Latest news with #TheNames
Daily Mirror
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Inside TikTok's literature boom: BookTok creators share their top summer reads
Stuck looking for your next beach read? With BookTok currently booming, four creators share their favourite reads and hottest trend predictions for this summer While TikTok has earned a name for brainrot and doomscrolling, it's actually leading this summer's hottest revival: BookTok. The hashtag currently contains over 59.3 million posts, while TikTok Shop data reveals that book sales were up 375% in 2024 compared to 2023. But what are people reading? According to popular online bookseller, Books2Door, the romance genre has seen one of the biggest readership surges, with sales rising 20% month on month. And while romantasy has dominated the book charts (think ACOTAR), Books2Door predict a slight change in reading habits this summer. 'A noticeable trend this summer is a shift from last summer's Romantasy (romantic fantasy) boom toward darker romance genres,' the bookseller reveals. They add: 'Titles like Legacy of Gods and Haunting Adeline are gaining traction, reflecting readers' growing interest for suspenseful love stories with a darker edge. This shift signals a broader trend in adult fiction where readers are exploring complex emotional themes paired with thrilling, sometimes supernatural elements.' So, looking for your next fairy-king romantic epic to sizzle over by the pool? Or maybe a more sentimental drama to lie back with in the grass? We asked four popular BookTok creators for their summer picks: Ben Mercer, @bcemercer Summer holidays are the perfect time to invest in a deep read. Ben shares his top fictional picks that might make you shed a tear or two. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante - "This summer I'm going to Italy and I'm finally going to take down Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels starting with My Brilliant Friend. It's fun to read something related to where you're headed, it's supposed to be brilliant and if I like it, I can crack on with the sequels!" The Names by Florence Knapp - "Knapp's debut novel The Names is a great concept, Sliding Doors mixed with One Day. A mother takes her newborn son to the registry office and the narrative splits in three as the name she chooses changes the rest of his life. It's easy to read but funny, shocking and moving all at once." A Month In The Country by J.L. Carr - "This is my favourite read of the year so far. It's warm, profound, and funny with a small mystery running through the tale of a WW1 veteran who's spending a month uncovering an old painting in a village chapel. It's got the perfect elegiac, quietly beautiful tone for a summer read." For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. Sam - @samfallingbooks Sometimes we find love where we least expect it. Here are Sam's top romantic and fantasy reads to transport you faraway - without getting on a flight Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid - "A beautifully written story set in the 1980s centring around the life of astronauts! It blends the wonder of space with all the love we find in our lifetime. An unforgettable read that will 100% make you cry." A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna - "A cosy fantasy about a witch trying to get her powers back while running an unconventional inn for the lost and the wandering. Equal parts hilarious, thoughtful and heartfelt. An absolute delight." Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez by Abby Jimenez - "This book never fails to deliver a romance with so much heart. Falling in love when you least expect it, falling in love while life keeps moving, while you're still navigating hurdles, and holding on to the love that you have throughout it all because that's what makes it all worth it. I will never skip an Abby Jimenez book." Dakota - @sp3llb00k If dark romance is your cup of (black) tea, then Dakota has the best picks for you. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan - "A sharp, melancholic tale of a teenage girl's cruel games and emotional awakening during a sultry summer on the French Riviera. It dances between innocence and manipulation, freedom and guilt. Holden Caulfield if he were a hopeless romantic girl. Reads like a spell - you'll feel the sun on your skin, too." Mrs. S by K Patrick - "A taut, sensual portrait of forbidden desire set in an English boarding school where a repressed young matron begins an affair with the headmaster's wife. It's about bodies, boundaries, and the ache of queer becoming across a blistering hot summer. Wonderful and gross." The Girls by Emma Cline - "A sun-drenched fever dream of adolescence and obsession, following a teenage girl lured into the dark glamour of a Manson-like cult in 1960s California. It's about a longing for belonging, for danger, for someone to notice you. Sexy and terrifying." Coco - @cultofbooks Looking for love – but with less fairies? Coco shares some of her favourite contemporary romances. Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston - "This book found me at a point where I was losing my love for reading. It shows a love story that was beautiful, not perfect, and was a little out of its time loop (once you read it, you'll get what I mean)" Game On by Ki Stephens - "It's so nostalgic to all my favourite books, the romance, the tension AND she is an English girl in America (take me out right now)" Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young - "This is a beautiful contemporary romance that highlights a relationship of a differently able couple and how they deal with a surprise that comes along the way (9 months in the making!)"
