things begin to crumble they decide it’s time for a break. One year apart, no contact. Who will they both become after twelve months?
Perhaps you’re after something with an element of truth. Real people, somewhat true stories, re-imagined by their authors. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham follows Hillary Clinton and tells us what her life might have been like had she not married Bill. Growing up in Chicago, people used to say she was “awfully opinionated for a girl.” If Hillary replied to Bill’s marriage proposal with a firm ‘no’, how would the future have been different? How would things have turned out, not just in their personal lives, but for America and the rest of the world?
There’s another new title that does something similar for it’s readers. Peering at the lives of people who existed but through the eyes of novelist, Kate Grenville. Notorious wool baron John Macarthur had a wife named Elizabeth and what if she had written a memoir and left it behind, not to be found for decades to come? Grenville “finds” this memoir through her own words and tells us the story of the Macarthurs. A playful balance between both the real and imagined, A Room Made of Leaves shows us a woman who fights for female power in a society that offered none.
Maybe you’re after a story that provides your heart with both grief and healing. The Phone Box at the Edge of the World is about a woman named Yui who loses two very important women in her life: her mother and her daughter, to the tragedy of a tsunami. She hears of a man who has a disused telephone box in his back garden, where people will travel from all corners of the world, using the phone box to find strength to speak to their lost loved ones. Yui embarks on a pilgrimage to this phone box, only to find she cannot manage to speak into it. Instead she meets Takeshi, a man dealing with his own grief and together they try to find their lost words.
Perhaps you want something that’s relevant. Brit Bennett brings us The Vanishing Half a story about the Vignes sisters, twins. Growing up inseparable in a southern black community in the US, the girls go on to lead two very different lives: one black and one white. One twin remains in their community where she raises her daughter. The other passes for white in California, married to a white man who has no knowledge of her past or who she truly is. The story spans over the lives of the two twins, from the deep south to the west coast, from the 1950’s through to the ‘90’s. A family story that confronts the issues of gender, race, society and identity.
Which one will you choose?
