Whether you are planning adventures abroad or a well-earned staycation, these recommendations offer the opportunity to discover new topics. If you are feeling ambitious, you can test your language skills in the original language, or opt for the English translation for a more relaxed summer read.

Not every book is a traditional beach read, but they will certainly transport you to different ways of thinking across languages, cultures, and perspectives. 

If any of these books sound fascinating to you, you can get up to 20% off when you use your CAMCard in selected bookshops.

Adas Raum (Ada’s Realm), Sharon Dodua Otoo

'Ada’s Realm' (in the original German, 'Adas Raum') is a novel by the British-German writer Sharon Dodua Otoo. The novel has been translated into Italian (2022), Dutch (2022), and Japanese (2023) as well as English (2023). 

It tells the story of four lives across six centuries, all of them lived by a woman called Ada. The first Ada lives in West Africa in the 15th century, as the first European colonisers were arriving. She is reborn as Lady Ada King in 19th-century imperial England, then as the Polish woman Adelajda Marianska, imprisoned in a German concentration camp in the 20th century, and finally as Augusta Adanne Lamptey, a Black woman born in London, raised in Ghana and living in Berlin.

Across the centuries, a gold bracelet and a mysterious storytelling Being travel with her. The Being inhabits various material objects such as a broom, a door knocker or a pre-Brexit UK passport. The novel takes European history and combines and critiques it from the perspective of African myth and knowledge. In the words of Kyung-Ho Cha, the story of humanity is told not only as a story of violence but also as a story of mutual care. Read more.

Sarah Colvin, Schröder Professor of German.

Nada (Nothing), Carmen Laforet

Are you interested in a novel about girlhood? About coming of age? A novel about travelling to a city for the first time to begin university studies? And one about encountering and negotiating the strange domestic dynamics of distant family? If so, Carmen Laforet’s 'Nada' ('Nothing'), originally published in 1945, which is available in an excellent English translation by Edith Grossman, might be something you consider for summer reading. 

It is a gripping, if not light, read, and the experiences described in my opening questions resonate with current and former university students. This, however, is not a novel to read for these parallel experiences alone. It is a stunning, at times shocking, engagement with post-Civil War Barcelona. And the difference between war against an external foe and civil war, such as Spain’s, when society folds in upon itself in aggression, could not be more apparent.

Orphaned protagonist, eighteen-year-old Andrea, arrives in the city from the country to encounter a strange family of aunts and uncles that have turned upon each other and themselves. The novel can also be experienced in a brilliant (if censored) film adaptation of the same name by Edgar Neville (1947), available on Apple TV.

Sally Faulkner, 1933 Professor of Spanish.

Penser comme un iceberg (Thinking Like an Iceberg), Olivier Remaud

I very recently taught in New Hampshire on the Dartmouth College Summer Institute of French Cultural Studies, where this year’s theme was ecocriticism. Working with an outstanding group of doctoral students and early career researchers introduced me to a rich body of contemporary French environmental writing, including philosopher Olivier Remaud’s 'Penser comme un iceberg' (2020), translated into English by Stephen Muecke as 'Thinking Like an Iceberg' (2022). 

Inspired by early ecologist Aldo Leopold’s call to ‘think like a mountain’, Remaud challenges the familiar Western view of ice as cold, empty and lifeless. Instead, he presents icebergs as dynamic companions, deeply entwined with culture, ecology and planetary survival. They emerge as thriving ecosystems, sustaining hidden marine worlds, while the Arctic is revealed not as an empty wilderness but as a richly inhabited landscape. Drawing on Inuit knowledge alongside the perspectives of sailors, scientists and artists, Remaud combines philosophy, environmental science and imaginative storytelling to give ice, in some sections of his narrative, quite literally, a voice. 

Ultimately, this is a meditation on the interdependence of humanity and nature. As icebergs are calved, as they crack and eventually melt, their vulnerability mirrors our own. Remaud offers a powerful reminder that indifference to disappearing ice reflects a much deeper failure to recognise ourselves as part of, rather than separate from, the living world.

Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French and Co-Chair of the Faculty.

