Summer readings with
Charlotte Casiraghi
To accompany you throughout the summer, Charlotte Casiraghi suggests a selection of books mixing literary genres and tonalities. From classic literature to contemporary authors, these books are about the life of women.
The Cost of Living
Deborah Levy
© Penguin Books, 2019.
"The frankness of the narrator's relentless inventory carries this novel along. With great insight, Deborah Levy describes the cost of living for a woman who demands everything from life and herself, despite her weaknesses and failures."
Outline
Rachel Cusk
© Faber & Faber, 2018.
"Rachel Cusk always combines the most ferocious of satire with the description of a detail that might be considered secondary, but which in fact radically changes your opinion about a character, and incidentally about the truth of everything."
Blonde : A Novel
Joyce Carol Oates
© 4th Estate, Cover reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2001.
"I always like to take a biography with me in the summer. Joyce Carol Oates describes Marilyn Monroe as a Hollywood icon in a poetic and subversive way, as a fragile and sublime woman in spite of herself, who never grew up or adapted to the world and its cruel demands."
Grand Union
Zadie Smith
© Penguin, 2020.
"Each story is a nugget of humour that playfully depicts our ideals and our contradictions. Zadie Smith portrays our social customs without censorship all while pointing out their limitations."
The North Face of the Heart
Dolores Redondo
Translated by Michael Meigs, © Amazon Publishing, 2021.
"I was so enthusiastically recommended this book that I have to agree! I'll be packing it in my suitcase this summer."
Save Me the Waltz
Zelda Fitzgerald
© Vintage Classics, 2001.
"This book conveys the frenzy of Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s existence: written over a fortnight, it recounts some of the exhilarating anecdotes that made up the couple's daily life and reveals their most tender fantasy."
The Heptameron
Marguerite de Navarre
© Penguin Classics, 1984.
"Some of the short stories in Marguerite de Navarre's The Heptameron have all the characteristics of what we now call sisterhood, which has clearly existed in literature for a very long time!"
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney
© Hogarth, 2017.
"Brilliantly crafted dialogues and portraits of contemporary young women whose flaws are revealed despite their narcissism... Conversations with Friends is her first novel, but a masterpiece in its genre."
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