August is here and we’re ready for a month full of reading. There are so many titles to choose from but we’ve managed to whittle our August reading list down to six books. There’s something for everyone so we’re sure you’ll find a tale that tickles your fancy on our list.
All The Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Penguin)
On Deena’s seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled- ‘bad apples’, their father calls them- and Mandy is the baddest of them all.
But then Deena starts to receive letters from Mandy, claiming that their family’s blighted history is a curse, handed down through generations of Rys women. Mandy has gone in search of the curse’s roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the notes that mysteriously appear in each new place. What Deena finds will heal their family’s rotten past- or rip it apart forever.
The Million Pieces of Neena Gill by Emma Smith-Barton (Penguin)
Neena’s always been a good girl. But when her brother disappears without a trace, her family becomes fractured beyond repair- and Neena finds herself spiralling out of control as she tries to find out what happened to Akash.
Surrounded by broken friendships, a broken heart and an increasingly broken grip on her sanity, Neena’s never felt more hopeless. But, as she’s about to discover, sometimes it’s in our darkest moments that we find our true strength.
The To-Do List and Other Debacles by Amy Jones (Penguin)
How not to be good? Let me list the ways…
Are you a woman? Do you make to-do lists to stop you losing your mind? Have you ever cried in the toilets at work, had a meltdown in the supermarket, or gone off the rails at a hen party?
And have you ever been saved from any of the above by your truly brilliant friends?
If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then this is the book for you. A moving, funny and brutally honest memoir of one woman’s millennial misadventures, The To-Do List and Other Debacles follows Amy Jones on her journeys through friendship, marriage and mental health disasters in a story that’s as relatable as it is riotous.
I Confess by Alex Barclay (Harper Collins)
A group of childhood friends are reunited at a luxury inn on a remote west coast peninsula in Ireland. But as a storm builds outside, the dark events that marred their childhoods threaten to resurface.
And when a body is discovered, the group faces a shocking realisation: a killer is among them, and not everyone will escape with their lives.
Published on August 22.
Crossfire by Malorie Blackman (Penguin)
Thirty-four years have passed since Sephy Hadley- a Cross- first met Callum McGregor- a Nought. Their love was forbidden, powerful- and deadly.
Life is seemingly very different now for Noughts and Crosses- including for Sephy and Callum’s families. But old wounds from the past are hard to heal, and when you’re playing a game as dangerous as they are, it won’t be long before someone gets caught in the crossfire.
Published on August 8.
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (Hodder)
Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way round and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread.
Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling: The price of hope, it seems, is Shakespeare.
