try this at home: a superb summer reading list
Emily Snowdon paints books. She also reads them. A lot of them! Here are her recommendations.
CLYTEMNESTRA (2023) BY COSTANZA CASATI
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The gist: Clytemnestra, a princess of Sparta and the sister of Helen of Troy, takes her revenge.
Emily’s notes: This is a feminist retelling of Clytemnestra and her story. I feel like Greek retellings, especially female Greek retellings, are having a massive moment, and I think this is an example of a really good one. Clytemnestra has always been historically portrayed as an angry feminist, a villain, an adulterer, but this book delves into why her actions were completely understandable.
I think the author really flips the narrative and focuses on her emotional side – yes, she has flaws, but there’s a sympathetic aspect to her. It’s proof that perspective can have such a huge impact on the history. And I think, taken from the perspective of the patriarchy, she did something evil and unforgivable, but from a modern perspective, she had an immense amount of restraint and courage.
THE POISONWOOD BIBLE (1998) BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER
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The gist: A missionary family moves from the United States to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
Emily’s notes: This is my mum’s favourite book, so the copy that I have is quite old. I think I was about 16 when I read it for the first time, and I’ve since read it multiple times. I get something very different out of it each time.
It’s a commentary on the religious movement in a lot of African countries, and how imposing the Western world’s interference is on their life. It’s a very heavy book, but I can’t even explain how good it is. We get a point of view from five women in the family, and because it’s set in the ’50s and is very religion-heavy, it has a lot of commentary on their roles within society, the expectations on them, and how the patriarchy impacts them – even in a non-Western world.
When I read it at 16, I was quite shocked. I grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, which is quite a white community, and I hadn’t been exposed to a lot of different viewpoints from other cultures or religions. It was quite confronting to read it that young and think, “Oh, OK. There have been quite horrendous parts of colonisation that have been really impactful on society.” I drew a lot of comparisons to the colonisation of our Aboriginal people here in Australia, which, when I was 16, was not spoken about.
LOVE & VIRTUE (2021) BY DIANA REID
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The gist: Two young Australian women who live on the same university college must grapple with issues of power and consent.
Emily’s notes: For Diana Reid’s debut novel, she absolutely hit the nail on the head. As someone who went to university in Australia, I really liked the themes that she brought up around consent, sexual humiliation, toxic masculinity and the use of wealth and privilege. And in the ways that she developed these two specific female characters, Eve and Michaela, it was interesting to see their dynamic shape.
I liked the exploration of different themes of Australian culture, like the binge drinking that has persisted throughout the decades, and the impacts this has on consent for both men and women. When Diana brought this book out, there were a lot more – and still are – conversations about the role of consent, especially at Australian universities, and the responsibility that university faculty have in upholding these values and morals, as well as the legality behind it.
This is quite an easy read; I think it would be a good book to sit on the beach and read, and then chat about with your girlfriends and boyfriends. I read this in a book club, and it was definitely our most talked-about book.
KATABASIS (2025) BY RF KUANG
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The gist: Two rival graduate students journey to hell to save their professor’s soul.
Emily’s notes: This is my most recent 10 out of 10 read. It’s a dark-humour adventure story featuring two academics who descend into hell to rescue their professor – and I absolutely loved it. It’s a dense read, but a really great one.
I read this on holiday, in summer in Europe. And every day, after a day at the beach, I would curl up in bed and read this book. It’s not a light read, so I think it’s good to have the peace and quiet and really stick with it. Be able to be by yourself.
I loved the analogy that academia, and the psychological toll that it takes on you, is like being in hell. I have a master’s degree in social work, so I was in academia for a large part of my life and I’ve been a research assistant before. So having that comparison was quite confronting to me, because the nature of competition between two researchers definitely does feel like a hellish landscape at times.
LOVED ONE (2025) BY AISHA MUHARRAR
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The gist: A grieving woman embarks on a global quest to recover the possessions of her deceased best friend.
Emily’s notes: I was very lucky to get an advanced copy of Loved One, so I read it months ago. It follows Julia – her first-love-turned-best-friend dies suddenly, and she’s left with all of these ‘what if’s. She doesn’t have her best friend to talk things through with anymore and she’s got to work it out herself. That journey peels back the layers of what she thought she knew. It cuts through to what it’s like to grieve for a friend and to not have answers to questions, and how to move past that.
While the book was heavy, it was really matter of fact – I think that sometimes we think of grieving as just crying in bed and being sad, but this book really explores the different ways that people grieve and how we grieve different relationships.
HUNCHBACK (2023) BY SAOU ICHIKAWA
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The gist: A Japanese woman, who was born with a congenital muscle disorder, writes porn and makes a deal with her nurse.
Emily’s notes: This is a short story that I read very recently. I’m really into translated fiction at the moment. Essentially, it follows a physically disabled woman, and it explores a lot of important questions about disabled love and sexuality, which I think is really overlooked in society.
This character essentially writes smut as a hobby, and it can be really confronting, but it’s also unapologetically funny in some ways. We follow the character writing and submitting all of these short stories, and we see her perspective, but she’s not writing all these stories based on the experience of a disabled woman. Sometimes she writes it as an able-bodied man or an able-bodied woman – seeing the parallel of how she actually lives her life is really interesting. It highlights society’s ignorance about what disabled individuals want and what their sexuality can be.
I accidentally read this while sitting in a pub, eating fish and chips by myself in Scotland. And I was a bit like, “Oh my gosh,” because it opens up with an incredibly graphic scene. I was like, “OK, didn’t know what I picked up here, but here we go.”
THIRST TRAP (2025) BY GRÁINNE O’HARE
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The gist: Three friends and housemates are approaching their 30s, and life is tumultuous.
Emily’s notes: This book captures those complicated feelings of love and resentment that come with being in someone’s life for a really long time. As you’re exiting your 20s and heading into your 30s, you find a lot of friendships where it’s like, “Are we friends because we have a lot in common and we enjoy our time together, or are we friends because it’s been a long time?”
It’s the nuances of female friendship: the obsessions, the selfishness, the jealousy; that immense, deep love of feeling like you would do anything for your friend, but also, you could see yourself throwing them under the bus for something as well.
It took me by surprise how much I enjoyed this book. I can see myself having a glass of wine and eating dinner by myself while reading it. I think it’s a really good one to read alone, to sit with and to learn some life lessons from. When I read it, I was writing down lessons from it like a madwoman. I was like, “Oh my god, I wish that I had read this in my mid-20s!” It probably would have given me the smack that I needed to get my shit together and acknowledge that not everybody is perfect. How boring would it be if everybody was perfect?
These clever book recommendations come straight from the pages of issue 129. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.