My list of summer reads, or books to take on holiday

It's that time of the year when we're all beginning to think about our summer holidays. (While the rain beats down the windows behind my desk...) I usually leave the book buying to the last minute, but this time, since I'm now a professional bookseller, I thought I'd get a head start.

The first novel on my list is set in LA. The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who travels from London to Venice Beach to attend her mother's funeral. Amongst her late mother's possessions she finds a suitcase full of love letters and photographs of the men her mother had known.  She decides to return each letter to its sender. It sounds like a brilliant read - just what's needed on a beach holiday!

Stop press: Anna Stothard is coming to talk about this book at England's Lane Books on 14 June. Details of the event can be found here.

I am a self-confessed Mad Men addict. So much so that my current phone ringtone is the theme tune from the cult HBO TV series. It doesn't make me answer my phone any quicker, and I sometimes find myself listening to the tune forgetting to answer all together - but I digress. When I saw that Rona Jaffe's The Very Best of Everything was written in the 1950's and tells a story of four women working in a Manhattan typing pool very similar to the one in the offices of Stirling Cooper, I had to get the book. The novel was regarded as scandalous when it came out in 1958, and is even mentioned in the show. So as the saying goes, if you liked Mad Men, you'll love....I cannot wait to read this book.

My next recommendation is a crime thriller. I do love a good Scandi crime book on holiday (not that I'm at all biased...) and The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler is famed for being just that. The story behind the writers of this book is almost as intriguing as the book itself: for a long time no-one in Sweden knew who Kepler was, until one persistent reporter found that behind the best-selling novel was in fact a married couple, Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril. I will be reviewing this book on my other site.

Next on my list is a novel by Tim Pears. I saw Pears, to me previously unknown writer, read from his book, Landed, at Shoreditch Literary Salon last week. Landed is a story of a man's life, narrated by him in some point in the future. It's an interesting method to use; while the story unravels in the 1980's the future world of the narrator is unknown to us. The bit that Tim read to us at Shoreditch Salon was also very funny so I'm really looking forward to getting to know this writer's work.

A book I'd saved for my holiday but couldn't resist starting is Lucky Break by Esther Freud. This is a sad and funny book which follows a group of young actors through drama school and onto their first successes and failures. Esther started out as an actress herself, so the book has an authentic feel. I'm really enjoying it so far.

Maggie O'Farrell is an author I, for some strange reason, have never read. When I heard her read from her latest novel, The Hand That Held Mine, I became completely smitten by her writing. The novel starts with a young girl, who, yearning for a more exciting life, leaves her genteel parents in the country and moves to bohemian Soho in post-war London. It's a story of what it is to be an artist and a mother, and if the few passages which O'Farrell read at Shoreditch are anything to go by, this is a must read of the summer.

Gerard Woodward has long been a favourite writer of mine. His brilliant Booker listed novel, I'll Go to Bed at Noon, was funny and disturbing portrait of a family coping with alcohol abuse. So I am really looking forward to reading his latest book to come out in paperback, Nourishment. This is an imaginative wartime tale of a woman whose children are evacuated, her husband is a prisoner of war and she's forced to live with her irascible mother while - to help the war effort - working at a London gelatine factory. When she receives a letter from Donald asking for a dirty letter, by return post, she's aghast but out a marital duty and with the help of book shops, libraries and public conveniences, decides to master the language of carnal desire. Again, I cannot wait to read this book!

Last but not least I am going to recommend a book of novellas by an old master, Stefan Zweig, an author who took his own life in 1942 at the age of 61, cutting his writing career tragically short. A couple of years ago for the Babington Book club I chose his novel The Post Office Girl, published post-humously, and fell in love with his writing. This collection of Selected Stories includes his most powerful novellas. It's the perfect book to have handy for a long journey, when you can dip in and out of Zweig's captivating world.

I hope you like my recommendations and tell me what you think. Happy reading!

