Love and revenge amid the sandcastles

WHAT do I read while on holiday? Not Deon Meyer as one would believe. I save his books for an ordinary weekend at home, when I am able to read undisturbed, or almost. Holidays mean too many people. Everyone needs a drop of your attention, or a bucket full. There are excursions, picnics, festivals. All of this requires preparation and tidying up afterwards. Gone are the days when as a child I could duck behind a dune with my book. It's a never-ending schedule of activities and you only manage a few pages at a time. Lose yourself in a suspenseful story, and you're going to be grumpy and unsociable and make yourself unpopular.

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In such a case it's better to take up high literature, where the sentences caress and arrest you, where you can read paragraphs over and over and ruminate on them, bit by bit. Then after half a chapter close the book to take it up later again. Short stories. Poems. Or fragments, such as Gielie Hoffmann's inspired reflections on the everyday, Naam Van Dier Dorp. Small titbits for the holiday brain to digest.

I've only read a handful of books amid the sun, sea and sapphire. Let me quickly tell you about them.

Domestic noir works under all circumstances and against any background. I tore through Nothing to See Here by Susan Lewis before the serious festivities and socialising kicked off. It feels so long ago now. In the meantime, I have inhabited many storylines. Lewis employs the popular contemporary medium of podcasts to show the unfolding of the murder investigation, as in the TV series Only Murders in the Building. It's quite a dynamic technique, like a stage script, with dialogue rendered as is, dramatic and charged.

Cristy Ward is the mastermind behind a successful true crime podcast series. She decides to tackle an old unsolved murder. A woman, her mother and her therapist, also female, were murdered one day in a stately residence, Kellon Manse. Her daughter disappeared on the same day. Could she still be alive? Ward tackles the most plausible culprit, the husband of one of the victims, who had been involved in a mysterious cult that had siphoned off large amounts of her and her husband's fortune. Old secrets are aired. It's highly suspenseful and also quickly forgettable.

Nothing to See Here by Susan Lewis was published by HarperCollins and costs R304 at Loot.

I accidentally packed the ideal aircraft reading material – and so, after boarding, as we were queued for two hours to take off at OR Tambo, I was barely aware of what was going on around me. I was caught up in Jack Jordan's Redemption, a gritty retribution story. You need quite a few idle hours for this novel. You won't want to put it down.

Tobias and Evelyn Moore's marriage is like a battlefield, a train disaster you can't look away from. They used to be happy once, but the day their only son died in a hit-and-run accident everything fell apart. They mourn him in different ways. The way Tobias processes the events is to be ultra-caring, to try to protect his wife. In the process, he smothers her. Evelyn's way of grieving is to be obsessed with revenge. That's all that keeps her alive. She has no need for tenderness.

The driver got caught. He had been under the influence of alcohol and drugs and was put in prison for 11 years. Now he's being released and Evelyn's strategy has been fine-tuned.

The reader experiences the events through the eyes of Evelyn, Tobias, and the drunk driver, Aaron. Repetition is inevitable when the same incident is viewed from two or three perspectives. Evelyn embarks on a manhunt to wipe out Aaron and Tobias is hot on her heels to thwart her plans and save her from herself. I don't want to give anything away, but things escalate and quite a few people bite the dust. The novel exploits prickly moral dilemmas, making the reader squirm.

Redemption by Jack Jordan was published by Simon & Schuster and costs R210,93 at Amazon SA.

In the beach house, I read Our Holiday by Louise Candlish in instalments. It's light reading but be warned, it packs a punch. Two families from London are holidaying at their second homes in Pine Ridge, an idyllic seaside resort. Unfortunately, the local people are on the warpath: They can no longer afford housing or find places to rent in the village because wealthy Brits snatch it up and inhabit it for one month of the year only. Calling themselves NJA (Not Just August), the protesters hurl tomato juice and eggs against holidaymakers' car windows, and deface their swanky homes with nasty stickers.

The dynamics in and between the two families are interesting. The children are privileged and entitled, the fathers with their alcohol and sex addictions are braggarts, the mothers want to impress each other. The gulf between the wealthy holidaymakers and hard-up locals, also between the generations, is wide. The children feel their parents are politically incorrect and stuck in the mud. They claim all the opulence and privilege while agitating with the homeless against capitalism. Then someone is murdered and a multitude of secrets are covered up. It is a fascinating book that one reads with a mild sense of guilt while luxuriating in a holiday home.

Our Holiday by Louise Candlish was published by HQ and costs R181 at Amazon SA.

On a beach towel, I indulged in Kathleen Jamie's Cairn – short passages and observations about everything and nothing. John Berger called Jamie “a sorceress of the essay form". Cairn is more meditation than essays, short musings, fine observations, sometimes poems, sometimes fragments of thoughts. You can taste it and reread it and wallow in the lovely prose, the wonder and delicately tuned ear of someone who hasn't lost touch with her inner child.

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie was published by Sort of Books and costs R433 at Amazon SA.

My favourite read was an Irish novel as thick as half a brick, Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey. It spans several decades and the characters grow on you like moss. This book is a must-read. I was sad when I finished it and I am going to read all of this author's work now. It follows the ups and downs of two people, with many side characters.

Milly has fled to London from Ireland. She is very young and pregnant. She starts working in a bar with the formidable Mrs Oakley and becomes friends with Trish. One of the regulars is a young Irish guy, Pip. He's a sensitive boxer and not really a skirt chaser – skirts chase him. He has an escalating drinking problem.

They are kindred spirits, but the circumstances are never favourable for them to be together. We are offered glimpses of them over the decades. Eventually, they're almost elderly, he's sober, and they become friends. But Milly can't face the prospect of a relationship, after years of infidelity and lies. What exists between them is portrayed memorably and beautifully, and one does not want the book to end. I highly recommend it, it's simply lovely.

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey was published by Atlantic and costs R280 at Amazon SA.

What are we listening to?

Leonard Cohen's “Boogie Street":

♦ VWB ♦

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