10 Great Summer Reads

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The holidays are approaching and you’re wondering what books should be on your summer reading list! Well look no further, as the staff at Dubray Books have chosen their 10 Great Summer Reads. All you have to do now, is find that quiet corner on the beach, and hope nobody interrupts you!

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#1. Five Days (Douglas Kennedy)

Nobody does romance quite like Douglas Kennedy. Five Days features faltering marriages, second chances and personal rebirth through heartbreak.

Laura succumbs to an emotional affair with Richard, whom she meets at a conference in Boston. The affair unfolds over five unforgettable days, each discovering that the other is haunted by a relationship from their youth that ended abruptly in tragedy.

#2. Inferno (Dan Brown)

Robert Langdon is back. He awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of where he is or how he got there. Nor can he explain the origin of the macabre object that is found hidden in his belongings.

Set against an extraordinary landscape inspired by one of history’s most ominous literary classics, Inferno is Dan Brown’s most compelling and thought-provoking novel yet, a breathless race-against-time thriller that will grab you from page one and not let you go until you close the book.

#3. Perfect Wives (Emma Hannigan)

When actress Jodi Ludlum returns home to Ireland, to raise her young son in South Dublin, she’s determined to shield him from the media spotlight that has dogged her throughout her glittering career. Even if coming home means leaving her husband – and waking old ghosts.

She befriends Francine Hennessy, queen of the coffee mornings, whose life is crumbling around her, behind closed doors. They quickly discover that there’s no such thing as the perfect wife, or the perfect life.

#4. Storyteller (Jody Picoult)

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. Sleeping by day and working in a bakery by night, she kneads her emotion into the beautiful bread she bakes.

But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet man old enough to be her grandfather, and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he’s kept for sixty years.

#5. TransAtlantic (Colum McCann)

1919 Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the First World War to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. Among the letters being carried on the aircraft is one which will not be opened for almost a hundred years. 1998. Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace.

1845. Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. On his travels he inspires a young maid to go to New York to embrace a free world, but the land does not always fulfill its promises for her. From the violent battlefields of the Civil War to the ice lakes of northern Missouri, it is her youngest daughter Emily who eventually finds her way back to Ireland.

#6. And The Mountains Echoed (Khaled Hosseini)

Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and stepmother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters.

One day the siblings journey across the desert to Kabul with their father. Pari and Abdullah have no sense of the fate that awaits them there, for the event which unfolds will tear their lives apart.

#7. Instructions For A Heatwave (Maggie O’Farrell)

This a portrait of an Irish family in crisis in the legendary heatwave of July 1976.  In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back.

The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children – two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce – back home, each wih different ideas as to where their father might have gone.

#8. Jacob’s Folly (Rebecca Miller)

In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob is a peddler of knives, salt cellars and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, Jacob is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can.

In twenty-first-century America, Jacob’s life has twisted in ways he could never have imagined. But even the tiniest of flies can influence the turning of the world. Reliable, true Leslie Senzatimore, a volunteer fireman, and Masha, a gravely ill young woman, are about to have their lives transformed.

#9. Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel) 

2012 Winner of Man Booker Prize. By 1535 Thomas Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn, the king’s new wife. But Anne has failed to give the king an heir, and Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour.

Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

#10. The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there.

But, as it turns out, Allan is not…Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police.

Dubray Books are offering all Mykidstime readers 10% off these titles, either in-store or online. Quote code MYKIDSTIME as order reference. 

Related: What book would you take to a desert Island

What book would you add to or take away from this list?  Tell us in the comment box below.

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