In a new low for literacy, the Chicago Sun-Times decided to print a Chat-GPT generated article recommending for ‘Summer Reading’ a whole bunch of books that literally don’t exist. Oh, and also Atonement because Ian McEwan is always a great beach read.

I don’t need to rehearse everything wrong with a newspaper uncritically putting out the regurgitron’s unconsidered slop, or the environmental cost of this fuckery, so instead here are some actual recommendations for books that you might actually enjoy on holiday.

Herewith the last ten books I read that had me crowing about how fun they were. All are available wide in ebook (or were when I got them anyway).

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Premise a la the cinematic masterpiece Red starring Helen Mirren with a machine gun: four teen girls are recruited to become a squad of super-assassins for a shadowy bureau (the Museum) that hunts Nazis and other bad people. Cut to now, they’re sixty, they’re all retiring, and the Museum is trying to kill them. Our awesome foursome go on the run and take the fight back to the Museum, while also bickering about hot flashes and menopause, dealing with bereavement, and complaining about their dodgy knees.

It’s terrific fun, with globetrotting and sneakery and some proper graphic on page violence. There is absolutely no messing about with questions such as “it is really okay to murder people even if they’re bad?”: we get straight in to murdering and keep at it, with an impressive bodies-to-page ratio and some lovely gory deaths. Our heroines are fed up of being old, of being underestimated, and definitely of bloody men in the workplace, and solve the latter problem at least with, again, lots of murder. I am here for it.

Pagans by James Alistair Henry

The concept is pure genius. No Norman Conquest, massively alt history. Europe is mostly an Islamic caliphate, but Pan-Africa is the global power. No British colonising, so no USA. Pathetic rainy basket/charity case backwater Britain is divided into Norse Scotland, Saxon Central/East, and Tribal (Celtic) Wales/South west. And although it’s set in a contemporary now with computers and drones, society is heavily Old English / Celtic still. with knives, ritual tattooing, blood feuds etc.

This is bloody great if you know anything at all about Old English. The police officer calls her car Roadfucker, and there are some fabulous lines along the lines of ‘are we all reciting from the same saga here, boys?’ and lots of delightful little tweaks and flourishes in the language. The mystery is super rooted in the imagined world, with its racial and cultural issues. The relationship between Mercian Aedith and Tribal Drustan is fantastic, as is the sense of immanent gods (very much plural). Basically it manages to be both a great alt-history and a really good mystery thriller and the two are inextricably linked. Enormously enjoyable, written with great verve and nicely paced. I really hope there will be more!

Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah

What an absolutely lovely book. I adored this. It’s the story of Harley, a young gay black Brit in Kent struggling with anxiety and depression and a homophobic father and an awful hookup situation, and a summer that changes things after he drops out of university, with friendships and a burgeoning super slow burn romance with Muddy, a Mancunian lad (deeply kind hearted, very open and generous). It’s more bildungsroman than romance but no romance reader will be disappointed; it’s also the best depiction of a certain kind of masculinity I’ve ever read, in Finlay, Muddy’s friend, a loud rugby-playing heavy-drinking Archbishop of Banterbury.

It’s got a lot to say about dealing with depression and anxiety, cultural restrictions (both Ghanaian and working class British), the relentless wearing of casual racism and queerphobia on self esteem. It’s very much a book about communication, about the need to give of yourself to people who love you–not sacrificially, but trusting them with your truth. Not perfect, I found the two women in the friend group perhaps not as strong characters, but overall this is spectacular character work, and a really great portrayal of kinds of friendship, kinds of people, kinds of love. Actually uplifting. Highly recommended.

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Immensely enjoyable cosmic horror. Lots of dreadful things happen, but it’s told with a thoroughly breezy style, making it a fun ride rather than a plunge into the abyss. At the same time, there’s enough real feeling that you care for the characters and commit to what’s going on. And it’s also completely bananas, so just my sort of horror, basically, and I’m sad the author doesn’t seem to have written more.

Coyote Run by Lilith Saintcrow

Antifascist queer Western pulp horror romp, and what a delightful string of words that is. This is massive fun, in an extremely gory way. Think Mad Max but in post-collapse fascist USA, where a war is raging between the fash and the, you know, non-shit people. There are also shifters, including Coyote, who makes the fun over the border to trade weapons and kill fascists. Most of Coyote’s personality is violent resistance. Some books debate whether violence is the answer; consider this one to start with the word YES in 150 point type.

