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| Discover delicious summer recipes with these books |
WHAT'S cooking? Vanessa Berridge chooses the best summer cookbooks.
The Oh She Glows Cookboo by Angela Liddon (Michael Joseph, £16.99)
The debut cookbook of this successful Canadian blogger frames its recipes with Liddon’s heartwarming story of finding health through vegan food. Even a hardened carnivore might prefer salads to a beef stew in summer, so this is a good time to try out vegan cooking, enticed by over 100 recipes for snacks, meals and drinks (there are lots of colourful smoothies including one with watermelon, baby spinach, coconut water, avocado and lime).
Well illustrated, the book has clear instructions for tasty lemon and tahini salad dressing, mushroom, walnut and pesto tart and black-bean burgers.
VERDICT: 4/5
The Tomato Basket by Jenny Linford (Ryland Peters & Small, £14.99)
Tomatoes are now ripe, juicy and full of flavour. So what could be better than 75 varied and interesting ways to use them? There are recipes for breads and pastry, soups and salads, sauces, poultry, meat and fish dishes, drawn from several food cultures.
I like the gazpacho with roast peppers and red wine as well as the spicier Thai gazpacho. Also delicious are the trout fillets with sauce vierge, while the olive tapenade makes a piquant base for a tomato tart.
VERDICT: 4/5
A Modern Way To Cook by Anna Jones (Fourth Estate, £25)
Jones’ A Modern Way To Eat was a runaway bestseller and this equally inspiring offering could change the way you cook, with more than 150 recipes for people who don’t have much time.
But there is no economising on flavour with dishes such as crispy chickpeas with sweet roasted courgettes. It takes 45 minutes to make Turkish flatbreads with a salad of red onion, ripe tomatoes and fresh herbs and just 20 for a quinoa risotto with peas and baby spinach.
VERDICT: 4/5
Summer Berries & Autumn Fruits by Annie Rigg (Kyle Books, £19.99)
This beautifully produced book will carry you across the most productive months of the year.
The recipes are arranged in sections by fruit types, with suggestions in each for preserves, salads, savoury dishes, soups and desserts. In summer, you can enjoy a beetroot salad with orange, chicory and chives, a lemon and almond roulade with redcurrants and raspberries, lamb kofte with cherries and a summer berry tiramisu cake.
VERDICT:4/5
The Salad Bowl by Nicola Graimes (Ryland Peters & Small, £14.99)
Nicola Graimes’ boldly presented cookbook features recipes sparkling with flavour that make the most of seasonal produce, combining it with meat, fish, grains and pulses.
Seared lamb is perfect with peas, mint and radishes while char-grilled halloumi is well accompanied by courgette and mint salad. We also like the contrasts of flavour of potatoes, radishes and chives in a salad with a sharply salty feta dressing.
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| Here's our five-star fiction selection of the season |
Still lives
Eithne Farry’s selection of five-star fiction
Signs For Lost Children by Sarah Moss (Granta, £12.99)
This wonderful, subtle novel picks up the strands of the story Sarah Moss began in Bodies Of Light, which followed Ally Moberly’s pioneering struggle to qualify as a doctor in 1880s England. Her new novel opens in Cornwall a few weeks into Ally’s marriage to engineer Tom Cavendish.
The newlywed couple are spending a last few days together before Tom departs on a six-month trip to Japan to advise on the building of lighthouses. While he’s gone, Ally has taken an unpaid position at Truro mental asylum, taking care of the female patients.
In alternating chapters, Moss delicately describes their new experiences. Tom is initially all at sea in Japan, befuddled by codes and conventions he can barely understand: “Take me for a savage, for a child raised by wolves, and tell me how to wake and sleep… tell me what to eat and when and how.”
Ally is more determined, baulking at the idea of tea parties and the embroidery hoops of a Victorian womanhood, she devotes herself “to the study of chimerical disorders of the mind, to the least respectable branch of medicine”.
But Tom is drawn to the beauty and elegance of the Japanese way of life, the bath houses, the beautifully understated art alive with cherry blossoms and cranes, as well as the surprising food, a far cry from the hearty, stodgy meals of his homeland. Ally finds her work an increasing strain – “It is not an original thought that the overall effect of the asylum is maddening, that the insane compound each other’s insanity” – and she is continually assailed by the disapproving internal voice of her difficult mother.
Unable to banish these “spirals of guilt and obligation” from her head, Ally is laid low by the nervous hysteria that marked her adolescence.
