As summer begins to mellow out, the golden hour of the year signals the beginning of Virgo season. We’re moving from the wild spontaneity and heat of Leo into a more quiet, thoughtful and introspective era. This earth sign is known for their analytical mind, practicality and perfectionist tendencies.
So, if you’re a Virgo, you likely have a desire to create deeper meaning out of life’s small moments. But beneath your composed exterior lies all that restrained emotion, and you often end up putting everyone else’s needs before your own. From emotionally precise novels to sharp societal critiques, these books are going to speak to your desire for depth and detail. Read on to find something just perfect for you...
Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos
Virgos are meticulous, detail-oriented and highly analytical – so it’s no surprise that George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties perfectly aligns with your practical mindset. This is a cult classic of 20th-century French literature and the novel that inspired Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (this year’s must-read), observing the world and one couple’s life through a similarly razor-sharp lens. (Expect similar levels of realist ennui as Perfection.) In Things, Sylvie and Jérôme can only find meaning through their possessions – brands, slogans and items take centre stage. It’s a profound critique of consumerism, advertising and corporate climbing, and the ending is purposefully ambiguous, leaving you with lots to think about. For the Virgo who craves intellectual details and social commentary, it’s a dream.
Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje
Moving and gorgeously written, Lidija Hilje’s debut novel follows Ivona and Vlaho, a young couple who meet as students in emerging Croatia and fall in love against the glittering backdrop of the Adriatic sea. The sense of place is so strong, you can practically smell the salt off the crashing waves and the heat rising from the dusty olive groves. We first meet Ivona years later, now divorced, still torturously entangled in her ex-husband’s life. As the novel slowly unravels the heart-wrenching choice Ivona makes to end their marriage, it explores the tension between the reality of the life we live, and the one we imagine for ourselves. Ivona embodies plenty of Virgo traits: hyper-analytical, introspective and so busy fixing the lives of those around her that she forgets herself. Readable enough for the beach, but compelling and knotty enough to keep you hooked for hours – this might just be your favourite book of the year.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Wallace is the analytical, introspective (and Virgo-esque) lens through which we experience the world of Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, a novel that asks whether lingering in the world of academia is simply an excuse to stay sheltered from the ‘real’ world. It serves as a biting critique of the casual racism embedded in American colleges, filtered through Wallace: a gay Black biochemistry graduate student surrounded by his white peers and their ‘accidental’, yet mostly intentional, microaggressions. He feels intense solitude and suffocating alienation, even in the company of others, which pervades his every thought and mood. He over-analyses social dynamics, processes his trauma in silence and is deeply restrained, nursing an infatuation with his often-cruel classmate Miller, which snowballs into an intense affair. Taylor’s writing style is meticulous and careful, perfectly mirroring Virgo’s love for order, detail and deeper meaning.
The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson
As a woman’s fever rises, she reflects on the people who’ve most shaped her life. In four separate sections – ‘Joanna’, ‘Niki’, ‘Alejandro’ and ‘Birgitte’ – this novel doesn’t do plot or big picture, but rather invites us to consider the small details and idiosyncrasies that define those who’ve had the most impact on us. The writing seamlessly transitions from sentence to sentence, with the fragments of memories moving from nostalgia to fraught friendships to infatuation to anxiety. It’s the perfect ‘nothing really happens’ novel – but that’s exactly the quiet, familiar magic of it. See Dua read from the Alejandro section here, and experience the emotional weight of a single moment when the narrator sees him for the very first time. Virgos love to get caught up in our human minutiae, so they’ll love this precise, particular story.
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Anne McLean
This one has a backstory as intriguing as the novel itself. Posthumously published after García Márquez’s death in 2014, and against the wishes of the author, the foreword written by his sons tells us that their father’s “perfectionism” prevented him from ever publishing this short novel himself. He even instructed that “this book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Particular and analytical? Very Virgo of García Márquez. Murky questions about authorial ownership aside, the result of García Márquez’s ‘lost novel’ is the tale of Ana Magdalena Bach. Each August, she leaves her home for 24 hours to lay flowers on her mother’s grave – and indulge in an extra-marital affair. It’s steamy, morally dubious and filled with longing. The perfect late summer reading for Virgo season.
