LitVox's Favourite Books of July 2021
Every month, LitVox brings you our picks of the best titles in fiction, non-fiction, crime and children’s books.
Fiction title of the month
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually by Helen Cullen
This beautiful novel was publsihed in paperback in May, and has become a favourite here at LitVox. We’ve been recommending it to any customer who’ll listen, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Fans of Anne Enright or Colm Tóibín will find comfort in the setting, but the style of this lyrical novel is very much it’s own.
On an island off the west coast of Ireland, the Moone family gathers… Maeve is an actor, struggling with her most challenging role yet – as a mother to four children. Murtagh, her devoted husband, is a potter whose craft brought them from the city to this rural life.
In the wake of one fateful night, the Moone siblings must learn the story of who their parents truly are, and what has happened since their first meeting, years before, outside Trinity College in Dublin.
We watch as one love story gives rise to another, until we arrive at a future that none of the Moones could have predicted.Except perhaps Maeve herself.
A beautiful work, pulsing with humanity. You can buy your copy from LitVox here.
Thriller of the month
This one is a pure, adrenaline-fuelled thriller, descibed by Ian Rankin as “Speed on a passenger jet – with the cockpit dials turned up to supersonic”.
You’ve just boarded a flight to New York.
There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard.
What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped.
For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die.
The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane.
Enjoy the flight.
Pick up your copy of Falling from LitVox for dispatch today.
Non-Fiction title of the month
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovendon.
Opening with the notorious bonfires of ‘un-German’ and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, Burning the Books takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it.
Richard Ovenden, director of the world-famous Bodleian Library, explains how attacks on libraries and archives have been a feature of history since ancient times but have increased in frequency and intensity during the modern era. Libraries are far more than stores of literature, through preserving the legal documents such as Magna Carta and records of citizenship, they also support the rule of law and the rights of citizens. Today, the knowledge they hold on behalf of society is under attack as never before. In this fascinating book, he explores everything from what really happened to the Great Library of Alexandria to the Windrush papers, from Donald Trump’s deleting embarrassing tweets to John Murray’s burning of Byron’s memoirs in the name of censorship.
At once a powerful history of civilisation and a manifesto for the vital importance of physical libraries in our increasingly digital age, Burning the Books is also a very human story animated by an unlikely cast of adventurers, self-taught archaeologists, poets, freedom-fighters — and, of course, librarians and the heroic lengths they will go to preserve and rescue knowledge, ensuring that civilisation survives.
Pick up your copy of this incredible and thought-provoking work from LitVox today.
Kids Book of the Month
All the Money in the World by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Published by Orion Children’s Books.
One day you’re broke. The next, you have all the money in the world. What would you do? A gripping, timely story about cold, hard cash and little white lies for fans of Jenny Valentine, Siobhan Dowd and Lara Williamson.
Fifteen-year-old Penny longs for something better. Better than a small, damp flat. Better than her bullying classmates and uninterested teachers. Better than misery and poverty day in day out.
An unlikely friendship and a huge sum of money promise a whole lot of new chances for Penny, and she realises that not only can she change her life, she can change herself.
