The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote, “If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.”
Summer doesn’t have a monopoly on love stories. But there is, for sure, fertile ground to be had linking burgeoning passions to the rising mercury, in flowering romance amid the summer blooms, in Shirley Valentine-esque escapes to foreign shores with the promise of carefree assignations.
Is there a difference between a romance novel and a love story? Possibly, though it might be a division based on current genre classifications. Romance novels seem concerned chiefly with the relationship as the central plank of the narrative. A love story tends, in my experience, to have the romantic aspects almost secondary to the main plot.
With a romance, we might expect a happy ever after, with a love story, things might not always run so smoothly.
My latest novel, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, was released earlier this month, in flaming June, and though a slow-burner set over 10 years, the pivotal action takes place during the summer months.
Martin, a disaffected drifter, takes a job almost on a whim as the lighthouse keeper on an island off the coast of north Wales. Once a year, in summer, an inner city Manchester school brings its charges to immerse themselves in the nature and glory of the (fictional) Ynys Dwynwen – and Martin’s ex-lover with them.
All good stories are love stories really, and here are my top 10 favourite summer sizzlers.
1. The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams (1950)
Williams specialised in steamy, dark romance in hot climes. Most of his stories were adapted for the stage – most famously The Night of the Iguana, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire. But he did write two novels. This, his first, follows the titular Mrs Stone, a fading stage actor, on holiday to Italy with her husband. He dies almost immediately of a heart attack. She decides to stay on in Rome, eventually entering a doomed affair with a young gigolo.
2. Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2015)
I wanted to include Daisy Jones & the Six here, because the artfully veiled story about Fleetwood Mac feels drenched in faded Polaroid 1970s Californian sunshine. But Reid’s earlier novel is far more appropriately summery. After drifting through life, Hannah Martin is faced with an apparently simple choice in a bar one night: go home with her best friend and flatmate or take a ride with her high school boyfriend, back on the scene. She does both, in alternating chapters that show how split-second decisions can have huge repercussions.
3. The Magus by John Fowles (1965)
Is it an outrageous claim to say that Fowles’s postmodern classic is a love story? Well, why shouldn’t it be? What’s it even about anyway? Nicholas Urfe, disaffected and rootless, takes a job teaching on the quiet Greek island of Phraxos (based on Spetses). He abandons a growing romance with an Australian in London to take part in the mindgames of the mysterious Conchis on the sun-drenched island These elaborate scenarios and masques often feature an enigmatic woman called, variously, Lily Montgomery, Julie Holmes and Vanessa Maxwell. A love story for those who believe that love is merely an ill-advised social construct that shatters like glass in the howling winds of the abysmal human soul. Or something.
4. The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman (2017)
Like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Coleman mines the speculative side of romance for her novel, which asks the age-old question, if you could go back in time and change everything, would you? Sisters Pia and Luna are in New York to deal with the aftermath of their mother’s death, and find out some painful truths about their family. Luna then begins to slip back in time to 1977, where she has a chance to change the course of family history. But should she? And what of the love she inevitably finds in the past? A story about the love between families, as much as romantic love.
5. A Fine and Private Place by Peter S Beagle (1960)
This astonishing debut novel was written when Beagle was just 19, and it’s getting a reprint later this year. Its unusual love story is played out in the dark hours of a long hot New York summer. It tells of a down-on-his-luck pharmacist who has taken to living in the fictional Yorkchester Cemetery, where he communes with ravens and ghosts. He helps bring together the spirits of two recently deceased young people, while also beginning a tentative relationship with a widow who visits the cemetery, Mrs Klapper. It’s a gentle and deliciously dark meditation on love, where death need not part us.
6. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Fitzgerald’s love letter to the Jazz Age needs little or no introduction, but let’s have one anyway. In the spring of 1922, Nick Carraway fetches up on Long Island and rents a house neighbouring the charismatic Jay Gatsby’s grand pile. He gets drawn into a life of parties and jazz, and the mysterious Gatsby’s interest in Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s distant cousin. Against the backdrop of champagne nights and ridiculous wealth, love and obsession prove to be universal currency, and all they buy in this fabulously opulent world are death and tragedy.
7. One Day by David Nicholls (2009)
St Swithin’s Day could arguably be said to be the very heart of summer, a pin stuck right in the middle of of July. It is on this day that Emma and Dexter first spend the night together, in 1988, after university graduation. Nicholls uses the device of taking the reader to visit them ever year on the same day, 15 July, for two decades, as they move from friends to lovers. It is like a series of Polaroids, collecting snapshots of their changing lives, as Nicholls builds to a conclusion that leaves nary a dry eye in the house.
8. Beach Read by Emily Henry (2020)
Could a book be more audaciously marketed to grab the lucrative summer holiday market for, erm, beach reads than a book brazenly entitled Beach Read? Fortunately, Henry plays into this with just the right levels of knowingness in a story of two very different authors – hopeless romantic January and serious literary novelist Gus (there are a lot of men called Gus in romance novels, apparently). Both struggling with writers’ block, they meet on holiday and decide to swap genres to see who can get a publishing deal by thoroughly staying out of their own lane. Obviously the obvious happens along the way, and delightfully.
9. Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell (2013)
Love in all its messy, uncategorisable, rough-edged forms abounds in O’Farrell’s story of the Riordan family in the blistering heatwave of 1976. When a middle-aged man goes out for a newspaper and doesn’t return, his grownup children return to the family home to console their mother and pick over the mystery of his disappearance, just as their own lives are laid bare, with tensions and anxieties surfacing like beads of sweat. A great story about marriage, and relationships and, above all, family.
10. Breaks by Emma Vieceli and Malin Ryden (2013-present)
Originally published as an episodic web comic, this series will be released as a thee-volume graphic novel from next year. It’s a love story and murder thriller combined, as two young men at a British school start out as enemies and become closer before the story spirals into darkness over the course of a summer.
• There Is a Light That Never Goes Out by David M Barnett is published by Orion. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy fro m guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
