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Choose comfort, ditch boring and prioritise pleasure – how to find the perfect beach read

It’s easy to dismiss holiday novels as pulpy, but relaxing with a book you enjoy has huge health benefits. Here’s how to read yourself happy this summer

Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina is a masterpiece. It has never been out of print. Luminaries from William Faulkner to Jilly Cooper have remarked on its brilliance. It is usually within the top 10 of any list of the “100 books you simply must read before you die”. However, I would argue that it’s a singularly poor choice of a book to bring with you for 10 days on the beach in Tenerife. Especially in hardback.

I really tried. Every day, I’d read two or three pages before realising I’d read the same pages the day before, and it simply hadn’t stuck. I kept drifting off during the more complex descriptions of 19th-century property law. I simply couldn’t see what Anna saw in Vronsky; he seemed dreadful, just a slightly different kind of dreadful from her husband, Karenin. My arms ached, the sand seemed unusually gritty, and on day four, as children shrieked and splashed around me, their parents read Jack Reacher books while I failed to understand the significance of Levin scything his fields, I thought, ‘No more!’ My luggage allowance was about 20kg. Tolstoy had taken up more than a tenth of it, and 100% of my headspace. I couldn’t relax. I wasn’t enjoying myself. When I found a Sophie Kinsella novel in the hotel gift shop, I almost wept with relief. It didn’t matter that I’d already read The Undomestic Goddess – my aching brain craved comfort and joy, and it simply wasn’t finding it on Russian railway lines.

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Murderland by Caroline Fraser review – what was behind the 1970s serial killer epidemic?

A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed

In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”

Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.

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Flashlight by Susan Choi review – big, bold and surprising

Stretching from Indiana to North Korea, the US writer’s sixth novel is a study of absence, alienation and affection in a family rocked by tragedy

The millennium is back – not just in fast fashion or TikTok remixes, but in the mood of American fiction. Think peak Chabon and Eugenides; the intellectual gymnastics of Helen DeWitt; the last profane and puckish gasp of Tom Robbins. That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans. Joyce Carol Oates channelling Marilyn Monroe. Jonathan Franzen snubbing Oprah. You can feel that early-00s energy jostling through a new crop of American novels: Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle are top-shelf examples. They’re big in all kinds of wonderful, infuriating ways: antic, overstuffed and richly peopled.

While it’s less hyperactive than some of its book-fellows, Susan Choi’s Flashlight still has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold. Stretching from a strawberry farm in Indiana to the North Korean border, Choi’s sixth novel reckons with the lies that undo families and underpin empires.

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The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?

Strange as it may seem, it’s hard to refute the arguments for truly universal suffrage

Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination.

Her case was thrown out, but it wasn’t the first time the voting age was challenged and it won’t be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children’s author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it.

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‘When I read my sister’s stories I think, that’s not what it was like!’: Esther Freud on the perils of writing about family

The Hideous Kinky author has always drawn inspiration from her own experiences. Now her sister Bella is writing her own version of their childhood. Does fact or fiction come closer to the truth, she asks

I’m four and I’m pretending to be dead. I’ve been lying here behind the sofa, and I’m hoping I’ll be missed, but more than that I’m hoping it will make a story. The story of the games I like to play, and how I profess to remember my past lives. It is 1967, a few months before we set off for Morocco – my mother, my sister Bella and I – travelling overland by van, taking the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, breaking down on the road to Marrakech. From then on everything becomes a story. The camel festival we visit, the path into the hills so steep that Bella and I are packed into saddlebags while the donkeys’ hooves skitter and slip. I can’t remember later whether it is a camel that is sacrificed when we reach the top, or a chicken. But either way I keep the description of the chicken to myself, running in circles, blood spouting from its headless neck.

For all the decades since, I’ve been the family chronicler, as much in my novels as in our lives. I’ve kept the few possessions from those years in Morocco. The kaftans we bought in the souk when we arrived, the corduroy patch that I unpicked from a pair of too small trousers, embroidered with a flower by a boyfriend of my mother. “Are you my Daddy?” I’d asked him, as I’d asked others, not because I thought he was, but because I’d read about another little girl asking the same question in a book. I can still see the look of consternation on the boyfriends’ faces, hear my mother’s embarrassed laugh.

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Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure

From Van Gogh’s starry skies to the nocturnal workings of Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Highsmith, sleepless nights have long inspired heightened creativity. Could those artistic impulses actually help us to sleep?

I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep.

The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound.

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Richard Flanagan: ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop it had corked badly’

The Booker-winning author on taking inspiration from Kafka, and a youthful passion for Jackie Collins

My earliest reading memory
My mother reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that’s the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone.

My favourite book growing up
Books were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world.

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Beastly Britain by Karen R Jones review – how animals shaped British identity

A revelatory cultural history of our relationship with native wildlife, from newts doing handstands to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a “sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel”.

This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain’s human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot “see” a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of .

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The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood audiobook review – a puzzle waiting to be decoded

Romance, sci-fi and family drama are thrillingly combined in this Booker-winning novel, shared between three narrators

It’s 25 years since the publication of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s intricately plotted, multi-narrative novel which led to her first Booker prize win. Blending romance, pulpy sci-fi and family drama, it opens with octogenarian Iris Chase Griffen recalling the moment she was told her sister, Laura, had driven off a bridge. The police inform her that two people witnessed Laura deliberately swerve off the road. Though Iris believes this to be true, she insists to the officers that it was an accident.

We go on to hear about Iris’s privileged upbringing and marriage of convenience to Richard Griffen, the wealthy owner of a button factory, and her estrangement from her granddaughter with whom she hopes to reconcile. The book also contains excerpts from Laura’s posthumously published novel which features clandestine romantic encounters between an unnamed man – seemingly a fugitive – and a wealthy woman. During their trysts, they concoct a wild fable about life on a distant planet. All this is interspersed with newspaper items reporting on the lives of the Chases and Griffins over 60 years.

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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà review – makes most fiction feel timid

This Catalonian tale of a botched pact with the devil has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting

Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores”. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house”. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass”. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster”. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood”.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

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