Summer is just beginning to come to a close, with 9am lectures and late night study sessions no longer a distant memory, but do not despair! The weather is still warm(ish) and there is plenty of time to fit in a few more spontaneous weekend getaways, beach-side picnics and rooftop bars, and maybe even a book or two! However, for many girls, typical summer romance novels just aren’t really their cup of tea, so we’ve come up with 5 alternative summer reads that are the perfect mix of fun and grit, and will have you hooked from page 1:
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
This thrilling sci-fi follows the story of Area X, a section of north America that has been mysteriously cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible field. Inside, people report a paradise, where nature has taken back what it lost, but every research team that entered has returned only to die of unknown causes. Annihilation is about the 12th expedition team, made up of 4 women, and the strange and inexplicable horrors they discover inside Area X.
I never truly understood what the word ‘spine-tingling’ really felt like until I read this book. It is a chilling, mind-bending mystery that you will not be able to put down.
Eleanor by Jason Gurley
This is a story about family, love and loss that literally crosses time and space. In 1985 young Eleanor loses her twin sister in a car accident, sending her splintered family spiralling into grief and anger. In 1993 Eleanor is 14, and one day she walks through a door at her school and finds herself in another world. It continues to happen again and again. For Eleanor, it feels like a matter of minutes has passed when she returns, but in the real world it is days, or weeks, or months. Then one day she goes diving by the sea, and as she falls something rips her out of time and space and, on the other side, someone is waiting for her.
This heart wrenching story explores the concepts of fate, dimensions, the afterlife, and the power of family. You will laugh, cry, and feel like a new person when you’re done.
The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
A collection of essays and stories written by Marina Keegan, a brilliant young writer who had just graduated from Yale in 2012 when she died tragically in a car crash. In the wake of her death, her last essay for the Yale Daily News went viral across America, getting millions of hits. To honour her memory, her family put together a compilation of her essays and stories for the world to read. Her stories and essays embody moments from all stages of life, but none better than the unique sensation of being young and unsure, of leaving the safety of university and wondering how to navigate and find your place in the world, and maybe even make a difference.
Her writing is truly unforgettable, perfectly capturing the hopes, desires, and struggles of our generation.
The Bees by Laline Paull
Reading ‘The Bees’ you will feel like you have discovered a fantasized dystopia, but in fact you are reading about a bee hive, brought to life by Paull’s vivid imagination. This thrilling novel follows the story Flora 717, a low class worker bee who through her unusual talents rises up the ranks, from a sanitation worker to a high level forager and companion to the Queen. But secrets and enemies, both internal and external, are overwhelming the hive, but none more so than Flora’s, a forbidden desire which will change her destiny and her world.
This chilling world and Flora’s heroic story are made even more remarkable by the fact that it is based largely upon the real lives of these small, amazing creatures. You will never look at a bee the same way again!
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
This is a story of two women who could not be more different, connected through time and space by a diary inside a Hello Kitty Lunchbox. On a small island in Canada, Ruth, a struggling novelist, discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in the wake of the Tsunami in Japan, one item being a Hello Kitty Lunchbox. Inside, Ruth discovers a diary of a young girl called Nao. In Tokyo, Nao has decided that she has had enough of life, of depression, and of her classmates bullying her. But before she ends her life she wants to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than 100 years. In writing her diary Nao changes not only her own life, but Ruth’s, who becomes invested in Nao’s drama and fate.
Reading this novel you almost feel a part of the story, as Ozeki explores the relationship between writer and reader with her unique humour. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that felt so real.