please help me sort out my holiday reading

[JimmyGreavesMoustache]

I've got a huge to-read pile currently, but it's all either bleak, or fairly challenging. I don't think I want to take Dickens or Doris Lessing on holiday for poolside reading.

I'm after recommendations for fiction - not too heavy, but not Dan Brown either. I love Sarah Waters, Julian Barnes, Kate Atkinson, Donna Tartt.

The Deaths by Mark Lawson?

On my pile for my hols that I will have to reduce :
The Goldfinch
The Bone Clocks
Jenny Eclair's Moving
The Heart goes last
Dinner at the Homespun Restaurant

I recently read The Shadow of the Wind which I adored. Easy reading but not light. How about A Man Called Ove?

I do like the sound of The Deaths and The Shadow of the Wind, and I've enjoyed Jenny Eclair's stuff previously - hoping to get some book tokens for my birthday next week so will stick them on my list.

bringbacksideburns The Goldfinch is very good - drags a for a short spell after the very dramatic start, but definitely picks up again nicely.

The Luminaries
This Thing Of Darkness
Cloud Atlas

I took The Shadow of the Wind with me on holiday a couple of years ago, and lay on the beach reading it. Was utterly gripped by the story. Thoroughly recommended. If you want something short and light-ish then Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud was good.

Second The Luminaries. Also Where'd You Go Bernadette, light, funny but also intelligent and affecting.

thanks for all the recommendations
there's something I just don't fancy about The Luminaries - can't put my finger on it.

I did enjoy Where D'you Go Bernadette

I love most of those authors too. Also Jane gardam?

Have you read any Liz Jensen?

Or Douglas Coupland?

Have a look at Sue Gee - Earth and Heaven or The Mystery of Glass
Also Ann Patchett - State of Wonder or Bel Canto
and Jane Harris - The Observations or Gillespie and I

Oh, and Rose Tremain. Restoration and Music and Silence are my favourites.

Thanks again for the recommendations - I think I've read all of Douglas Coupland's novels so anything similar would be great

Jane Harris in particular sounds the sort of thing I'm after, but will have a proper browse of all the recommendations in Waterstones next week

I read Restoration at the start of the year!

Restoration is wonderful. I loved it and its sequel, Merivel. Just brilliant

Bill Wahl the art of impossibility

Reading a beautiful book at the moment called Mariana (has anyone read it?) I alternate genres as I get readers fatigue and this is perfect...historical fiction mixed with the modern day, easy to read and 99p on kindle!!!!

Station Eleven is mind-blowingly good. It's not light, and definitely has an element of great bleakness, but it's not all despair. It seems to defy generations too with my teenage niece and seventy year old mother loving it too. I'm thirty.

Also, Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazaelat novels are great. Was introduced to them by an old lady at the library where I work, who was devouring them at an alarming rate. 'Oh they seem very genteel dear, but they do have bite' she said. She was right about the bite.

DP says 'The Bone Clocks, everyone should read the bone clocks.' He read it on our last holiday, hardly looked at the sights he was so engrossed. Sat on the beach reading it while I splashed about in the sea.

If your DP hasn't read Cloud Atlas, he really must. The Bone Clocks is a pale shadow of Cloud Atlas.

Station 11 - No, just no. None of it makes any sense. Very badly constructed and the details are just not credible. (Sorry)

Cote, thank you - I'll tell him he must read that. (Might even get it for part of his birthday.)

I loved Station Eleven but DP and I have very different taste, his is probably more like yours. I loved the before/after format and the way it the epidemic ran parallel to an old man's life.

thanks for ALL the recommendations

I now have The Bone Clocks, and a Liz Jensen (can't remember which one) plus a couple not mentioned here (can I please recommend A Pedant in The Kitchen as a very quick read for anyone vaguely interested in food?).

I have vouchers left so am printing this thread for a future shopping trip.

Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
And I second Travelling's recommendation of the Cazalet chronicles. I too devoured them (as audiobooks whilst breastfeeding and when I couldn't turn light on at bedtime for fear of waking baby)
Agree re. Restoration - brilliant
Re. Where'd You Go Bernadette - remember reading great reviews
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (soooo much better than her Booker prize winning novels in my view)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (very hard to put down and absolutely not a physics book!!)
The Company by Robert Littell (best Cold War thriller I've ever read; totally gripping but quite heavy as quite big)
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray (absolutely superb short stories but I think quite tricky to find a copy...last time I looked it was out of print)

I see that A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray is available for Kindle....

Try Valentine by Rebecca Farnworth.