From classic novels to recent releases, writers and critics tell the Observer which books they'll be cramming into their suitcases this summer
**Louise Doughty*
*Novelist*
*
Well-written reportage or memoir is my relaxation reading. I loved Janet Malcolm's last book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and so will be falling upon her new one, *Forty-One False Starts*, a collection of essays and profiles, if only for the great title. While we are on numbered titles, I might catch up with Elif Shafak's *The Forty Rules of Love*; with recent events in Turkey, her work has become more important than ever. Each summer, I try to read something I'm ashamed to have not read and this summer it's going to be (big admission here) Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*.
**Julian Barnes** *
*Novelist*
*
For the flight (and for a reminder that the activity was once much more dangerous) I shall take Richard Holmes's history of ballooning and balloonatics, *Falling Upwards*. As every five years or so, it's time to reread *The Great Gatsby* (which also contains a theme of upward mobility); but for once it can be followed by the chaser of Sarah Churchwell's *Careless People*, a kind of biography of that perfect novel. John Williams's *Stoner* is not about drugs – or written by the guitarist – but by a forgotten American; first published in 1965, it is one of those purely sad, sadly pure novels that deserves to be rediscovered.
**Hilary Mantel** *
*Novelist*
*
Since I holiday at home and don't have to pay excess baggage, I look forward to *Modernity Britain*, the latest in David Kynaston's series of postwar histories: these are volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face. I can recommend Louise Doughty's new thriller, *Apple Tree Yard*: guaranteed to have you on the edge of your sun-lounger. And this may be the season I finally enjoy Richard Ford's modern classic *The Sportswriter*, which has sat on my shelves for many summers.
**John Lanchester*
*Novelist*
*
Two brilliant books by young writers that I've looked at and am looking forward to reading properly are *Money* by Felix Martin and *Idiopathy* by Sam Byers. They're respectively a fascinating new way of telling the story of what money is and a mordantly riveting first novel about what it's like to be a thirtysomething. Joe Brainard's *I Remember* is republished in a beautiful new form by Notting Hill Editions. Every section in it starts with the words "I remember": it was the inspiration for two of my favourite pieces of autobiographical writing, Georges Perec's Je me souviens and Harry Mathews's The Orchard. It's a quarter of a century since I read Proust so I'm going to tackle him again, starting with the translation of *Swann's Way* by one of my favourite writers, Lydia Davis.
**Helen Dunmore *
*Poet*
*
The recent publication of Deirdre Madden's Time Present and Time Past sent me back to her earlier novels. *One By One in the Darkness* is one of the finest books I know about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. A country child's confident world is eaten away while the all-powerful adults are revealed as vulnerable, fearful, even desperate. This is history from within and it grips the heart. I'm a rereader as much as a reader, and the classic that I would take with me is Colette's *Le blé en herbe*. This coming-of-age love triangle between a boy, a girl and an older woman is the essence of summer: tender, sensuous, poignant and without illusions.
**Robert Macfarlane** *
*Travel writer*
*
I'm chairing this year's Man Booker prize jury, and we've been on a novel a day for the past 100 days, and a novel every two days for the 100 before that. So fiction will certainly not be featuring as part of my summer reading (in fact, now I think about it, reading might not be featuring as part of my summer). But among the not-novels I've been looking forward to having time to turn to, once the bulk of the Booker is done – we longlist in late July – are Tim Dee's forthcoming *Four Fields*, about grass, sunshine, life and the pastoral, and *The View from Lazy Point* by Carl Safina, the story of "a natural year in an unnatural world", written by an oceanographer who has been acclaimed in the US as Rachel Carson's successor. Both books, I anticipate, will relate dazzling close observation to the larger politics of the environment. Oh, and as part of the research for a book called Underland that I'm slowly writing, about subterranea and the worlds beneath our feet, I'll also be reading Eyal Weizman's now-classic study *Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation* (Verso).
**Stuart Evers *
*Writer*
*
Both Evie Wyld's new novel, *All the Birds, Singing*, and James Scudamore's *Wreaking* have remote, rain-riven places at their heart – perfect, then, for any kind of squall or heatwave. I'll also be taking the first of the Carrigan and Miller novels, *A Dark Redemption*, by the UK's most important, underrated crime novelist, Stav Sherez, as well as the much vaunted web thriller *Kiss Me First* by Lottie Moggach. *The Walk* by Robert Walser is my "classic author I've never read" inclusion for the year, accompanied by Jane Jacob's *The Death and Life of Great American Cities* as my non-fiction choice.
**Alexander McCall Smith*
*Novelist*
*
Peter Davidson, an art historian, has written a remarkable and unusual book, *Distance and Memory*, which is a collection of essays about place and the effect of place. I have started this book but want to make it last the summer. It is a sustained prose poem, very moving in its effect. As for novels, I shall be reading James Robertson's *Professor of Truth*, a controversial fictionalisation of the Lockerbie issue that has haunted the Scottish legal system for some time. Robertson is a very great novelist. And then there is Rosemary Goring's *After Flodden*, another real treat.