Times
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Pandora Sykes picks this summer's top 10 beach reads
A summer holiday is the perfect time to finally knuckle down to some serious reading. Here are the most in-the-know novel to been seen reading by the pool. Florence Knapp's novel The Names is a moving riff on the concept of nominative determinism — the idea that people's lives are guided by their name — using three different timelines. Each begins in 1987, with Cora registering her newborn son's name. In the first timeline Cora calls the baby Gordon, as his abusive father has demanded. In the second she calls him Julian. And in the third, her nine-year-old daughter names him Bear. Bear grows up to be a gentle wanderer; Julian is artistic and avoidant; and Gordon is as bullish and dismissive as his father.
Gulf Today
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
I've already read 30 books this year – but this is the one I'm recommending to everyone
Maybe it's the high calibre of new releases in 2025, or perhaps it's that I keep deleting TikTok, but I've already read more than 30 books this year - and there's one that I've been recommending to everyone. I've been stuck into the "romantasy" genre with Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing series, enjoyed comedies including Alison Espach's The Wedding People and Sarah Harman's All The Other Mothers Hate Me, and been equal parts shocked and inspired by the real life stories of World War Two secret agent Pippa Lantour and former-Mormon Tara Westover in their beautiful memoirs, The Last Secret Agent and Educated. But it's Florence Knapp's new novel, The Names, that's a future classic. Curiously, her only other book is a non-fiction guide to English paper piecing, but her first foray into fiction is a masterclass. It's as devastating as it is life-affirming, which is a recipe for the perfect book. The novel is an utterly original take on the "sliding doors" concept. Beginning on the day a mother sets off to name her baby son, it follows three versions of a boy's life as dictated by his given name. An exploration of how small decisions can echo down the decades, the novel is a gripping and moving family drama. I tore through the book in two sittings while on holiday. The story might not be the typical easy-breezy beach book, but the novel is hugely readable, with beautiful prose and compelling characters. Debuting at number two in The Sunday Times bestseller list and with an average rating of 4.18 on Goodreads, it's one of those rare mainstream novels that live up to the hype. Whether you're packing for a summer holiday or looking for your next weekend read, here's why I'm recommending The Names to everyone. 'The Names' by Florence Knapp, published by Phoenix An utterly original concept, Florence Knapp's debut is structured around nominative determinism - how someone's name can set the trajectory of their life. Set after the Great Storm in 1987, it begins with Cora setting out with her nine-year-old daughter to name her newborn baby boy. She has three options. The first is Gordon, as demanded by her controlling and abusive husband, who wants him to be named after himself. The second is Bear, the nickname her daughter Maia has affectionately given him. Cora's own wish is for him to be named Julian, believing this name will set him free of any expectation and influence from his father. The chapters are divided into three sections - Gordon, Bear and Julian - with each following the ramifications of his naming and the boy's life as it unfolds over the decades. The novel is profound and moving in its exploration of how tiny decisions can change the path of your life. It's also an important portrayal of domestic violence and how it can impact a child through the decades, with one version seeing Cora leave her husband and another depicting years of continued abuse. Despite its darker themes, the novel has the same charm as cult hits like William Boyd's Any Human Heart or Min Jin Lee's Pachinko; you follow the characters through their entire lives, including their loves and their losses. Moments of tragedy will make you weep, but the family story of love and resilience is beautiful. It's an old-fashioned page-turner, too - I couldn't tear myself away from the page and read the novel in two sittings.
The Independent
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
I've already read 30 books this year – but this is the one I'm recommending to everyone
Maybe it's the high calibre of new releases in 2025, or perhaps it's that I keep deleting TikTok, but I've already read more than 30 books this year – and there's one that I've been recommending to everyone. I've been sucked into the 'romantasy' genre with Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing series, enjoyed comedies including Alison Espach's The Wedding People and Sarah Harman's All The Other Mothers Hate Me, and been equal parts shocked and inspired by the real life stories of World War Two secret agent Pippa Lantour and former-Mormon Tara Westover in their beautiful memoirs, The Last Secret Agent and Educated. But it's Florence Knapp's new novel, The Names, that's a future classic. Curiously, her only other book is a non-fiction guide to English paper piecing, but her first foray into fiction is a masterclass. It's as devastating as it is life-affirming, which is a recipe for the perfect book. The novel is an utterly original take on the 'sliding doors' concept. Beginning on the day a mother sets off to name her baby son, it follows three versions of a boy's life as dictated by his given name. An exploration of how small decisions can echo down the decades, the novel is a gripping and moving family drama. I tore through the book in two sittings while on holiday. The story might not be the typical easy-breezy beach book, but the novel is hugely readable, with beautiful prose and compelling characters. Debuting at number two in The Sunday Times bestseller list and with an average rating of 4.18 on Goodreads, it's one of those rare mainstream novels that live up to the hype. The Names to everyone. Why you can trust us Daisy Lester is a senior shopping writer at The Independent. As well as writing about beauty and fashion, she specialises in reviewing books. She always has her finger on the pulse when it comes to new releases from both debut authors and acclaimed writers.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Looking for something new to read? Here are 10 of the latest books
