Feel the burn: why holidays from hell make for blistering fiction

Family fallouts, failing marriages, sunburn, food poisoning ... from Deborah Levy’s hypnotic and disturbing Hot Milk to All In, Claire Powell’s all-inclusive nightmare, Leon Craig looks at the best novels about vile vacationsEvery summer, we long for a much-needed break from daily life, dreaming of self-reinvention in some distant paradise. But really, holidays can be absolute hell. Instead of relaxation we encounter heaving crowds, lumpy beds, the caprices of our loved ones and the grim truth that we can escape neither their worst failings nor our own, however far we travel.Small wonder, then, that the disaster holiday has become a booming subgenre in fiction. For most of us, the levels of luxury promised by hit TV series The White Lotus are pure fantasy, yet we’re all vulnerable to the expensive promises we’ve been sold. Two of the smartest offerings in fiction this summer come from Claire Powell’s All In and Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. In the former, a struggling coup