The Bookends Picnic 2020 | Which books are on your reading list this summer?

Every week, throughout summer we will be asking some of your favourite authors to share their 2020 summer reading essentials – we’ll be covering which books they’ll be reading this summer to which of their character’s they would like to go on holiday with.

So to kick things off, we asked Sarah Steele, VB Grey and Isabelle Broom what books are on their reading list this summer!

Sarah Steele, author of The Missing Pieces of Nancy Moon:

I’m very much looking forward to Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow is pretty high up the list, and I keep hearing amazing things about American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Fellow Stroud author Rachel Joyce’s new novel Miss Benson’s Beetle is a must, as is Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear, to help me remember the new slowness of life we learned during lockdown.

V.B. Grey, author of Tell Me How It Ends:

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow was a perfect lockdown choice, about a man placed under restrictions finding the grace to make a fulfilling life for himself.

I loved Anne Enright’s Actress, in which a daughter tries to answer the impossible question ‘What was she like?’ about her famous mother. Writing that is vivid and joyful and tragic all at once.

And I am currently reading Abbie Greaves’ understated debut, The Silent Treatment, which I fear is going to break my heart.

Isabelle Broom, author of Hello, Again: 

I will definitely be treating myself to a copy of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett – a book the entire world has been raving about. And I am ridiculously excited to have a proof of Jodi Picoult’s big new release, The Book Of Two Ways, sitting high on my TBR. At the moment, I’m reading Finders Keepers by the always brilliant Sabine Durrant; it’s exquisitely creepy and affecting.

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