July 2020 - Summer Reads

It has been an unusual couple of months in Lockdown-Land, but the seasons still come around, and with the warmer weather and sunnier skies many of us will be thinking of taking some time out to chillout and unwind. 

While our libraries’ doors were physically closed we have still been thinking of resources and ideas for you once the work is done -  whether you are sunning yourself in the garden, taking a run around the park or relaxing on your sofa after a busy day.

You can also visit us on:  

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We hope you will drop in and share Summertime Reads with us. 

Our first taster is one of the Summer Reads chosen by Barack Obama, President of the USA 2008 - 2016:

Normal People by Sally Rooney

This novel has been adapted for tv to great popularity in 2020, but was only Rooney’s second publication and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2018: 

In school Connell and Marianne affect not to know each other. People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts. Despite these social tangles, a connection grows between them and when they both get places to study at Trinity College in Dublin it lasts long into the following years. 

The Booker Prizes  https://thebookerprizes.com/books/normal-people-by 

Normal People, written in barely a year since her debut, is set mainly in the same shadowy, smoky, studenty Dublin, has the same witty dialogue and delicately observed play of often anxious feeling, and the same interludes of startlingly graphic, passionately intimate sex. It, too, is astonishingly fresh: in fact, when these books are shelved together in the future, it may seem that Normal People is the earlier work ... Normal People may not be about being young right now, but better than that, it shows what it is to be young and in love at any time. It may not be absolutely contemporary, but it is a future classic. 

Kate Clanchy The Guardian 01.09.2018 

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship. 

GoodReads 2018 

 

Published by Faber & Faber (2018) ISBN: 978-0571334643 

Library copy details here