With the summer holidays officially upon us, the Salt team has put together just some of their top recommendations for reading in the sunshine. Whether you’re looking for your next book to slip into your suitcase, or some much-needed escapism while you're on your lunch break, we’ve got you covered.
Including fiction, short stories and poetry, here are the best holiday reads to add to your packing list.
FICTION
Nameless Lake
Chris Parker’s novel is skilfully paced and structured around the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship between Emma and Madryn. In adulthood, Emma longs for connection beyond her family, and as she finds new possibilities as she’s drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life. But when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally take action. Read more…
The Way to Work
The Way to Work, by Sean Ashton, takes an ordinary morning commute into an unforgettable journey that may well haunt you long after you turn the final page. In this mesmerising novel, a salesman for a cat litter manufacturer catches his usual 8.08 a.m. train, but soon discovers that all is not as it first seemed. Read more…
Reservoir
Reservoir, by Livi Michael. In this tense psychological thriller, personal and professional lives collide as Hannah Rossier, formerly Annie Price, runs into someone from her traumatic childhood while attending a conference in Geneva. After decades of reinventing herself, Hannah, a psychotherapist, has to decide whether she will confront the past she has spent her whole life escaping from. Read more…
The Good Son
The buzz for The Good Son, by Paul McVeigh, continues on even eight years since its publication. It follows a unique 10-year-old boy, Mickey, and his pet dog, Killer, at the start of the Troubles in Belfast. Heartwarming, original and raw, we promise this novel is one that stays with you for years to come. Read more…
A Perfect Explanation
While not an uplifting read, Eleanor Anstruther’s debut is a gripping and moving novel about class, inheritance and motherhood. Based on the story of Anstruther’s grandmother, it follows the desperate Enid as she offers to give her son to her sister for £500. The sheer emotional intensity drives the reader on. Read more…
POETRY
White Noise Machine
In White Noise Machine, Richard Skinner uses a language to play with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, such as the sounds of running water, or wind blowing through trees. Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems. Read more…
my name is abilene
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough has created a bold and mesmerising collection full of twisty fen-Gothic narratives with macabre imagery and sexual violence. my name is abilene is rich in symbolism and mythology – it’s a thrilling read that will leave your mind as black as peat. It has also been shortlisted in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Read more…
Woof! Woof! Woof!
Rob A. Mackenzie’s collection, Woof! Woof! Woof!, offers biting satire and sweeping social commentary. His experimental poems descent the reader into the sort of purgatory we may never choose to escape from, yet his wit offers us all a large dose of saving grace. The poems offer a clear-sighted challenge to the risk of isolationism and powerless relativism. Read more…
Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of My Brother
In Julian Stannard’s collection, a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, among much more. His poems sing of bewilderment and the bizarre. Read more…
Death Magazine
Matthew Haigh’s Death Magazine is a vision of our soundbite, snippet-obsessed, digital and print magazine culture. It uses the Dadaist technique of cut-up to produce poems that range from the blackly comic to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the prescient. This radical work creates a futuristic landscape of human emotion as a product. Read more…
SHORT STORIES
Mammals, I Think We Are Called
In Giselle Leeb’s debut collection, she uses eighteen strikingly original short stories to explore what it’s like to be human in the twenty-first century. Whether about our relationship with the environment and animals, social media, loneliness, or time – they are each beautifully written and reflect the complexities of being alive. Read more…
The Moon is Trending
Playful, surreal and dazzling, in this short story collection Clare Fisher explores many aspects of modern life including feelings of failure around gender, sexuality, and work that arise in a success-obsessed capitalist culture. Each short story veers between the real, the surreal and the absurd and is a must-have in your suitcase this summer. Read more…
Forgetting is How We Survive
In David Frankel’s Forgetting Is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point – an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow. Read more…
Concrete Fields
David Gaffney’s haunting and funny stories in Concrete Fields stay with you long after you finish them. Using dark humour and surreal characters, David Gaffney explores the theme of town versus country through a number of different lenses, including his own experience of being brought up in west Cumbria then moving to Manchester. Read more…
Scablands and Other Stories
In Scablands and Other Stories, Jonathan Taylor tells tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is; yet, sometimes, there is also beauty, music, and laughter. Read more…
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