Lawn Reading – 4 July 2025

Whatever your almanac may tell you, it is not summer until the strawberries have swollen to indecent size, cucumbers are filling both sandwiches and jugs of Pimm’s and this music is playing.

Happy Wimbledon fortnight to you all. Between matches there is just time to stretch out on a lawn with a good read: a novel plucked from the shelves or a book bursting with suggestions for delicious things to nibble whilst watching other people exercise in thirty-degree heat.

Ripeness by Sarah Moss is a stunning novel following Edith, aged seventeen in the 60s, and Edith in 2023. Poised for university, her French-Israeli mother declares that Edith must spend the summer in France or Italy to improve her language skills. As it is, she finds herself sent to care for her pregnant sister, who has been hidden away in an Italian villa until she gives birth when the baby will be removed and Lydia can return to a burgeoning ballet career.

As an older woman, Edith is living in Ireland in a village apparently welcoming to those fleeing Ukraine but less so to refugees from elsewhere who are being housed nearby.

The narrative alternates between the two settings, both with richly described landscape: the Italian setting glows with trees heavy with oranges and fragrant blossom, glossy figs, plums ready to pop and pink geraniums spilling from their troughs; in Ireland Edith dives into a bitter sea which slaps her face heartily.

Ripeness feels both sprawling and tense. A moment – a look at her sister or the taste of a pear – stretches out in description and significance yet decades of family history unravel in a few words. Her mother’s advice encapsulates the plight of generations before hers and those to come: ‘Leave while there’s still doubt, while it might be unnecessary… It can always happen here, to you.’

If you would like to feel a little passionate and a little melancholy, another Edith offers this. In Summer by Edith Wharton, Charity Royall plans to escape the small town which has never let her forget her unfortunate origins. The man who is supposed to be her guardian makes a pass at her, the man who says he loves her leaves nonchalantly with another woman and a doctor cheats her out of what little money and dignity she has. I love the intense indignation that Wharton induces at every turn.

As champagne corks burst onto Centre Court, tomatoes burst – with flavour and quite literally – in Sophie Grigson’s collection of stories and recipes from Southern Italy, Exploding Tomatoes. I’d like to begin every day with a giant pan of her pomodorini scattariciati, scooped out with the tomato and olive focaccia featured in Jenny Linford’s recipe/hymn book, Tomatoes, accompanied by a cup of espresso made with lemons in the Bialetti pot, as advised by Letitia Clark in For the Love of Lemons.*

As love letters go, there can never be too many to tomatoes and lemons and each of these books abounds with the most mouth-watering recipes and sumptuous stories.

In the (surprisingly unlikely?) event of a rain break,** there is time to read Anne Carson’s short essay on The Gender of Sound, a fascinating exploration of sound and voice and how our responses to these have been shaped by ideals of self-control and the ‘hysterical.’ It may affect how you respond to those particularly grunt-filled points…  

If instead you wish to escape to listen to birds and the sea, Summer’s Hum by Angela Harding transports you via her beautiful prints and accompanying notes through the rhythm of the summer while Katrina Naomi’s poetry collection takes you diving into the eponymous Battery Rocks, offering splendour alongside danger in the hidden depths. Katrina is reading in the shop on Saturday 12 July. Do come along and let her raise a shell to your ear through which you can enjoy all the resonances of her sinuous verse.  

Of course, not everyone wants to get away. Some people, and some bugs, just love being at home with a bowl of tomatoes or a glass of honey…  When Branwell the bee loses his home, he is forced to check into The Bug Hotel. The amenities are great – nectar cocktails on the rooftop terrace, a cabaret show performed by butterflies – but Branwell prefers to be alone. Then Kevin shows up, a child whose bug etiquette leaves much to be desired, and Branwell has the chance to save the day… Trouble at the Bug Hotel by Kathryn Simmonds and Tor Freeman is a multi-faceted and many-legged delight.

I understand that other games are available, that cricket, football and tiddlywinks tournaments are all taking place too. Middle-grade readers will thoroughly enjoy the wild competition between the Six Guilds at the centre of Jed Greenleaf by Kieran Larwood. Think the Olympic Games meets The Hunger Games meets the rivalry of the Williams sisters meets the exquisite poetry of Federer’s groundstrokes.

Talking of Federer, as someone who occasionally pines for Wimbledons past, I am off to read Geoff Dyer’s book on the final achievements of great artists and athletes, The Last Days of Roger Federer. If I don’t get distracted by tennis, that is.

May your weekend serve up a faultless double of reading and games,
Lizzie

*With apologies to my Italian godmother who I suspect would enjoy each of these things but not together and not for breakfast and not as a precursor to a strawberries and cream sandwich…
** It will now rain for the entirety of the second week. Sorry.