Her second novel Lucie Yi Is Not A Romantic is out June 21 and is available at your local indie or  here. Follow her on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter here: @HelloLaurenHo.

I love me a good, old-fashioned listicle, especially a bookish one in time for the hottest (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) quarter of the year: who has time to read chunky blocks of words when you’re zipping out to soak up the precious sun, a cold brew in one hand and aviators in another? Not you! Certainly not me either, but then again I live in the tropics, and we’re blasé about the sun. What we yearn for instead is the sweet embrace of snow, gently enveloping all the mosquitoes around us in slow, horrible, unpreventable deaths.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, for all of you anticipating summer, here’s my listicle, or an article craftily masquerading as a listicle, of all of my must-read beach reads, both current titles and backlisted ones, broken down by category with barely any plot details to help you out. So sue me, I’m a vibes girl. You’re welcome anyway.

THE LIST!

Transportive Contemporary Romance: Where We End and Begin by Jane Igharo: Lagos becomes a sizzling backdrop to a beautiful second-chance romance that also serves up a side helping of family drama.

‘Destroy me’ romance/women’s fiction: The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang: delicately wrought, beautifully fleshed out love story with a timely spotlight on burnout in the age of social media, and layered ASD rep.

Contemporary fiction featuring a woman who feels trapped by her life: Fault Lines by Emily Itami: an affair in metropolitan Tokyo unfurls to shimmering prose you can snap your fingers to. Also, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason: Funny, poignant, layered, heartbreakingly wonderful, of a woman’s (and her family’s) experience of an unnamed mental illness.

Contemporary fiction with a polarising lead: Milk Fed by Melissa Broder. Melissa Broder’s writing, like most port-novelists, grips. Compelling, erotic and honest, it follows a young woman obsessed with her diet who becomes smitten with a froyo scooper. Bonus: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda: a mixed-race millennial vampire dreams of eating human food—and more.

Suspenseful general adult/Women’s fiction: At Least You Have Your Health by Madi Sinha: Shady wellness business, impressionable doctor-mom, witty dialogue, Liane-Moriarty energy and pacing.

Heart-warming Fantasy: The House On The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: I’ve never called a book ‘delightful’ until I read this.  A cozy hug of a fantasy book.

‘Hear me Roar’ Fantasy: She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan: punchy, cinematic, brilliant.

‘Destroy me’ young adult romance: You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao: Bring tissues and cancel your weekend.

Clever, compelling middle grade murder mystery from SE Asia: Queen of The Tiles by Hanna Alkaf: Hanna, who’s Malaysian like me, is the queen of fierce, character-driven writing. Twisty and fun, with great hijabi rep.

Folkloric middle grade from SE Asia: Mist Bound by Daryl Kho: Atmospheric, touching, richly illustrated and written, featuring folktales from this part of the world.

Funny, fun contemporary romance: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. Chemistry of the best kind.

General adult/women’s fiction exploring identity and culture:  Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal.

Moving Bildungsroman:  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: heartrending, utterly memorable from its first line.

Thriller, ish: Girl A by Abigail Dean: suspenseful and heart-breaking, it lingers.

Quiet, meditative fiction: Brood by Jackie Polzin: Wry observational humour, surprising, tender, with no fowl play (sorry! I couldn’t resist the pun!)

Sheer chaotic genre-bending fun: Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto. She took all my Asian auntie nightmares, added murder, and somehow made it LOL. Sorcery.

Sheer romance: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams: Exuberant, sexy, funny, and just absolutely smashing. Also, The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren.

Pure joyful, romcom escapism: Twelve Days in May by Niamh Hargan: Witty, delicious Cannes escapism. Also, On a Night like this by Lindsey Kelk: Nobody writes romcom like Lindsey.

Meta beach reads: Beach Read by Emily Henry. All the feels, all the prose, the angst, the banter.

A modern classic to cherish and re-read: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: prepare to have the map of your literary world re-drawn.                        

Bonus category (auto-read writers): Am I even Asian if I don’t throw this in? And it’s a two-fer!

Poetry: Anything by Li-Young Lee

Short story collections: Anything by George Saunders

And if you liked my listicle and want more beach reads, you could check out my debut romcom/contemporary adult fiction novel, Last Tang Standing, about a woman in her early thirties who navigates societal and familial pressures to get married while she attempts to make partner at her law firm, or my second romcom/women’s fiction novel, Lucie Yi Is Not A Romantic, which follows a woman in her late thirties who attempts to have a family her way, platonically, and the fun and fallout of that decision.

The post The Ultimate Chaotic, Vibes-Only Beach Reads List appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Written by Jasmine Shaheen

Did you participate in 2017’s Diversity Bingo? Perhaps this year you want to read more diversely, explore more genres, and know more cultures? Well, you have come to the right place!

Welcome to Literature of The World where every week, we’ll feature books and authors from different parts of the world.

For our first article, we’ll start with Literature from India!

Read on to discover some great books and tell us in the comments below if you will be reading any of them!

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag | Goodreads

How does money play part in our relationships? In this novella, Shanbhag tells the tale of a poor family suddenly submerged with luxury and money. It shows how gaining more could lead to losing so much more.

