I thought it would be perverse fun to read Joanna Biggs’s fascinating All Day Long (Serpent’s Tail), about the nature of contemporary work, while on holiday – cue villainous laugh. I’ve also lined up Mark Vanhoenacker’s elegant meditation on being an airline pilot, Skyfaring (Chatto & Windus), and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice (Harvill Secker), about Alice Liddell and Charles Dogson/Lewis Carroll. Two new novels I’ve been looking forward to reading for months are Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (Faber) and Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming Purity (4th Estate). Also, the fourth and final volume in Elena Ferrante’s amazing L’Amica Geniale sequence is out in September (to be called The Story of the Lost Child), so there has never been a better time to start at the beginning with My Brilliant Friend (Europa Editions).
