What a whirlwind this year has been so far. From the release of Radical Optimism and my dream gig at Glastonbury to how Service95 readers have embraced our Book Club, I’m profoundly grateful for it all.
But I’m also exhausted! So I’m going to take a short break in August from my Monthly Reads and instead make some headway on my ever-increasing TBR pile. While I spend some much-needed time with family and friends over the summer, these are the books I’ll be taking with me.
I love to pick books at random and just see where they take me, so I can’t tell you what to expect from this list. But if you want to read along with me and compare notes after the summer, I’m here for it.
And don’t worry about being starved of book content in the meantime, throughout the month, we’ll be sharing some of our favourite moments from Book Club so far, as well as summer reading recommendations from the Service95 team. It’s a joy to be going on this journey with you.
Dua x
- Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace – A short story collection formed of 23 metafictional pieces from the genre-bending author.
- Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov – An earlier novel from the notorious author of Lolita.
- Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio – The much-anticipated novel by Ecuadorian-American writer and the author of The Undocumented Americans.
- Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange – A multi-generational novel about North America’s troubling history with its native population, told through one family’s story.
- Brotherless Night by V. Ganeshananthan – This novel, set during the Sri Lankan civil war in the 1980s, was the winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
