Summer is when readers are traditionally supposed to reach for something undemanding: easy reads that require little brainwork as we lounge in the sun. But it seems the UK’s holiday reading habits are decidedly more literary, with 2015’s suitcases containing everything from 700-page epics to debut novels, “quest fiction” and classic works.
Readers seem increasingly willing to add more challenging books to their holiday lists, according to Britain’s booksellers. “The belief that people only want to read fluffy romantic novels or thrillers on the beach is just not borne out in our bestseller list, particularly this year,” said Chris White, fiction buyer for Waterstones.
“Contrary to public perceptions, this summer people are buying large and testing books and even the classics that they wouldn’t have time to sit down and read in their daily lives on their commute on the tube.”
The trend towards the more literary end of the spectrum this summer has been skewed in particular by the advent of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, which sold more than 200,000 copies in its first week. That has been partly balanced in literary terms by the surprise release of Grey, the latest EL James book which has already sold 41,943 copies. But these big-hitters are not the only two novels on readers’ summer reading list.
For Waterstones, The Mersault Investigation by Algerian author Kamel Daoud – a reworking of Albert Camus’ The Stranger – is proving a surprise big summer read of 2015. “It is a book that has come out of nowhere but has got a lot of great reviews recently, and so shot up to our bestseller list in the past couple of weeks,” White said.
“It has been a slight dark horse in terms of a summer bestseller – it’s the one I didn’t see coming and didn’t predict it would do this well – but it does show that quality will out.”
More predictably, other big-selling novels for the book chain include the latest Kazuo Ishiguro novel The Buried Giant, and Eleanor Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy, while a desire to return to the classics has resulted in Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse – put on promotion in Waterstones – selling 6,000 copies in the past month.
Jasper Sutcliffe, head of buying at Foyles, reports similar diversity in the British public’s book-buying appetite this year. Foyles have twice sold out of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley, a book blending history with fantasy, while a thriller first published in 1994, Kolymsky Heights, is experiencing a resurgence this summer – proving a popular alternative to the big name thrillers that tend to dominate the bestseller lists over the summer months.
Another surprise for Foyles, Sutcliffe said, was the immediate popularity of A Little Life, the second novel from Hanya Yanagihara, which is a harrowing 700-page epic of life in New York. “It certainly defies the perception of summer being just beach reads and chick lit,” he added.
This summer has also proved particularly buoyant for smaller bookshops, thanks to big-name releases. Tim O’Kelly, owner of independent bookshop One Tree Books in Petersfield, Hampshire, said that the latest novels by Ian McEwan and David Mitchell were his customers’ most sought-after summer reads.
“Station Eleven, the Emily St John Mandel book, has done really well for us – partly because we’ve been recommending it – which is a bit more subtle than your average post-apocalyptic book,” he said. “The new Louis de Bernières has started to sell well already, so I think we are looking at that becoming one of the big reads of the summer.”
A particular trend of this year’s summer reading was towards what he called “quest fiction”.
“Maybe it’s something about going on holiday but we have sold of masses of books focused around people going on a physical journey,” he added. “In particular Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper which sees this woman marching across the middle of Canada to see the sea.
“And then there’s an Australian one called Lost and Found by Brooke Davis which is a jumble of people on a journey together, dealing with their own crises by walking.”
As at Foyles, who have experienced a sales surge of around 10% this summer, O’Kelly said the summer sales at One Tree Books made him confident for the future of independent bookshops.
“I think we’ve seen the impact of digital plateau recently,” he said. “As we saw last summer and this year again, digital ebooks and Kindles are no substitute for having a physical novel to throw into a suitcase and read in the sun.”
