Summer books 2021 for all ages, from Chinese fantasy fiction and Netflix-ready sci-fi to self-help guides and Covid-19 deep dives

Dive into a variety of books spanning genres and tastes to help pass the summer months while you wait for the pandemic to end

Reading Time:9 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Here are a variety of books including Julia Donaldson’s The Woolly Bear Caterpillar, spanning genres and tastes to help pass the summer months, whether you’re on a beach or in a panic room waiting for the pandemic to end.

James Kidd

Published: 6:15pm, 16 Jul 2021Updated: 1:54pm, 17 Jul 2021

What is the perfect summer entertainment when summer falls – again – in the middle of a seemingly never-ending pandemic? One option is to reach, as many of us have, for the most escapist stories imaginable, anything without illness, plagues, quarantines, vaccination or home-schooling. Then again, more than a few of us went the other way – Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) was one of the most streamed films of 2020.

Bearing these extremes in mind, here are a variety of recent books, in hardback and paperback, spanning genres and hopefully tastes between the poles, to help pass the summer months, whether lying on a beach or huddled in a panic room.

Thrillers and Crime

Thrillers and summer go together like courtroom and drama, or conspiracy and theory. Publishers plan their entire year around the midyear holiday, and Covid-19-stricken 2021 is no exception, and no less predictable: new or newish blockbusters from old hats such as John Grisham (Sooley), Jeffrey Archer (Turn a Blind Eye) and Dean Koontz (The Other Emily), and in paperback Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling, as if you were not aware), and The Silent Wife, by Karin Slaughter.

It goes without saying that James Patterson will publish roughly 8 million new titles before the autumn, but The President’s Daughter, his second collaboration with former American president Bill Clinton, will doubtless attract the most attention.

One of 2021’s big literary success stories is Richard Osman, a popular and immensely tall British television personality whose first venture into fiction, The Thursday Murder Club, broke several sales records. This cosy and impressively charming twister, set in a retirement community populated by gentle eccentrics, has already attracted Steven Spielberg’s attention.

Ovidia Yu, one of Singapore’s most successful international writers, has been toiling at the cosy crime coalface for rather longer than Osman.

Her latest, The Cannonball Tree Mystery, is the fifth part of her superior “Crown Colony” series, set in Singapore, initially during the final days of the British colonisation, and now Syonan – Japanese-occupied Singapore.

As usual, our heroine is Su Lin, an unassumingly brilliant Chinese woman who cut her detective teeth working for the flawed (but also brilliant) British policeman Chief Inspector Thomas LeFroy. With LeFroy interned in the Changi prisoner-of-war camp, Su Lin is centre stage – not only as an investigator but also as a prime suspect in a murder.