{"id":129381,"date":"2026-07-14T17:40:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T17:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/129381\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T17:40:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T17:40:26","slug":"five-sultry-lakeside-reads-the-berliner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/129381\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Sultry Lakeside Reads – The Berliner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"\"Photo Credit: Ksenya Blokhina<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that time of year: the lakes beckon, with their dirty shores and FKK offshoots, promising tan lines and abandoned inhibitions. For a lake day, you want a book that\u2019s hot enough that it forces you to take a cold lake plunge, while capturing summer\u2019s strange, sizzling energy. We can\u2019t think of anyone better to capture that spirit than avid lake swimmer Leon Craig, whose gothic queer novel The Decadence explores sultriness to an extreme. Out in paperback on August 6 through Sceptre Books, it follows six hedonistic friends on holiday at a haunted house, so preoccupied with their own interpersonal sexual politics that they hardly notice that they\u2019re in serious danger. She brings that same energy to these recommendations: indulgent, feral, complex. These are the books for days that make you sweat, whether you\u2019re making eyes at someone across Teufelsee or chasing the wild boar who just stole your underwear into a dark Grunewald forest.<\/p>\n

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The Seers<\/p>\n

Sulaiman Addonaia, 2025<\/p>\n

Hannah is a young Eritrean refugee who has found herself homeless in London after her foster mother\u2019s death. Now she\u2019s camping out in Bloomsbury amid the ghosts of poets and writers, with only her mother\u2019s diaries for company. After a gruelling journey to the UK, Hannah is at the mercy of the British asylum system but remains determined to carve out meaning for herself. She\u2019s insistent upon her own pleasure. She defies the \u2018perfect victim\u2019 narrative often expected of refugees. This highly original stream of consciousness novel tackles the taboo subject of displaced people\u2019s sexuality with confidence and charm.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the Chaoskampf<\/p>\n

Jane Flett, 2026<\/p>\n

In the sweltering humidity of the New Orleans summer, Marcy is reaching a breaking point. Her strait-laced husband won\u2019t stop pressuring her to have a baby and a stigmata-like wound has just opened on her chest. She becomes obsessively attracted to a rag-tag group of troublemakers who seduce her into leaving her crumbling marriage and joining them at a remote compound overlooking the ocean. The group is presided over by a charismatic figure known as Mutti and sessions of randomised group sex, trials by ordeal and even cannibalism ensue. Flett\u2019s no-holds-barred imagining of an apocalyptic unleashing of the group\u2019s collective id in service of an ancient chaos goddess isn\u2019t just a sidelong look at dysfunctional queer microsocieties; it\u2019s also a horny, rollicking good time.<\/p>\n

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Cleanness<\/p>\n

Garth Greenwell, 2020<\/p>\n

This novel in vignettes is all about cruising, intimacy and relationships. The narrator is based in Bulgaria, where he can\u2019t openly show affection for other men, forcing reflections on how he was shaped by the fears of his own post-AIDS-era youth. The capital, Sofia, is also a place of many formative experiences, a place he\u2019s preparing to leave behind. Through counselling a young distraught student who comes out to him after class, his sadomasochistic encounters with strangers and a complex romance with R, his semi-closeted Portuguese lover, the narrator comes to a deeper understanding of shame, freedom and the often fraught interplay between the two.<\/p>\n

Jawbone<\/p>\n

M\u00f3nica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker, 2018<\/p>\n

This book felt like it rewired my brain. It sinisterly depicts a pair of teenage girls, devoted to one another and to the mysterious, who start playing oft-homoerotic games in the ruins of an abandoned house. Their traumatised teacher, Miss Clara, already hovering on the edge of sanity after mistreatment by her mother and a violent home invasion, decides to kidnap her pupil Fernanda. In flashbacks, we see Fernanda and her best friend, the manipulative Anneliese, become drawn into rituals worshipping their invented drag-queen deity, the White God. It\u2019s a dark and haunting novel about women\u2019s capacity for madness and evil.<\/p>\n

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Snakes and Earrings<\/p>\n

Hitomi Kanehara, translated by David Karashima, 2003<\/p>\n

This Japanese cult classic follows Lui, a young hostess in Tokyo who plunges ever deeper into the world of DIY body modification, seeking to distinguish herself from her peers. Caught between her boyfriend Ama, the first man she ever met who also has a forked tongue, and the sadistic tattoo artist Shiba, she must navigate a world without rules, driven by desire and vengeance. A provocative dive into early-2000s Japanese subculture, Snakes and Earrings is told in a spare style that belies its disturbing contents. This account of obsession and transformation won the author, Hitomi Kanehara, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize when she was just 21.<\/p>\n

The Berlin launch for The Decadence is on Aug 12 at Chapters, alongside Anna Maconochie\u2019s Diamond Life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo Credit: Ksenya Blokhina It\u2019s that time of year: the lakes beckon, with their dirty shores and FKK…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,62927,24273,3931,190,16244],"class_list":["post-129381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-author","tag-book-launch","tag-books","tag-germany","tag-reading"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116919561615383628","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}