Summer Reads

Here are my book recommendations for August. I hope you will give them a try. I really enjoyed them both - one I read and one I listened to.

Kate Riordan is an excellent writer. This book is beautifully written and an absolute joy to read.

It is set in Italy and features Nick and Laura who have recently moved there to open a holiday cottage business, pretending that all is well and that their marriage isn’t on the rocks.

Their first guests are Madison and Sebastian, a couple from America, who bring their own problems to the villa. The setting is wonderful and there is just the right amount of tension to tip this literary novel into the psychological thriller genre.

I will definitely be looking for some more novels by this author.

Audio Book Recommendations

The Other Son follows the lives of Alice and her son Tim. Alice is in an unhappy marriage and is plotting and scheming how she can leave her husband. She is terrified to do it after fifty years, but her friend has recently walked out on her husband, which makes Alice wonder whether she can do the same.

Tim is married to Natalia and has two boys, but isn’t as close to Alice as she would like. Tim’s father has been cruel to him his whole life and Tim doesn’t have any sympathy with his mother for staying with him for so long.

It’s a wonderful story about ordinary people, but the characters are so lifelike that I was fully invested in them and thoroughly enjoyed the book.