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul | Goodreads

Canadian born to Indian immigrant parents, Scaachi Koul tells her story through a collection of her essays. The book discusses a myriad of topics including the difference between adapting and adopting a culture. It reflects on family, fashion, racial discrimination, strict gender roles, and more.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy | Goodreads

Arundhati Roy only wrote one book and it became the winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, so it must be a hell of a debut novel, right?! In The God of Small Things, Roy introduces a rich story filled with mystery, love, loss, fear, social discrimination and of course, politics. It shows you different perspectives of reality and truth.

Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani | Goodreads

This graphic novel follows Priyanka, an Indian teen in America who tries to know her identity. It’s a story about culture and the relationship between a mother and a daughter in gorgeous illustrations.

The Windfall by Diksha Basu | Goodreads

“From rags to riches” that pretty much sums up The Windfall. Similar to Ghachar Ghochar, this novel tells the story of moving from poverty to extreme wealth. However, Basu’s main characters realise that among the wealthy, they still stand out.

Do you have any others you would add? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Literature of The World: India appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Read on to discover some new releases and if you find one that you like, tell us in the comments below!

Here and Gone by Haylen Beck | Goodreads
When a woman flees through Arizona with her kids in tow, trying to escape an abusive marriage, she’s pulled over by an unsettling local sheriff, things soon go awry and she is taken into custody. When her children go missing, the cops say they never saw any kids with her, that if they’re gone than she must have done something with them. Meanwhile, halfway across the country a man hears the frenzied news reports about the missing kids, which are eerily similar to events in his own past.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong | Goodreads
Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he’s moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer’s. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year. Ruth and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits, in the absence of a cure, and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become.

Every Last Lie by Mary Kubica | Goodreads
When Clara Solberg’s husband Nick and their four-year-old daughter Maisie are involved in a car crash, it is ruled an accident until Maisie starts having night terrors that make Clara question what really happened on that fateful afternoon. Tormented by grief and her obsession that Nick’s death was far more than just an accident, Clara is plunged into a desperate hunt for the truth. Told in the alternating perspectives of Clara’s investigation and Nick’s last months leading up to the crash.

The Sunshine Sisters by Jane Green | Goodreads
Ronni Sunshine left London for Hollywood to become a beautiful, charismatic star of the silver screen. But at home, she was a narcissistic, disinterested mother who alienated her three daughters. But now the Sunshine Girls are together again, called home since Ronni has a serious disease and needs her daughters to fulfill her final wishes. Although the daughters are all going through crises of their own, their mother’s illness draws them together to confront old jealousies, secret fears and discover that blood might be thicker than water after all.

Stranger by David Bergen | Goodreads
Íso Perdido, a young Guatemalan woman, works at a fertility clinic tending to the rich women and she’s also the lover of Dr. Mann. When an accident forces the doctor to leave, Íso is abandoned, pregnant. After the birth, the baby disappears and determined to reclaim her daughter, Íso crosses illegally into a United States where the rich live in safe zones, walled away from the indigent masses. Travelling without documentation she must determine who she can trust and how much, aware that she might lose her daughter forever.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid | Goodreads
Evelyn Hugo is ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life and chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career. Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. But as Evelyn’s story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz | Goodreads
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be different from his others. After working with him for years, she’s intimately familiar with Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. His latest tale has Atticus Pünd investigating a murder, but as she reads, she’s convinced that there is another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript: one of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition, and murder.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy | Goodreads
Transporting us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years, it takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety, in search of meaning, and of love. In a graveyard outside of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met.

The Child by Fiona Barton | Goodreads
When a workman discovers a tiny skeleton, buried for years, Kate Waters believes it’s a story that deserves attention. As Kate investigates, she unearths a crime that rocked the city decades earlier: A newborn baby stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital was never found. She is drawn—house by house—into the pasts of the people who once lived in this neighborhood and she soon finds herself the keeper of unexpected secrets that erupt in the lives of three women—and torn between what she can and cannot tell…

Blackout by Marc Elsberg | Goodreads
One night, the lights go out across Europe. The electrical grids collapse on an epic scale and unleash a devastating chaos in the total blackout. When a former hacker and activist who knows a thing or two about infiltrating networks starts investigating the cause of this disaster, he soon becomes a prime suspect. As threats to the United States start to emerge, he goes on the run with a young American reporter based in Paris, racing desperately to turn the lights back on. Because if they stay off, tomorrow may be too late.

The Fabrications by Baret Magarian | Goodreads
When Bloch, a popular novelist, starts writing a fictionalized story featuring his unremarkable friend Oscar, the invented details start to come true. Gradually, Oscar embarks on a surreal odyssey into fame, while Bloch descends. Oscar falls in love with Najette, a bewitching painter, but their relationship hangs in the balance as his myth balloons out of all proportion. At the centre of the hype stands the demon-like publicist Ryan Rees, whose power enables him to manufacture the truth, and the story builds to an unforgettable, startling climax.

Twelve Days by Steven Barnes | Goodreads
While leaders and notorious criminals alike are mysteriously dying, Olympia Dorsey, with her cynical teenage daughter and autistic son, are trying to heal from a personal tragedy. Meanwhile, soldier Terry Nicolas reunites with his team to carry out a risky heist, but when they visit an unusual martial arts exhibition and meet Madame Gupta, she offers not just a way for Terry to tap into mastery beyond his dreams, but also for Olympia’s son to transcend the limits of his condition.

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