Talk about worthy hardbacks all you like, but one of the joys of a holiday is a dog-eared paperback in the hand luggage. And this summer offers a host of page-turners.
For classic airport reading, Stephen Leather's Hard Landing (Coronet, $97) is an unputdownable thriller about a British cop who goes undercover in a prison. The Hit by Jere Hoar (NEL, $109) is a smart, seductive thriller set around the Mississippi. The Ghost Writer (Vintage, $159) by John Harwood is a spinechiller, in the Victorian tradition involving a family secret.
Female investigators are hot this summer. In The Jury Must Die (Arrow, $87), Carol O'Connell's heroine, Kathy Mallory, must discover why the members of a jury are being killed off. Dead Ringer (Pan, $87) by Lisa Scottoline is another pacy instalment in her series about strong-willed lawyer Bennie Rosato. Helen Fielding's Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (Picador, $116) features a reporter tracking down terrorists with a dagger hidden in her bra.
For a romantic saga you can lose yourself in, Middlemere by Judith Lennox (Pan, $98), an engrossing epic about a small town girl who runs away to London in the 1950s. The Mistressclass by Michele Roberts (Little Brown, $101) lures the reader into a world of lazy French summers and the London literati. Diana Abu-Jaber writes prose as mouthwatering as the Middle Eastern food she describes in Crescent (Picador, $98), and Plum Sykes dives into the shallow waters of New York society with Bergdorf Blondes (Penguin, $162).
World Wresting Federation champion Mick Foley goes crashing across the boundaries of literary and genre fiction with Tietam Brown (Vintage, $101), a story set in New York about a son who tries to understand his eccentric father. Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy (John Murray, $116) is set in California and has all the drama and scope of a multi-generational saga but is refreshingly short at 260 pages. The Girl Who Played Go, by Shan Sa (Vintage, $105) is an atmospheric tale about a 16-year-old Manchurian girl who falls for a Japanese soldier. Terry Brooks delivers one of his best fantasies in years with Jarka Ruus (Pocket Books, $101), and Gerard Donovan isn't afraid to get heavily philosophical in Schopenhauer's Telescope (Scribner, $99).
Some of this year's most captivating narratives have been non-fiction. Fatwa by Jacky Trevane (Hodder & Stoughton, $126) is about a 23-year-old British woman who married an Egyptian man and ended up a prisoner in a poor Cairo suburb for six years. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Little Brown, $133), David Sedaris looks at the absurdity of American life. And the French Revolution gets a makeover in Vive La Revolution (Schribner, $116), as Mark Steel pokes fun at the pomposity of historians.
