Hot page-turners

Books for the beach, tomes for the train, bestsellers for the plane... Claire Coleman lists the best summer holiday reads

The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, the world's worst golfer Scott Murray and Simon Farnaby
Yellow Jersey Press, £11.99 (from July)

Golfers will be attracted to the story of Maurice Flitcroft, a 46-year-old crane driver from Barrow-in-Furness who, having never played a round of golf before, wangled his way into the 1976 Open championship. His sheer gall, not to mention his dire score of 121, so incensed the sport's authorities, that they banned him for life.

Flitcroft refused to take such a snub lying down and in a long-running game of cat-and-mouse continued to enter tournaments using grandiose pseudonyms and over-the-top disguises. "I have been insulted, abused, pelted with stones, held up to ridicule, manhandled by police, prosecuted, fined, threatened with violence and, finally, assaulted," he once said. "In spite of it all I shall try to succeed as a professional golfer...  no sabre-rattling is going to stop me."

Taking its name from one of the working titles of Flitcroft's unpublished memoirs, this book celebrates a glorious sporting underdog. Heartening if you've just spent the day hacking up the course, yourself.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An eclipse novella
Stephenie Meyer, Atom, £11.99

One hesitates to include what is effectively a children's book, but as with the Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman's trilogy, we could pretend that only youngsters read these books. A glance at rail commuters, though, tells a different story.

This novella focuses on one of the vampires first introduced as a bit part in Eclipse, the third book in Meyer's Twilight series. It examines her life before she appears within the context of (central characters) Edward and Bella's story.

Meyer says that she started working on the book in 2005 as "an exercise to help me examine the other side of Eclipse, which I was editing at the time". The author claims she never saw it as being more than a short story that might one day appear on her website. But she kept adding to the tale.

The result is something that will go some way to slaking the insatiable thirst of many fans, young and old, for her vampire tales. Pretend by all means that you're buying it for your teenage daughter, and then devour it in secret.

Norman Foster: A life in architecture
Deyan Sudjic, W&N, £20

He's shaped some of the world's most recognisable architecture—from the new Wembley stadium to the Reichstag in Berlin and Beijing's new airport, but how much do you actually know about the man behind the buildings?

In this authorised biography, architecture expert Deyan Sudjic, who is also director of the Design Museum, traces Foster's path from the backstreets of Manchester to his position at the top of an international architecture practice that boasts around 1,000 employees.

When you look at what Foster has achieved in his personal life it's not surprising that he's had such success professionally. He's beaten cancer, learnt how to fly jumbo jets and takes part in several sporting races, not least of which is the Engadin Ski Marathon in Switzerland that he's entered 16 times. It's perhaps his reflections on this event that gives the best insight into the intersection of his life and his designs.

"It's an aesthetic experience," he once commented of the cross-country skiing ordeal. "You go through countryside, you're in nature, you get out of it what you put into it."

The Last Weekend
Blake Morrison, Chatto & Windus, £12.99

Morrison's novel is not one to take with you if you're spending a long weekend with old university friends in a house by the East Anglian seaside—because that's precisely where the action takes place. What starts out sounding like it could be a romantic and nostalgic, sun-soaked, alcohol-infused romp turns out to be something altogether darker that examines deep-held rivalries centred on class and women.

Morrison's prose conjures up the oppressive nature, not just of the remote house on a hot summer day, but of the relationships within its walls, and the way that the past has a funny way of coming back to haunt the present. As the story unfolds, and the stakes get higher and higher, it's impossible not to be drawn in to this gripping read.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Jonathan Coe, Viking, £18.99

With modern classics such as The Rotters' Club and What A Carve Up! to his name, Jonathan Coe takes a look at contemporary society via the troubled character of Maxwell Sim.

Newly divorced, with a floundering relationship with his only daughter and 74 friends on Facebook, but nobody he feels he can actually talk to, you can begin to understand why the man is having a bit of an existential crisis. Then along comes a business proposition that sees him spending a week driving on his own from London to a remote part of the Shetland islands. It offers Sim the opportunity to explore not just the country but himself, too.

Coe always makes for an engaging storyteller, even if his subject matter here might be a little bit too close to home for some readers.

Wags at the World Cup
Alison Kervin, Ebury Press, £6.99

Every summer-read list needs a ridiculous beach bonkbuster—the sort of book that you'd never admit to reading in real life but for suntan oil-soaked sessions of inane pleasure, does the job.

Kervin, the Daily Telegraph's chief sports interviewer, has form when it comes to this type of thing. Her previous titles—The Wag's Diary and A Wag Abroad—have been acclaimed as genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. This third tome sees her trashy treasure of a heroine, Tracie
Martin, travel to South Africa knowing that "the true battle of the tournament will be fought in Gucci and in the pages of her favourite tabloids". Then she stumbles across information that indicates a crime syndicate is trying to fix the result of the World Cup...

Utter escapism, and more entertaining than anything that the likes of Coleen and the girls will offer this summer.

The Twain Maxim
Clem Chambers, No Exit Press, £7.99

If you can't quite switch off on holiday, and like your beach read based in the financial markets you know and love, take a look at the second novel from Clem Chambers, chief executive of stocks and shares website ADVFN.com.

His debut work, The Armageddon Trade, was published last year and proved to be a timely tale of market trading and economic collapse. The title of his latest work refers to Mark Twain's quote: "A mine is a hole in the ground with a fool at the bottom and a crook at the top."

The story takes the world of hi-tech City wheeling and dealing and meshes it with the equally uncompromising but infinitely more dangerous environment of the Congolese jungle. Described by a Newsnight journalist as "What would happen if Jason Bourne had to invest in shares", it's a thriller with more than a touch of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.

At Home: A short history of private life
Bill Bryson, Doubleday, £20

Bryson is a consummate storyteller and a man with an eye for how the little details in life tell a far bigger tale. Whether it's his wry observations on another country and their inhabitants, or his broader look at Earth or the universe, his words are always compelling.

His latest book was sparked by the realisation that while history teaches us a lot about the cataclysmic moments of the past-wars, power struggles, revolutions—what it scoots over is the fact that most history is far more mundane; centuries of people going about their everyday business.

Inspired by this notion, he began looking around his house, pondering the origins of everyday items. Using this as a starting point, Bryson explores the history of everything from electricity and toilets to epidemics and the Eiffel Tower. An easy book to dip into, and the source of many interesting, perhaps irritating, anecdotes that begin "Did you know...?"

 

Photo by Mark Large, Associated Newspapers/Rex Features