That thorny old issue

The point of view (POV) in a novel has been something of a hobby horse of mine since I took an MA in Creative Writing a few years ago. Whether it's my analytical brain, or my natural tidiness (no comments needed by people who know me - in my brain I'm tidy...), but I've always felt that the point of view in a novel should be clearly set out and that certain rules should be followed.

I know I can bore the socks of some people about POV, but briefly for those who don't know and are interested (rest hop to paragraph below), what I'm talking about is this: when reading about how a character feels, we imagine the writer is inside their brain. When he moves to describe another person's feelings, he's changing the point of view. This change should be flagged somehow, by a paragraph or chapter break. If it isn't, confusion can arise; who's brain are we in now, the husband's or the wife's? Or perhaps it's the mistress, who's just stepped out of the marital en-suite shower who's speaking? I also often think that a novel which is written from a third person should not switch to 1st person narrative and vice versa.

I would also go as far as to say I don't particularly like an omniscient style, where the writer is pretending to be God-like figure, sitting on a cloud high up in the sky, describing the feelings of his characters going on about their business below. Unless very well done, it can be very confusing to read, and affect the authenticity of the story. It's also quite old-fashioned, this was the way books were written in the olden days.

As for chopping and changing the POV, not being wholly omniscient, nor holding to any of the above rules, or mixing 3rd and 1st person narratives? This just drives me completely crazy. (As witnessed by those unfortunate enough to get involved in a discussion about POV with me.) It makes me wonder if the writer has mixed POV just to be different. In my view it doesn't make the story more interesting, or make the telling of it more poignant, it just confuses and annoys.

On the other hand, writing a book wholly in one character's first person, though intense, can seem self-indulgent. Many modern novelists use the easy technique of having a chapter per character, telling the story from the POV of, say, three of four main characters. But blindly following the rules of POV in this way can make the novel a little, dare I say it, boring.

So what is the writer to do? Some, like for instance, Booker-nominated Gerard Woodward in his novel about a modern British middle-class family struggling with alcohol addiction, 'I'll Go To Bed At Noon', used a combination of an omniscient POV with a third person narrative. When the story demanded it, he'd swap POV mid paragraph. And in spite of my initial huffing and puffing while reading the book, I liked it. Because, as often is the case in fiction, or art, the most magnificent things happen when rules are broken.

The reason I'm writing about this is that with my latest manuscript I'm really struggling to decide what kind of point of view to use. I'm concerned that I'm not talented enough to do what Gerard Woodward did, nor am I confident enough to go wholly omniscient. Though I think that my particularly story would really suit this way of telling it. So far I've written parts of it in third person from 3 different character's POV. There's also a chapter in 1st person, one which in my opinion works really well. It makes the story much more immediate, and I think makes the reader empathise with my main character to a much higher degree.But I can't write the whole story from this one character's POV, in first person. Nor do I think I could combine 3rd and 1st person narratives.

While pondering this I was wandering around Daunt Books in North London and picked up a new book that I thought my book club would enjoy. It's 'The Privileges' by an US author called Jonathan Dee. To be honest I chose it because it was about New York ,a city I love and a city which features strongly in my current manuscript. It also had an endorsement by Jonathan Franzen, who's novel 'The Corrections' I absolutely loved. And I'm a sucker for endorsements by authors I love. (Probably lots of people are, why else would publishers use them...?)

In any case, I started to read the new book last night and was astounded by the style. Fully omniscient, it still manages to be modern, fast paced and absolutely clear about who's brain we're having a little look into. Reading Dee has made me want to restart my manuscript from scratch to try out his style. At least I shall do an exercise we did during the MA where you copy a style for your own story for a chapter and see how it works. In a way I almost wish it won't work as that means  a re-write as early as 25,000 words into the novel. But, if it does work and I prove to be skilful enough (please, please, the God of Authors...!) it could be quite refreshing to say goodbye to all my hang-ups about POV.

Wish me luck!