This week's books include a story inspired by Slavic folktales, crime fiction from an Indigenous perspective, a trip back to 1950s Australia and an epic tale of trade between China and the West. Happy reading! FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Unquiet Grave Dervla McTiernan HarperCollins, $34.99 Irish thriller doyenne Dervla McTiernan has relocated to Western Australia, but her imagination remains drawn to the mires and fens of her native land. Now on his fourth case of the series, her detective Cormac Reilly unearths a corpse in a bog in Galway. At first, he assumes he's stumbled across the mummified remains of a ritual human sacrifice. Prehistoric finds in the region are not uncommon, and such gruesome, millennia-old discoveries are of fascination to archaeologists. On closer inspection, Reilly assumed wrong. The mutilated remains are those of a high-school principal, Thaddeus Grey, who vanished two years before. Reilly thinks he knows what happened, but after he gets distracted by his ex, another mutilated corpse turns up halfway across the country. Suddenly, he seems to have been thrown into a high-profile serial killer investigation. If that's the case, it's only a matter of time before the murderer strikes again. McTiernan is a bestselling crime writer for good reason, and this is another brisk, moody police procedural with an effortless command of pace and suspense. Florence Knapp's debut, The Names, hinges on a sliding-doors moment. It's 1987, in the aftermath of a terrible storm. Cora, with her seven-year-old daughter, Maia, in tow, is about to enter the name of her baby son in the birth registry. Will she name him Bear, as Maia has whimsically suggested? Or Julian, the name that most appealed to her from the books of baby names she consulted while pregnant? Or will she submit to her husband's demand that the boy be given the same name as him? She has never liked Gordon much as a name, but defying her husband – a doctor whose public virtue is shadowed by cruel abuse behind closed doors – could have terrifying consequences. We follow the family through three timelines – one each for Bear, Julian and Gordon – each chapter separated by a seven-year interval. This could easily have been too much scaffolding, but Knapp uses the architecture to sketch subtle contrasts between timelines. Characters develop distinctively in each thread, shaped by Cora's choices in a way that emphasises the invidious decisions facing those living through domestic violence, as well as a love that endures even the darkest hour. When Beatrice goes blind in her 70s, her inner life turns to what can be seen without eyes, to all she has learned and felt, to a life devoted to cultivating her mind, and to memories of the family that has shaped and sustained her. Relic Light has a free-flowing, kaleidoscopic structure, and Beatrice's story emerges through brief, loosely connected musings, interleaving personal anecdotes with oddments collected from realms of literature and art. These roam from odd facts about poet John Milton (when the author of Paradise Lost lost his vision, he made two of his daughters read to him in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, apparently, while the third got off scot-free), to witticisms about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. That novel is one way into Relic Light 's experimental form, and it's interesting to speculate on what Woolf would have made of the cultivated female voice Brennen Wysong has crafted; I think she would have recognised it as a descendent of her own fiction. Wysong's background as a short story writer is evident: although linear narrative is abandoned, the darkness is lit by flashes of insight, distilled with a sculpted quality that beguiles the mind. Crime fiction from Aboriginal perspectives has broken into the mainstream over the past decade, and Kooma-Kamilaroi author Angie Faye Martin adds to the depth of the field with Melaleuca. Our detective is Renee Taylor, an Aboriginal policewoman working in her remote home town for what she hopes will be a short and uneventful spell. Renee imagines issuing the odd speeding ticket and helping her mum out, mostly. Her life is in Meanjin/Brisbane now, and she's itching to get back to it. When a woman is found murdered at a nearby creek, Renee gets a chance to lead an investigation, and she soon finds a potential link to the disappearance at the same location of two young women decades before. An ugly suppressed history hovers under the town's sleepy surface, and Renee must confront intergenerational trauma and a dark legacy of racism to find the truth. Melaleuca is solid commercial crime fiction by any yardstick. Weaving a contemporary murder mystery into the grim reality of historical and continuing injustice faced by Aboriginal people, it's an unflinching addition to the growing corpus of outback noir. The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death Helen Marshall Titan Books, $27.99 Helen Marshall, a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Queensland, has penned a dark fantasy grand in ambition and steeped in lore, but you get the impression of an elaborate world only half-realised. Possibly influenced by Slavic folktales, it's set in a war-torn land under occupation. Sara Sidorova comes from proud stock. She has resisted the colonisers with violence and as she lays dying, an avatar of destruction offers her a glimpse of the future. There, her granddaughter Irenda