Relax with a retro this July: SALT WATER by Charles Simmons, THE HA-HA by Jennifer Dawson, THE LOFT by Marlen Haushofer Translated by Amanda Prantera

In the first line of this devastatingly moving novel, 15-year-old Michael recalls: ‘In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned.’

Yet knowing what is to happen increases the tension in this coming-of-age drama set on the New England coast.

Michael spends weeks swimming and sailing while his handsome, charismatic father travels to the city for work.

But when beautiful, knowing, 20-year-old Zina arrives next door, Michael falls in love, painfully unaware of the complex web of adult lies and self-deceptions that lead to tragedy and his abrupt loss of innocence. Inspired by Ivan Turgenev’s classic, First Love, it is witty, tender and quite brilliant.

While studying at Oxford, Dawson was hospitalised after a breakdown, which is the basis for this award-winning debut exploring the treatment of mental illness in the 1950s.

Oxford student Josephine lacks the ‘skills’ for living: ‘I did not know the rules’, and after a serious episode is sent to hospital from where she will be discharged only when she has been ‘regraded’ and reintegrated into society.

There she meets worldly wise Alasdair, another patient, and their friendship inspires a connection to feeling again – with unintendedly damaging consequences.

The dark portrayal of a fractured mind is terrifying, yet the final glimmer of light is transformative.

The loft is where the narrator, an Austrian wife and mother of two, sits alone, drawing birds.

Over the course of a week, the mundane details of her domestic duties, her relationship with dull husband Hubert and her love for her children are contrasted with the sudden daily arrival of pages of an old diary, written when she was sent away to a remote house, 20 years earlier, while stricken with unexplained deafness.

Who is posting them and why? What happened in the forest and who was the raging man she couldn’t hear?

It is the skilful juxtaposition of internal loneliness and isolation with this mysterious, chilling past that brings such emotional power to this unusual book.