The world is complex, but you can go with the flow very easily, the characters are lightly drawn in classic Western pulp manner, the violence is extreme, and the message is very clearly that the resistance will always regroup and regenerate and fight back, and eventually win, and that this is done all the quicker by not worrying about ‘civility’. The escapist book I needed right now, and what a staggeringly good cover.

A Bloomy Head by J. Winifred Butterworth

Family, romance, skulduggery and murder, set in rural Regency England. There’s a lot of hard stuff here – the book deals with domestic abuse, infertility, the traumas of survival in post-Revolution France, living as a trans men, reproductive coercion, and the destructive effects of power, misogny, homophobia and uncomprehended neurodivergence. There are also two heftily mutilated corpses.

With all that, it’s a surprising amout of fun. Kate and Thomas have a great deal of pain and trauma between them, but the other Governor siblings are all frankly bananas, and the unadulterated chaos that results is gleefully recounted. It’s going all out for T Kingfisher territory (cheesemaking and decapitation), and while it doesn’t reach quite those heights (it needed a stronger edit imo) it’s an enjoyable combination of cartoon violence and comeuppances with real pain and trauma that gets soothed with real kindness and consideration. I also appreciated the smart use of POV shifts. A very fun oddball of a book, though you might want to check the content warnings.

But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo

A sapphic Gothic romance, where the monstrous mistress of the isolated house is in fact an eldritch spider god. as you do. It’s immensely creepy and warped with lots of murder and amorality and body weirdness. Lush writing and thoroughly entertaining, with a delightful line at the end. I don’t know if I was convinced by the romance per se but the weirdness carried me along very effectively.

Helle’s Hound by Oskar Jensen

Very entertaining murder mystery with Danish art historian Torben Helle on his second outing. Notably stronger than the first, to my mind. It’s entertainingly nuts, with ridiculous leads and secondaries, a crazed plot, lots of fun references, a spot of fourth-wall-breaking that approaches Edgar Cantero levels, and the most spectacularly gratuitous final line I can remember. Props. But for all that the murder mystery is both clever and fair, and that’s a tricky thing to pull off. The author also pulls off a bait and switch as to What’s Going On that absolutely had me breathless in a OH YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY way. I really hope we get more of this series, it’s a hell (oh dear) of a lot of fun.

The Fast and the Dead by Anuja Chauhan

The title is a piece of genius and things do not disappoint thereafter. Absolutely cracking tale of murders in a Bangalore street, with immensely lively depictions of the setting and characters, infused with social observation and some cracking dialogue. Plus a very nice romance and a genuinely unexpected but fair solution to the murder.

It’s written with huge brio. I read this at the tail end of a ten hour flight and it kept me awake, entertained, and hooked, which is some sort of miracle. A massively enjoyable read: I must get the first one with this tec.

What Will People Think? by Vedashree Khambete-Sharma

An absolute blinder. I loved this. Which is all the more extraordinary because it’s a Pride and Prejudice retelling, and I absolutely hate Pride and Prejudice retellings. The difference here is that the setting makes perfect sense. It’s set in 1970s Mahathastra, where dowry is still expected and four daughters is a disaster, marriage is a necessity and a misbehaving daughter can ruin a family. In other words, when the Darcy-figure gets his friend to ghost the Jane-figure, he’s not just doing something hurtful, he’s potentially torpedoing her entire family’s future. The Austen plot machinery has serious weight here, in a way it simply does not in a 21st century New York version.

It works brilliantly. There’s a searing sense of injustice, from the author in the footnotes as well as from the main character, who can see a world of independence and work and *not* being dependent of marriage almost within her grasp. We really care about the two older sisters, and Darcy’s ineptitude with women is much more understandable, making him very likeable. The writing is clever and extremely funny, with a lot of sarcasm, but the story is told with real heart, and the tweaks to the mother and the Lydia character make a powerful difference. This is what a retold classic should be: it uses the original but brings something entirely new to the table. Fantastic. Unreserved recommend even if you hate Austen.

If you still need another book, may I recommend my own Copper Script, out on 29 May!