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Most reviewed: summer reads

30.06.08 Anna Richardson

There was no clear favourite on the review pages last weekend, with a handful of titles receiving a couple of reviews, including Donald Spoto’s latest Alfred Hitchcock book, Spellbound by Beauty, Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Crime, and David Bret’s biography of Doris Day (see "most reviewed", below).

Some papers were more preoccupied with the imminent holiday season. The Sunday Times picked the "essential holiday reads" in its round-up of the 100 best books for summer. In its selection of top fiction, the newspaper highlighted The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris (Little, Brown), Breath by Tim Winton (Picador), The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic), God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin (Viking), Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury) and Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (Harvill Secker) as its top choices.

Highlighted in its list of top 50 non-fiction were The World is What it Is by Patrick French (Picador), The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador), Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley (Faber), McMafia by Misha Glenny (Bodley Head) an The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury).

The Daily Mail presented its top choices for the Summer divided into “scare yourself”, “enjoy yourself”, “indulge yourself” and “inform yourself” categories, featuring Harlan Coben’s Hold Tight (Orion), Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (Simon & Schuster), J G Ballard’s Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate) and Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden (Pan), among others.

The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, dedicates four of its Saturday Review pages to the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, featuring Antony Beevor (who won the first Samuel Johnson for Stalingrad) explaining the value of the award, and a round-up of this year’s shortlisted titles.

MOST REVIEWED (27th to 29th June):

Spellbound by Beauty by Donald Spoto
(Hutchinson 9780091797232 £20)
“Little of the material is fresh” Sunday Telegraph 
“[Combines] immense enthusiasm for his subjects with a sturdy refusal to ignore their less savoury behaviour” Times

The Blackest Streets by Sarah Wise
(Bodley Head 9780224071758 £20)
“Wise is too clever and considered a historian simply to give us a lurid, one-dimensional Victorian melodrama” Daily Telegraph
“A wide-ranging study” Sunday Telegraph 

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
(Faber 9780571240982 £12.99)
“A beautiful, understated novel that celebrates the heroes of private battles” Observer 
“Greer feels the need to insist on portentous meaning” Independent

Crime by Irvine Welsh
(Cape 9780224080538 £12.99)
“A triumph . . . it is incredibly sure-footed. Crime is not destined to become a cult book. It’s better than that” Observer
“Welsh sends out mixed signals about how seriously he wants his readers to tak all this” Guardian 

Doris Day by David Bret
(J R Books 9781906217501 £17.99)
“Revealing” Daily Express
“Bret cleverly conjures an overview of this intriguing and messy story but it needs some basic flesh and blood” Sunday Express 

Media Anna Richardson Most Reviewed

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