The Best Books We Read Over The Summer

BOOKS BY LAURA BRADING

For the PRIMER team, one of the joys of summer is having the time to devour a whole heap of books. Bonus points if we happen to be near a body of water while doing so. Felicity used this summer to catch up on some of last year’s buzzy titles; Anna got stuck into advanced copies of some rather exciting 2024 releases; and Laura indulged by reading entirely non-work-related books (ie. books more than five years old). Here’s the best of them…

My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown

What counts as a valuable life? Is caring for children more or less worthwhile than pursuing a career? And what is the cost of fulfilling your professional ambitions? These are some of the knotty questions that New Zealand poet Amy Brown’s debut novel poses. The book opens with the story of Ida, whose career has stalled during early motherhood while her husband’s ambitions remain unchecked. However, it’s Brown’s layering of two other stories, including a fictionalised account of the sister of author Stella Franklin, Linda, that make the book so thought-provoking and original. Selected by Anna

The Work by Bri Lee

I’m not allowed to say too much about Bri Lee’s fiction debut about art, power, love and money, but I can tell you that I gobbled it up over two days this past summer and have thought about it a lot since. Equal parts pacy and racy, there’s a good chance your book club will be reading The Work when it publishes in April. Selected by Laura

Wellness by Nathan Hill

If you’ve ever looked at your long-term partner and thought, ‘Remind me why we got together?’, this is the book for you. Jack and Elizabeth meet as students in ’90s Chicago, part of the underground arts scene and deeply in love with their life, their friends, each other. Twenty years on, worn down by money struggles and parenthood, they’ve grown apart; so far apart, in fact, that they’re planning to have two master bedrooms at opposite ends of their apartment. Yes, this all sounds irredeemably depressing, but this is actually a funny, smart, 600-page joy of a novel that feels all too relatable at times. Selected by Felicity

Glossy by Marisa Meltzer

Despite never having purchased a Glossier product in my life, I really enjoyed Marisa Meltzer’s book about the millennial beauty brand and, more broadly, about culture, ambition, and corporate feminism. Charting the rise of the billion-dollar company and the psychology of its founder Emily Weiss, it offers a fascinating context to the culture that created—and then cancelled—the girlboss. Selected by Laura

The Pulling by Adele Dumont

Sydney author and critic Adele Dumont has trichotillomania, the compulsive urge to pull out strands of hair from her scalp. There’s a method to her pulling, as she writes in this compulsive, unsettling memoir, with each hair scrutinised, touched and tasted. She runs the root along her lip, notes the particular colour and texture of each strand. But alongside this careful taxonomy runs the uncontrollable need to pull. When an episode takes hold, Dumont can spend hours hunched over, tugging more and more hair, emerging exhausted and filled with shame. Selected by Felicity

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

Fans of Kiley Reid’s first book will find this, her second offering, a marked change from the bestselling Such A Fun Age . Come And Get It follows a group of university students and staff in Arkansas, and it is both less plot-driven and more character-focused than Reid’s debut. However, both books tackle thorny social issues, and Come And Get It examines the ways in which money and power intersect and how attitudes to money can reflect broader values and insecurities. Selected by Anna

Meet The Women Making Thousands From Their Wardrobes

BY CAROLINE ZIELINSKI Arrow READ IT HERE