**Ali Smith *
*Novelist*
*
I'm looking forward to Bernardine Evaristo's new novel, *Mr Loverman*, out in August. It's the story of Barry, Antiguan-born Hackney local hero/antihero, who, it turns out, has been living a secret gay life (especially secret from his wife and kids) for decades. I'm a fan of Evaristo, who can take any old trail and make it blaze. This novel looks full of explosive life and mischief. I'm also reading all I can find of the 20th-century Italian writer *Giorgio Bassani*. Bassani was Jewish; he survived imprisonment and escaped the fate of so many of his fellow Jewish Ferrarese inhabitants. He spent the postwar decades using fiction to work at the knots of politics, passion and betrayal that formed the psyche of the town he knew inside out. I recently reread his novels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, in powerful new translations by the poet Jamie McKendrick; these sent me back to his other books published in the 1960s and 70s, which I'll read in the knowledge and the pleasurable hope that at some point there'll surely be McKendrick versions of these too. Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity.
**Justin Cartwright *
*Novelist**
*The Accursed* by the prolific Joyce Carol Oates is apparently a gothic novel but turns out, I am told, to be a subtle novel about fiction. WG Sebald is a great hero of mine; his work is utterly beguiling, and I can't wait to read the latest, *A Place in the Country*, a collection of his essays. As for *Animal Farm*, I have never really wanted to read it after reading Down and Out in Paris and London, and wondering how bad that could have been with a trust fund to call on. But I am aware that Animal Farm has pierced the consciousness of the world to a very deep level, so this summer I am going to read it. And I do like pigs.
**Hari Kunzru *
*Novelist*
*
In fiction, I'm looking forward to reading the reissue of Antonio Tabucchi's novel of fascist Portugal, *Pereira Maintains*, to Javier Marías's latest, *The Infatuations*, and to *Barley Patch* by the overlooked Australian master, Gerald Murnane. I'll also be packing Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster's *Stay, Illusion!*, in which the husband and wife philosopher/psychoanalyst team dive deep into Hamlet, and William Dalrymple's account of Britain's first (but not last) Afghan disaster, *Return of a King*.
**Craig Taylor *
*Journalist and playwright*
*
This summer, I'll be so deep into Canadian fiction I'll practically be living in Moose Factory or Moose Jaw. There comes a point when people, and by people I mean me, need to play catch-up with the literature of their homeland, so Morley Callaghan and Margaret Laurence await, and also Gabrielle Roy and Madeleine Thien. I can't wait to read Leanne Simpson's collection of short stories *Islands of Decolonial Love*, *The Victoria System* by Eric Reinhardt and also a book made for anyone who cares about cities: Mark Binelli's *The Last Days of Detroit*.
**Kamila Shamsie *
*Novelist**
This summer, as every summer for the past decade, I plan to read *Middlemarch* for the first time. I feel more confident that I'll get around to the more recently published books on my list (possibly because I actually own copies of them): Claire Messud's *The Woman Upstairs*, Patrick Flanery's *Fallen Land*, and the always brilliant Ali Smith's collection of lectures, *Artful*.
**Rachel Cooke *
*Observer writer**
I can't get on with my Kindle, but I will use it for reading Meg Wolitzer's fat new novel, *The Interestings*, which tells the story of six friends down the decades following their first meeting as teenagers in the summer that Nixon resigns. In paperback, I'll be taking Virago Modern Classics' new edition, with an introduction by Barbara Trapido, of Barbara Comyns's 1947 novel, *Sisters By a River*, an autobiographical tale with a wild gothic streak about five girls' struggle to bring themselves up. Comyns is brilliant, and if you haven't read her, you should. My non-fiction is going to be *Careless People* by Sarah Churchwell. Looks juicy, to say the least.
**Ali Shaw *
*Novelist**
For the past few years, when the weather's grown hotter, I've ended up reading about snow. This year, I'm about to start Yasunari Kawabata's *Snow Country*, which has been described as haiku in prose and seems like a novel to return to over and over. I shan't get as far afield as Japan this summer but I will be taking *Holloway* to Dorset. It's a short and atmospherically illustrated book about that county's sunken paths, joint-authored by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards. I'm going to find one such holloway and sit in its tunnel of branches until I've finished reading.
**Colin Thubron*
*Travel writer**
Holidays routinely promise more reading time than ever happens, but I shall take with me Gavin Francis's *Empire Antarctica*, which records 14 months among king penguins in the beauty of the west Antarctic. And* **On the Map* by Simon Garfield offers a subtle study of how maps shaped us and vice versa. Finally, I hope to tackle David Foster Wallace's enormous and extraordinary novel *Infinite Jest*, a masterpiece (it is said) of comic seriousness.
**Kate Kellaway *
*Observer writer**
I have a pile of books in waiting. They involve truancy – or a departure from the run of the mill. The new edition of *Wild Swimming* by Daniel Start could not be more beckoning, identifying every British puddle and lake worth swimming in. Jane Robins's *The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams* is a true story that has had blood-curdlingly good reviews. It is about a 1950s GP who bumped off widows with barbiturates (one to keep you alert on the beach). And I have never read *Chekhov's letters*. I expect them to be as good as – perhaps comparable to – Keats's letters.