L’età fragile (The Brittle Age), Donatella di Pietrantonio

Ever since the astonishing global success of the mysteriously pseudonymous Elena Ferrante and her Neapolitan Novels sequence ‘Ferrante fever!’, English-language publishers have been searching for the next 'big thing', the next great Italian woman writer. Such market moves at least mean we can discover anew remarkable icons from an earlier generation, such as Natalia Ginzburg to Elsa Morante, or pick up for the first time lesser known writers like Alba de Cespedes or Marina Jarre. 

I’m looking forward to reading the latest by Donatella di Pietrantonio, 'L’età fragile' ('The Brittle Age'), after her two wonderfully observed novels about young women’s lives in the Abruzzo region, 'L’arminuta' ('A Girl Returned') and 'Borgo sud' ('A Sister’s Story'), all translated by Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein.

Other books that promise rich lines of connection from the UK to Italy are Thea Lenarduzzi’s layered memoir of her Anglo-Italian family and formation, between Manchester and Friuli, Dandelions; or a short book I’ve just been gifted by the always compelling British-Libyan writer Hisham Matar, reflecting on his encounter with an Italian city that I'm sure many of us still remember being blown away by for the first time (in my case back in 1984), A Month in Siena.

Robert Gordon, Serena Professor of Italian.

Quaderno proibito (Forbidden Notebook), Alba de Cespedes

I just finished writing a book on the afterlife of the redesign of the city of Rome under Fascism, and so Rome, especially in the twentieth century, is much on my mind (as it often is). I recently read 'Quaderno proibito' ('Forbidden Notebook') by Alba de Cespedes, which was first published as a completed novel in 1952. 

It initially appeared serially across twenty-six instalments, published in the weekly La Settimana Incom illustrata, between December 1950 and June 1951. The novel’s protagonist is Valeria, a just-barely middle-class Roman housewife who struggles to maintain the flat she keeps for her stolid husband and two somewhat feckless children, both of them just embarking on adult lives in the outside world. 

At the beginning of the novel, in its first entry, Valeria records a minor ‘transgression’: the purchase of a notebook in which she begins to keep a diary. The conceit, of course, is that this is the self-same diary that we are reading. Because the diary becomes the medium in which she confesses her misgivings about the lives of her unappreciative and selfish family members, as well as her slightly more consequential dilemmas, it becomes crucial that she find a place in their small home in which to hide it from them. 

This crisis of a woman’s privacy inside the domestic sphere is both terrifyingly melodramatic and all too plausible. Valeria’s navigation of the banalities of a postwar Rome that continued to be a place of economic scarcity becomes the material for the most gripping suspense. Her Rome is one slowly emerging from the poverty we see in a neorealist film like Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), but still a long way off from La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960). The novel has been translated into English by Ann Goldstein (see Robert Gordon’s reading suggestions above) and published in a handsome paperback by the Pushkin Press. 

I raced through this book in a few sittings, but its diary entry format means you can read short sections one at a time, much as its original readers would have done. The brevity of the entries might suit drowsy seaside reading. But this is a book of real seriousness and urgency.

John David Rhodes, Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture and Co-Chair of the Faculty.

An Armenian Sketchbook, Vasily Grossman

Earlier this month, I ran an international summer school in Armenia, studying how Soviet life was experienced across the vast spaces of the Union. Such complex histories are poignant in Armenia. In preparation, I dipped into An Armenian Sketchbook of Vasily Grossman, best known for his novels (Life and Fate and Stalingrad) about the Second World War. 

Written in 1961, An Armenian Sketchbook is an engaging read, attuned to the beauties of Armenia, but not blind to the country’s suffering.  Grossman keeps us honest as students of the Soviet Union. A Jew, born into a secular Russian-speaking home in Ukraine, he was a war correspondent committed to the Soviet anti-fascist battles, but acutely aware of his country’s own flaws. 

In Armenia, he encounters a ewe with “bright eyes, rather like glass grapes.” “There was something human about her”, he writes, “…something Jewish, Armenian, mysterious, indifferent.’ He goes on: ‘Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness, to beg sheep not to go on looking at them with that glassy gaze.’ 

Grossman’s war correspondence has just been published in translation, and I’ll be reading that over the summer.  Not a beach read, but surely necessary in our time.

Emma Widdis, Professor of Slavonic Studies.