Need some inspiration for your poolside reading?
Worry not because we have you covered with all the books hitting shelves this July.
Here are seven to add to your to be read list.
If These Walls Could Talk – Michelle McDonagh
In the shadows of a forgotten asylum, deadly secrets wait to be unearthed. Hazel McNamara is on the phone with her husband Darragh when she hears the screech of tyres. He screams her name – then, silence.
The jeep he was driving is soon found, overturned in a field off the motorway, but Darragh has vanished. As days pass and the Gardaí investigate, Hazel’s carefully built life starts to crumble. She soon discovers that her charismatic property developer husband has been keeping secrets – personal and financial – that could put her family’s safety and future at risk.
But where is he? Is something sinister afoot, after he got into bed with the wrong people? And what is the connection to an abandoned mental asylum in a small town in County Galway? The answer, when she eventually gets it, will shock Hazel beyond belief.
Out 2nd July
Queenie is working on it. – Candace Carty-Williams
How is it possible for one woman to hold it together when she’s: Confronted with a racing biological clock when she doesn’t even know if she wants kids. Trying to act normal when her heart is smashed into a million pieces.
Ten times smarter than the people she’s working for. Priced out of the housing market in the place she grew up.
Stuck in a situationship when all she wants is the love of her life back . . .Bigger. Not better. Older. Not wiser. Queenie Jenkins is working on it.
Out 2nd July
Postcards from Sicily – Nancy Barone
Olivia swore she would never grow up to be like her mother, who fled to Sicily to be with her lover when Olivia was a teenager. But now in her thirties, the spark in Olivia’s marriage has been extinguished for years, she’s hopelessly pining over her attractive business partner, Markus, and her own teenage daughter barely speaks to her.
So when her estranged mother offers to pay for an eight‐week trip to a luxurious wellness centre in Italy, Olivia reluctantly accepts. A break will be good for her. For everyone. There’s just one catch… Susan is staying in the adjoining room.
Fuelled by gorgeous weather, good food and even better wine, can the two women overcome their history and form the mother-daughter bond that Olivia always dreamed of? Or is it too late for second chances?
Out 30th July
Hello Baby – Kim Eui-kyung
In a group chat called ‘Hello Baby’, six women share the anxieties and absurdities of undergoing IVF. Outside the chat, each woman is different – a journalist, a police officer, a vet, a lawyer and two housewives – but inside it, they’ve come to confide in one another. They know it is unlikely they will all get their happy ending, but while messaging, anything seems possible.
So, when 46-year-old Jeong-hyo suddenly announces she has stopped treatment and goes silent, it rocks them all. One year later, on Lunar New Year, Jeong-hyo sends a message announcing the birth of her daughter.
As the stunned women count down to their visit to meet her and the new baby, they each reckon with their own journeys. Might this news hold fresh promise for each of them? To know that they will need to understand just how this unexpected miracle came to pass.
Out 29th July
The Man – Laura Sims
The photos Judith Stanley takes are just for her, a private passion to fill her suburban days. But when she shares them with Paul Sorenson, her new photography instructor, she’s unprepared to hear his astonished praise. ‘Stunning,’ he calls her photos. ‘Extraordinary.’ She has an uncanny eye, he says, and should consider publication. He could help.
Except Judith has no interest in sharing her work; in fact, the mere idea of it frightens her. Still, emboldened by Paul’s encouragement, Judith ventures out beyond her quiet neighbourhood to the city in search of increasingly striking images. When she starts to notice the dark shape of a man in the corner of her self-portraits, Judith is certain he’s an attacker from her past. She doesn’t know why he has returned, but she’s sure of his presence: the hoarse sound of his breathing, his hard grip on her elbow.
Perhaps it would appease the man if she were to put her camera down and give up her private passion. But she can’t; she refuses. Until one night when the man finally emerges from the shadows, and Judith’s story suddenly and irrevocably becomes his own.
Out 7th July
Everything She Didn’t Say – Jane Casey
Someone is dead. Someone is a killer. Someone is lying.
A woman is found in bloodstained clothes on the lonely coast of County Mayo. At first, she won’t speak. Then a name comes: Ruth. And a story about her missing friend: Maura. Ruth says she and Maura were staying in a clifftop house together. But there’s no trace of her there. Nothing but a pool of blood.
Ruth says the pair fought in the days before Maura disappeared. But the locals say they only ever saw one woman. Ruth swears she’s telling the truth, but do the answers really lie in everything she didn’t say?
Out 16th July
Country People – Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.
So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.
Out Now