Nicky Pellegrino recommends holiday reads

Nicky Pellegrino

Books: Your holiday books

Herald on Sunday -  Dec 21, 2014

Sit back and relax with this wrap-up of great reads to help you while away the hours

Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga is one of Sarah-Kate Lynch's best. Photo / Supplied

Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga
By Sarah-Kate Lynch (Random House)
Heartfelt is the word I'd use to describe the latest novel from New Zealander Sarah-Kate Lynch. She always sets her books in interesting places and this time she takes us to India and all the colour and confusion of the city of Mumbai. Annie Jordan is a middle-aged woman who is going through a tough time. She has lost her mother and her dog, her kids have left home and her husband barely seems to notice her. So when he offers to take her with him on a business trip to Mumbai she thinks, why not? India is daunting and Annie struggles at first. Then she is taken to a laughing yoga class on Chowpatty beach and finds she rather likes it. With the help of kindly guru Heavenly Hirani she begins to see India and her own life in a whole new light. This is one of Lynch's best.

Funny Girl
By Nick Hornby (Penguin)
I've never been a devotee of Nick Hornby's more laddish books but this one isn't blokey and I loved it. Funny Girl is the story of the pop culture of the 1960s, when television sitcoms were beginning to make their mark.

Barbara Parker is a young pneumatic blonde in the mould of Diana Dors (Google her, kids) who wins a beauty contest but surrenders her crown to follow her dream of becoming a comedienne like her heroine Lucille Ball. She moves to London where she lands a role in a long-running sitcom and shoots to stardom. Hornby has a lot of fun sending up cultural snobs and punctuation pedants as well as touching on more serious subjects, such as the reality of being gay. It's a smooth and entertaining read that captures an era in British television that was more naive and immeasurably more glamorous.

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