An admission.

I have not yet been awake early enough to see the sun rise.

In fact, my alarm call as such, here under summer Cretan skies, is indeed the sound of the cicadas starting their day. It’s an idyllic way to wake up.

It’s also idyllic to pull on the thinnest of clothes without having to regard the sky or feel the air as warmth is guaranteed to last to sunset and beyond.

It takes some adjusting to, trusting in the weather to provide and live up to its name of ‘summer’ especially after the indifferent one we’ve been experiencing in England this year.

So here I am at our family home in a Cretan village, relaxing into the pattern of our summers and elated to be here.

But writing and reading are not being neglected.

After a very hectic few months with other work obligations including several author talks, I have at last returned to novel 5 and am moving it slowly yet satisfyingly on. Surrounded by my research notes, my WW2 novel with a working title of By the Green of the Spring – which may well change- advances at my usual slow and measured writing pace.

Reading!

And at last time to read more or less whenever I please.

So to my Summer 2024 reading list!

I have just finished Jill by Philip Larkin, one of the two novels he wrote before becoming fully established as a poet. I am sure I read it decades ago but had entirely forgotten the story. Set in 1940 at Oxford university, it is not ostensibly a novel about the war yet inevitably the conflict is the background to the story. I enjoyed it enormously and the fact that Larkin wrote it when he was 21 makes it all the more remarkable.

I am loving Colm Toibin’s Long Island. A sequel to Brooklyn which remains a favourite novel – and the film is extremely good and faithful to the original book – I find the apparent simplicity of Toibin’s story-telling such an art. He makes straightforward, clear and sincere writing look easy – yet it is the most difficult thing to achieve. He shifts perspectives so seamlessly too, often viewing the same event through the eyes of different characters. I really don’t want to reach the final page!

My other selections for Summer 2024 reads include They Were Sisters. I have enjoyed all previous novels by Dorothy Whipple that I have read and am sure this 1943 novel, now published by the inimitable Persephone Books, will be just as rewarding.

Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder and Me, Patrick Gale’s Friendly Fire, and Jennifer Johnston’s The Railway Station Man are also lined up on my shelf ready to read (I don’t possess and will never exchange an actual book for a kindle!) as is Anne Youngson’s A Complicated Matter, the only writer who is new to me.

Clearly, I am unlikely to run short of reading material even with the extra hours there are in my currently far more leisurely days.

And if I actually manage to wake in time for sunrise, at an hour when I can watch from the house the White Mountains turn from grey to pink back to grey again, to greet the cicadas as they start their day’s perpetual background buzz, I might actually get through them all.

Happy Summer – Happy Reading!