Summer Reads

The very phrase ‘summer reading’ seems to suggest a certain lightness of being – the literary equivalent of a beach towel and a cool drink. We are encouraged to pack novels that are ‘unputdownable’ but what if summer, with its promise of unstructured time and a slower pace, is actually the ideal season for a different kind of reading? The perfect time to engage with books that demand more of us.

The following is a mix of books that, in their various ways, invite us to look more closely at the world, at ourselves, and at the strange and beautiful business of being alive.

On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle
The premise is simple enough: on November 18th, Tara Selter finds herself trapped in a single, endlessly repeating day. But where a lesser writer might use this as a gimmick, a mere plot device, Balle uses it to conduct a philosophical inquiry into the nature of time, memory, and the self as Tara is forced to examine and re-examine the same small slice of existence, to find the infinite within the finite.

Balle’s prose, cool and precise, has the quality of a scientific instrument, and yet it is capable of moments of breathtaking beauty and terror. This is a book that will make you look at your own life, at the passing of your own days, with a new and startling clarity.

The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith
When you leave your childhood behind you don’t leave your books; they’re all inside of you. In this delightful and deeply intelligent book, Sam Leith takes us on a tour of the enchanted forest of children’s literature, a place that, for many of us, is our first and most formative encounter with the power of storytelling.
Leith is a witty and companionable guide, and he wears his learning lightly. A book for anyone who has ever been lost in a book.

Flesh by David Szalay
You’ve got to read the 2025 Booker Prize-winning Flesh. It’s a novel about a man named István, a Hungarian who comes to London in search of a better life and finds himself adrift in a world of casual cruelty and fleeting pleasures. Szalay’s prose has a stripped-back, almost brutalist quality. It’s remarkably easy to read and utterly absorbing.

Kings of the Road by Elizabeth Knox
A new book by Elizabeth Knox is always going to grab your attention and grab your attention for longer than planned. This is a story of a group of teenagers who are kidnapped and held for ransom, but it is also a story about the power of stories, how we use them to create our own realities.

As always with the best fantasy writing this is not an escape from reality, but a way of seeing it more clearly.

*Catch Elizabeth Knox in the Writers Programme at 2026 Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts in the following sessions Letter to My Art Mother and Dark Academics: Elizabeth Knox and Lili Wilkinson

Makeshift Seasons by Kate Camp
If you need a slim volume to take to the beach with you, tuck Makeshift Seasons into your basket. There, lying on a towel you’ll find your eyeline is in perfect accordance with the author and you can contemplate swimming, growing old and friendships among other things. Camp’s poems are full of unexpected turns of phrase and thought. Read once slowly and then repeat.

*Catch Kate Camp in the Writers Programme in Letter to My Art Mother

Service by John Tottenham
The novel’s narrator, Sean, is a struggling writer who works in a bookshop. There have been many attempts to write this kind of story featuring the daily humiliations and absurdities of life behind the counter but Tottenham has a wonderful eye for the small, seemingly insignificant moments that reveal the larger truths about class, and power, and the human condition with excoriating detail  It’s a book for anyone who has ever felt like a cog in a machine and/or for the wage slaves who work 9 – 5 while dreaming of a better destiny.

The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester and Sarah Hall’s Helm
It’s one of the curious pleasures of reading, the way that books can speak to one another. Such is the case with Winchester’s new book Breath of the Gods and Sarah Hall’s Helm; two books that approach the subject of wind from radically different angles yet arrive at surprisingly similar truths about human vulnerability and the vast indifferent forces that shape our world.

In The Breath of the Gods, Winchester takes us on a journey through the history of our relationship with the wind, from the ancient myths and legends to the latest scientific discoveries. Helm by contrast, is a work of imaginative fiction that gives voice to wind itself. Where Winchester seeks to explain wind, Hall seeks to inhabit it, to imagine what it might be like to be a consciousness that is also a force of nature. We can’t think of a better background to read these books in than Wellington.

*Catch Simon Winchester in the Writers Programme in The Breath of the Gods

Slowing the Sun by Nadine Hura
This is a book that is difficult to categorise. It is a collection of essays, but it is also a work of memoir. Hura has a gift for weaving together the personal and the political and by doing so gets our attention on what really matters.

*Catch Nadine Hura with Dr Jessica Hutchings in the Writers Programme in Me Aro Koe Ki Te Hā o Hineahuone – Pay Heed to the Dignity of our Soils

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