A selection for summer reading

An entertaining collection of dishes, many suited to outdoor cooking, which will enliven the summer season. Not all Asia cooking is red hot curry or over chillied Thai food. Many cultures provide subtle flavour food, largely distinguished by its use of fresh fish and vegetables. While trailing round the roads of Asia by motorcycle may…

This is the seventh and final instalment in the continuing story of Martha Long’s heroine. All have been most successful, but this book has a striking twist to its tale. Learning her childhood abuser is dying, the girl hopes she can witness his last pains and delight in them. But the experience turns out not…

This is a debut novel, but one which has been widely praised for its atmospheric treatment of the theme. The Dutch interiors, so familiar from paintings, here become the setting in the house and in the miniature doll’s house version of it, the setting for a playing out of the injunction of St Luke that…

This is a ‘reimagining’ of  the Jane Austen novel, the second in a series. This may seem a strange sort of project, but the result, with the abbey now set in the Scottish Borders, a far cry from the genteel settings of Jane Austen’s original. But this novel too is great fun, which indeed is…

A last look round the Binchy estate so to speak in this set of tales concerning the varied residents of Chestnut Street, which readers of Minding Frankie will recall is just around the corner from St Jarlath’s Crescent. These are warm and entertaining tales of the kind of suburban life which was very much Maeve…

This is an interesting exploration of the state of Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, in many ways it echoes the atmosphere of a 1930s novel, but yet is right up to date in the attitudes to society and politics and money. This is a world which the author, a former journalist turned industrialist,…

Here in a sense is the ideal spiritual book for summer reading. Author Daniel O’Leary focuses on the power of dreaming to transform oneself, and by doing so transform the lives of others. In  summer we become conscious of the beauty of the world, with the shining sun, brilliant green, the ebb and flow of…

Patrick Leigh Fermor is the justly famous author of some of the best travel books of the last century. This book is the final part, published posthumously, that rounds out his recreation of walking across Europe in the 1930s, begun in The Time of Gifts and The Way Through the Woods. His destination was supposed…

For the serious political buff this is the read of the summer. Whether Hilary Clinton will run for the White House remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma. This book recounts her experiences as American Secretary of State, dealing directly with the foreign affairs of the United States. This is one of the most sensitive…