LITERATURE
August Book Club This month, Charlotte Griffiths provides the literary itinerary you need for your summer escape Tangled Webs CALLIE COLES
Now this is a holiday read. Settle into your sun lounger with this debut novel by Callie Coles, who you might have bumped into on Instagram – she’s the one with the beautiful country home filled with kids, chickens and ponies that occasionally bimble through her kitchen and help themselves to tea. Set in and around neighbouring Newmarket, this is the first in a planned trilogy and is an all-senses deep dive into the world of horses. If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic caused by an early-morning parade of exercising thoroughbreds and wondered what it must be like to ride horses for a living, this is the novel for you. Sage Deverill’s marriage to her dashing but abusive racing-driver husband has crumbled, and she and her young son Hal have rushed back from South America to the only home she’s ever known: her grandparents’ ivy-clad Georgian manor and stables in the heart of Newmarket. While slowly reconnecting with old childhood friends, riding a lot of horses and rebuilding her sense of self, she crosses paths with handsome trainer Rafe Dunbarton – but is it too soon to fall head- over-heels for someone else, when she should be falling in love with herself? And what about her not-quite ex-husband? Coles is a self-confessed fan of Jilly Cooper’s work and every sentence shimmers with vivid description, whether it’s Sage slipping into her grandparents’ kitchen for post-ride bacon butties, or an escaped chestnut filly clattering off towards the clock tower roundabout. Let the stud’s iron gates clang shut behind you, throw caution to the wind and race off into this modern fairytale. You won’t regret it.
The Homemade God RACHEL JOYCE
painting – as well as growing suspicion of their new stepmother Bella-Mae, 50 years younger than their father, who married at speed in the final months of his life. But is blood thicker than water? Can they strike out as individuals while remaining family? Or is it too late to say it’s all just water under the bridge? This is an intense and beautifully written novel that sparkles and charms with sprawling vistas and long multi-course suppers. Yet it also wrestles with questions of inheritance, legacy and whether the siblings have anything in common besides their genetics and shared memories of the good old days. It turns out nostalgia is a powerful drug: best served beside an Italian lake on a balmy summer evening.
Siblings are everywhere this summer, and this novel, now out in paperback, is a hymn to the complexity and beauty of these (hopefully) long-lasting relationships – all set in a sumptuously drawn Italy. What more could you ask for? Here, four siblings – Netta, Susan, Goose and Iris – are travelling to their artist father’s crumbling Italian villa in Piedmont following his unexpected death. A heatwave is stifling Europe, testing the siblings’ patience as they try to carry out post-death administrative tasks. Many decades have passed since their halcyon, chaotic childhood summers, swimming in the lake and tearing around nearby Italian hamlets. Now they’re forced to reconnect as adults, united in a hunt for their father’s will and his rumoured final
Siblings are everywhere this summer, and this novel is a hymn to the complexity and beauty of these relationships
24 AUGUST 2026 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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