Cristina Sanders Blog

Books for taking on Holidays

I don’t know why people say they want ‘trashy’ books to read on holidays. Who wants to read trash any time? It’s like getting stuck with a boring companion on holiday when you should toss them aside and pick up someone vibrant and exciting. With that in mind, here are ten of my favourite books, hammock tested, good company assured.

But before I hit the list, a quick plug! ‘Tis the season for long haul flights, wandering across walking trails, or hammocks. Kindle-time. I have it on good authority that my historical fiction novels have kept many travellers entertained on their journeys. So why not?
Type Cristina Sanders into kindle you’ll find them all:

Jerningham,
Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant,
Ōkiwi Brown,
Displaced.

Four award listed, best-selling, kiwi historical novels to put in your pocket.

Here are ten other great holiday reads from Christmases past, ones that shouldn’t be missed but may now be out of stock in your local bookshop, so perfect to put onto your kindle and into your travel bag. In no particular order, and with links to reviews:

The Axeman’s Carnival, by Catherine Chidgey. The narrator is a magpie. This farming family story works on every level. A must read.
Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, by Josie Shapiro. In case you’re thinking of taking up running.
Poor People With Money, by Dominic Hoey. Just because its cool.
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes. You think you’re far from home? This will take you further.
Wonderland, by Tracy Farr. An amusement park in 1912 Miramar and the Loverock family. Plus Marie Curie. Mixed up wonderful.
Foster, by Clarie Keegan. Or anything by Claire Keegan. Quick Novellas. Brilliant.
The Smuggler’s Wife, etc, by Deborah Challinor. If you want a bit of fun, lots of swashbuckling New Zealand history with a feisty heroine.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. War & Peace lite, the descendants, sort of.
This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson. A very long read that takes you all around the world on the Beagle with Darwin and Fitzroy and makes sense of so much. Can be re-read many times.
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. Let’s bring back arctic explorer Graham Gore and set him loose in modern London. Provocative, funny, sexy. Goes a bit James Bondy at the end.
Pretty Ugly, by Kirsty Gunn, well crafted, morally complex short stories.

Whoops, that’s eleven. Bonus!

I hope your holiday finds you in a hammock with a bowl of cherries and a good book.
xxx

Foster – book review

Foster, by Clarie Keegan

‘I’d better hit the road,’ Da says. ‘What hurry is on you?’ Kinsella says. ‘The daylight is burning, and I’ve yet the spuds to spray.’ We’re in Ireland again, back with the wonderful Claire Keegan and her intimate descriptions of all the small things that make up a life. Another top class novella from a writer fast becoming my favourite. Here a girl is sent from a struggling household to stay with an older couple, her mother’s people, on a Wexford farm. Her mother is pregnant again and unable to cope, her siblings run wild. Her dad drops her off and hits the road.

So Late in the Day – book review

So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan

Cathal is one of those blokes a friend might go out with and say, you know, he’s OK. He’s got a job, not bad looking. We meet Cathal looking out of his office window where the day is good: sunshine; birds; the smell of cut grass; “so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.” Cathal is writing rejection letters for bursary applicants. And there we have it, Keegan gives us the heads up that this is not a happily-ever-after. In this poignant novella, the fact that Cathal is not one of life’s winners is revealed through the world around him.

Trust – book review

Trust, By Hernan Diaz

‘I am a financier in a city ruled by financiers. My father was a financier in a city ruled by industrialists. His father was a financier in a city ruled by merchants. His father was a financier in a city ruled by a tight-knit society, indolent and priggish, like most provincial aristocracies. These four cities are one and the same, New York.’ And here’s me trying to boycott all American culture until they get themselves a decent president! It was a book club choice, inescapable. Interesting book, though and a topic that’s resonating, so it gets a review.

Seascraper – book review

Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood

Thomas Flett lives in a fictional seaside town of Longferry with his mother. He is a ‘shanker’ and takes his horse and cart out on the mudflats when the tide goes way out, trawling for shrimp. Coasts like Morcombe Bay immediately come to mind, with its treacherous history of drowning as the tide races for miles on the ebb and flow, faster than you can run, leaving quick sands and strandings. In this beautiful, hugely atmospheric book, Thomas, a thinker and observer, takes us with him out on the shifting sand.

Atmosphere – book review

Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Interesting book on the life of an astronaut in training. In 1980, NASA is a male dominated place with the door just beginning to open to the ladies. Sometimes this inclusion feels very modern, with non-gender-specific spewing in zero gravity, sometimes it is fraught with the same old-fashioned misogyny that made the 1980s a confusing time to be a woman. During training, both physical and academic, Joan Goodwin excels. She also fails to fall for the many handsome and smart male astronauts who try to pick her up, and discovers (with surprise, having never thought of this before) that her inclinations lie elsewhere. She falls in love with a fellow astronaut. Vanessa. For reasons that seems unfathomable to us now, this is unacceptable on the programme and wider world and, if discovered, might end her career.

Always Home, Always Homesick

Always Home, Always Homesick, by Hannah Kent

Why fall in love with Iceland? Hannah Kent counts the ways. As a young Australian woman she picks up the default option of a Rotary exchange to Iceland, spends the first few months in a cold house with a cold family and an inhospitable frozen land, but after a while, both Hannah an Iceland thaw. She works hard to learn the language “my conversation has always been pockmarked with grammatical error and the foreigner’s manner of jamming in known vocabulary at the expense of clarity and precision”, makes some friends, and moves in with a new family who became her greatest support and friends for life. She falls in love with Iceland itself.

A Marriage at Sea – book review

A marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey are an odd couple. “Love, when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke,” and that is certainly the case in this story. He is eccentric, moody, lacking confidence. Several years older, his life is narrowing and “loneliness had closed around him like a case”. She “coloured in his gaps“. Lucky him. She’s terrific, outgoing, brave and smart. But Maralyn falls in love with Maurice, and it feels true. For some reason, women seem to love an oddball.

They go sailing to get away from the confines of their English life and, in a move that seems inevitable for the pair, sell the bungalow, have a boat built to their specifications and head off into the blue. They’re running away from a difficult England where they feel they don’t fit, and New Zealand is the chosen destination, via a long ocean voyage. They leave in the summer to catch the trade winds across the Atlantic. I was quickly caught up in this story, always a sucker for a tale of life at sea but also I wanted to find out how long it would take for Maralyn to throw Maurice overboard.

Vianne – book review

Vianne, by Joanne Harris

Nice bit of fanciful storytelling, bit too ‘woo woo’ for me, but hey, it’s coming up to Christmas and this will be a really good present for one of your friends. I asked my local bookseller for a recommendation for something easy and fun, but not rubbish. Not every book needs to be a lit masterpiece but every book must be well written for its audience and have a point, must delight in some way. Vianne, prequel to the splendid Chocolat, is full of entertaining and wistful romps around Marseilles, which was enough to keep me happily engaged. Read it in the hammock if your Christmas is southern hemisphere, or curled up by the fire through the dark afternoons up north.

One Boat – book review

One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley

What, was the cover designer on holiday this week? I could have done that.

One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley, was on the longlist for the Booker this year. It didn’t make the shortlist, which I think is the right decision. Nice book, but not a winner. The Greek Island setting is lovely, reminiscent of holidays past, the writing evocative and I almost really enjoyed it but there was something a bit too clever about the way we jumped around in different time periods. It felt like an editor had switched some chapters around to make the book more exciting. It didn’t work. The book is still slow and introspective. And also jumpy.

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