bends herself to circus life – a training ground for her eventual quest to avenge her mother's death at the hands of the enemy. This is a fable-like fiction that invokes the carnivalesque, alongside hails of bullets, living gods, and references to seers and elf-children. It's a song of brutality and mystery and a fierce desire to be free, although its playfulness and sense of theatricality do come at the expense of narrative clarity and coherent exposition. I found it tough going, despite the author's obvious talents. Lee Gordon Presents … Jeff Apter Echo Publishing, $34.99 'The past,' wrote L. P. Hartley, 'is a foreign country'. Jeff Apter's biography of legendary promotor Lee Gordon is a bit like a journey back into that foreign country of 1950s Australia, when big American acts were rarely seen on stage until the brash young Yank brought them here. Gordon's list of stars included Frank Sinatra (who was a friend of his), Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and many, many more. Along the way he also discovered local talent such as Johnny O'Keefe. But for all his chutzpah, this is also a portrait of an insecure, troubled dynamo. In 1958, after something of a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows, Gordon disappeared for nine months before fetching up in a sanatorium in Hawaii where was treated for a nervous breakdown. He was also a man of mystery, his years before coming to Australia (via Cuba and mixing with the Mob) uncertain, as are the circumstances of his death in a London hotel in 1963, aged poignancy here, but what comes across is the sheer frantic pace of Gordon's short life. In that time, though, he helped turn the black and white of our 1950s life into colour. You wouldn't think a Beretta could shoot down a Halifax bomber, but on the night of August 14, 1943, in southern France, that's what happened. In no time 11 people (crew and civilians) were dead. Only the pilot, Frank Griffiths, crawled away from the wreckage of the eponymous Operation Pimento. Adam Hart, his great-grandson, reconstructs that night and the escape over the Swiss border that followed, as well as Griffiths' life. The secret mission, part of Speical Operations Exectuive operations, was to drop explosives to a Resistance group in the area. Griffiths, badly injured, wound up in their care, and his escape – involving beaming maquisards, pleased to meet an RAF pilot; a madame and her brothel where he hid; and the inevitable blonde named Collette – is a gripping tale, told with poise and warmth. Hart also incorporates his own journey in the footsteps of 'Griff', meeting descendants of those who saved his life. I would not be surprised to see this pop up as a dramatised TV doco. Silk Silver Opium Michael Pembroke Hardie Grant, $37.99 The title might be three little words, but Michael Pembroke's fascinating study shows how they came to loom so large in history, from the earliest Chinese dynasties and the Romans until now. It's an epic tale about the consequences of 2000 years of trade between China and the West, also incorporating recurring themes such as the imperial Chinese strategy of trying to make trading partners dependent on them – an early form of Belt and Road. Silk, for example, mesmerised the Romans. They couldn't get enough of it and paid a fortune for it, but were also just as mesmerised by the mystery of how it was made. Same with porcelain. But it was the opium trade, a source of massive quick profit to the British East India Company especially, that had the most the devastating effect. Mass addiction followed, along with a series of Opium Wars that culminated in the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 – murderously put down by a 19th-century version of the Coalition of the Willing, leaving a war bill that 'essentially bankrupted China'. Something the Chinese still haven't forgotten. An erudite, timely, entertaining rendition of a complex subject. Uptown Girl Christie Brinkley Harper Influence, $36.99 Although it's impossible to read this without the Billy Joel song in the background, there was nothing upbeat in Brinkley's childhood in suburban California, where her biological father regularly whipped her with his belt. She writes about his violence and thuggery – when she developed a strong sense of deliverance through fantasy – with admirable restraint. But life picked up with her mother's second marriage to a Hollywood scriptwriter who encouraged her to write the script of her own life. Which, in many ways, she did. Fast-forward to Paris, 1974, where she'd gone to study art, but accidentally became one of the most famous models of her time after a photographer saw her in a post office. At 19, she was 'discovered', and quite suddenly, fantasy became reality. Inevitably, much of her story is about the fame that followed, along with love, four marriages, and what she calls the 'magic' of being alive – not to mention surviving a helicopter crash. High-flying life, down to earth memoir. The Stress Recovery Effect Dr Nick Hall and Dr Dick Tibbits (with Todd A. Hillard) Signs Publishing, $32.95 According to the American Institute of Stress, 83 per cent of Americans suffer work-related stress. This self-help guide offers practical ways of turning it into a positive. The authors met when both were engaged in a scheme (partly funded by Disney) that aimed to turn a Florida hospital into an anxiety-reduced zone by taking a wholistic approach that included installing a surfboard in an imaging machine. But their plans were drastically affected by the Pulse nightclub shootings in 2016, with some survivors, who were already enrolled in the stress recovery program, telling Hall and Tibbits how they applied their strategies to help them recover. Strategies included controlled breathing, acting out smiles instead of frowns, and buying a rocking chair to rock themselves into a state of calm. Quoting Walt Disney (think, dream, believe, dare), the whole thing comes across as a transcribed motivational talk.