Moss charts Tom and Ally’s changing perspectives with precise, poetic language, their physical distance reflecting the slow sundering of their emotional connection. Tom becomes increasingly reluctant to return home. Japan has captured his heart and his memory of his old life and new wife seems lacklustre compared to the enticing gleam of this seductive world.
Ally, too, is reassessing what matters to her, finding refuge in her aunt’s house in London after her mental collapse. Offered a paid position at a female convalescent home, Ally finds a sense of belonging: “She has found a way to live and it does not involve the institution of marriage. It does not, it turns out, involve Tom.”
This is not the end of their story but a fresh beginning, as Sarah Moss’s heartfelt conclusion to this fine novel makes wonderfully clear.
VERDICT:5/5
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador, £16.99)
Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel is far from an easy read. It’s more than 700 pages long and takes as its theme the unremitting suffering of a gifted young man who is attempting to deal with the aftermath of his traumatic childhood.
Yanagihara has said that writing A Little Life over the course of an intense 18 months was like a fever dream and there is a febrile feel to the book, an almost hallucinatory, otherworldly quality to a
story that deals with the damage done to a child.
It opens benignly enough with four college friends with good educations and scrappy jobs heading to New York, starry eyed with ambition and ready for a bright lights, big city kind of life. There is Malcolm, unsure about his sexuality and his standing in his family, who creates luminous little model buildings and wants to be an architect. There is JB, gay, beloved by his mother and aunts, and making a name for himself as an artist.
There is handsome Willem, who comes from farming stock but dreams of being an actor. And finally there is enigmatic Jude, beautiful, brilliant and hurt.
He is parentless, a mesmerising singer and an elegant pure mathematician, but he is drawn to the law “because he wanted to have the means to protect himself… to make sure that no one could ever reach him again”.
Yanagihara slowly reveals why this idea of self-protection is so important to Jude. He has suffered a remorseless catalogue of violence and sexual abuse that began when he was taken in by monks after he was abandoned, continued when he was taken away by one of the brothers and did not stop with the counsellors in a children’s home or his encounter with the deviant Dr Traylor.
Jude is beloved by his friends, who form a (mostly) kindly and protective enclave around the vulnerable, charismatic young man but can’t save him from his clamorous, destructive thoughts and actions. Named after the patron saint of lost causes, Jude has lost all sense of himself as a worthwhile human being; he is consumed by self-disgust and cuts the flesh of his arms as a way of controlling the overwhelming slew of corrosive emotions that continually undermine his fragile psyche.
“He wore his life on his skin… his biography was written in his flesh and on his bones.”
As a counterpoint to all this despair, Yanagihara happily tracks the lives of her four protagonists, delighting in the details of their achievements from Willem’s film roles, complete with intriguing, imagined plot synopses; Malcolm’s beautiful buildings; JB’s intimate paintings, which celebrate his friends’ day-to-day lives; and Jude’s stellar achievements as an ice-cold litigator.
They all acquire the trappings of adult success: money, fame, lovely houses, described by Yanagihara with rich, golden prose. But A Little Life is Jude’s story and it’s his sorrow that colours this devastating, exhausting, strangely exhilarating novel. It’s not in any way consoling but it is vitally compelling.
VERDICT:5/5
Top fives
Top five fiction
1. Grey by EL James (Arrow, £7.99)
2. Gray Mountain by John Grisham (Hodder, £7.99)
3. Flesh And Blood by Patricia Cornwell (Harper, £7.99)
4. The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop (Headline Review, £7.99)
5. Us by David Nicholls (Hodder, £7.99)
Top five non-fiction
1. Life With A Sprinkle Of Glitter by Louise Pentland (Simon & Schuster, £12.99)
2. Mary Berry’s Absolute Favourites by Mary Berry (BBC Books, £25)
3. Deliciously Ella by Ella Woodward (Yellow Kite, £20)
4. Get The Glow by Madeleine Shaw (Orion, £20)
5. Ardennes 1944 by Antony Beevor (Viking, £25)
Top five children’s
1. Enchanted Forest by Johanna Basford (Laurence King, £9.95)
2. Secret Garden by Johanna Basford (Laurence King, £9.95)
3. Demon Dentist by David Walliams (HarperCollins Children’s, £6.99)
4. Tom Gates: Yes! No (Maybe…) by Liz Pichon (Scholastic, £10.99)
5. Minions: The Junior Novel (Centum, £5.99)
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