**Wendy Cope *
*Poet**
I will be spending a month in Stratford-upon-Avon as a writer in residence, so I'll be brushing up my Shakespeare – reading plays I've never got around to, such as Timon of Athens, and rereading others. My copy of Charles Moore's *Margaret Thatcher* biography has just arrived. I know I'll enjoy that because Moore is such a good writer. However, it is a very big, heavy book – more suitable for reading at home than for travelling with. Other new books I'm keen to read include *A Delicate Truth* by John Le Carré, Fleur Adcock's new collection of poems, *Glass Wings*, and *Fifty Years in Time and Space: A Short History of Dr Who* by Frank Danes.
**Elizabeth Day *
*Observer writer**
The best holiday reading experience I had all year was taking *Americanah* by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie away with me over Easter. It is a brilliant novel: epic in scope, personal in resonance and with lots to say. This summer, I'm hugely looking forward to Viv Groskop's *I Laughed, I Cried*. I'm a big fan of Groskop's journalism and the premise of this memoir – an amateur does 100 standup gigs in 100 days – is too intriguing to resist. I've had an untouched copy of *Moby-Dick* on my bedside table for so long it's now getting embarrassing. I seem to have read an awful lot of novels inspired by it (the latest being The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach) so this might be the year that I take the plunge.
**Julie Myerson *
*Novelist**
I can't wait to reread my friend Mark Lawson's astonishingly expansive, hilarious and heartbreakingly dark new novel, *The Deaths*, which is to be published in September; I was treated to a sneak preview last year but now want to savour it as slowly as possible. I'm also going to take Kate Worsley's gender-switching *She Rises*, partly because I love historical novels but also because she's the latest graduate to be published from my husband's creative writing MA at City University. Meanwhile, Halldór Laxness's 1948 classic, *The Atom Station*, has been on my pile for a while, pressed on me by my daughter who has fantastically good taste and is fast becoming much better read than me.
**Philip French *
*Observer film critic**
The weighty volume in my holiday book bag is *Careless People*, Sarah Churchwell's enticing survey of "Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby". It has a striking cover based on Fitzgerald's 1925 bookplate. My fiction choice is John le Carré's *A Delicate Truth*. I'll be reading it in Sweden where he should have been shortlisted long ago for the Nobel prize. I've plucked from my shelves a classic I've long been intending to read: *Hunger*, the Norwegian Nobel prize-winner Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel, of which I've too often said: "No, but I've seen the movie."
**Sam Jordison *
*Writer**
I'll be taking *Elvis Died for Somebody's Sins But Not Mine* by Mick Farren. Farren wrote about everything from Johnny Cash to Richard Nixon to ebola and did it all with rage and humour, not to mention unusual precision. I'll interweave that with JW Ironmonger's *The Coincidence Authority*, hoping it will be as surprising and touching as last year's Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder. But I expect most of my time will be spent basking in *Sodom and Gomorrah*, book four of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I started reading the first book earlier this year and there's been no turning back. I know it's hardly news that Proust is good – but no one had told me how much fun he is too: how funny, how bitchy and how gloriously naughty. Getting through those millions of words isn't a challenge. It's a delight.
**Alex Preston *
*Author and journalist*
*
To Spain, in August, I'll be taking Evie Wyld's second novel, *All the Birds, Singing*. I adored her first, After the Fire, and I'm looking forward to lingering over this one on a terrace, with a glass of wine, in those precious hours after the kids are in bed. A stray comment in an interview with Günter Grass put me on to Wolfgang Koeppen's *Death in Rome*. It's an extraordinary novel, beautifully translated by Michael Hoffmann. I'm looking forward to reading the others in his "trilogy of failure"– *Pigeons on the Grass* and *The Hothouse*. Finally, I'll pack a proof copy of Anthony McGowan's *Hello Darkness*. His novels – ostensibly "young adult"– are brilliant, dark and very funny.
**Sara Wheeler *
*Travel writer and biographer*
*
I am learning Russian this year so all books point east. Much looking forward to *Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking*, a memoir by American journalist Anya von Bremzen. Also Joseph Frank's monumental biography of *Dostoevsky* – though I will have to pay excess baggage, as the condensed version comes in at 1,000 pages. Then it's *Chekhov's short stories* in a bilingual edition, starting, naturally, with "The Lady With the Dog". A daunting prospect, but what's the point in learning Russian if you can't battle through Chekhov in the original?
**Talitha Stevenson*
*Author and journalist**
I'll be rereading George Saunders's collection of short stories, *Tenth of December*, this summer – and reading all his other work for the first time. I'll also read James Salter's new novel, *All That is*. I was lucky enough to see Salter talk at the South Bank this May and he was still fiery with wit and compassion at the age of 88. I'll also be rereading Marilynne Robinson's novel *Home*, which I have been afraid to look at again for three years because she knows how to break my heart.
**Robert McCrum*
*Observer writer**
Joanna Kavenna is one of the recent "Best of Young British" Granta selections, and her satire, *Come to the Edge*, a Cold Comfort Farm for the new millennium, makes perfect summer reading: pointed, perverse, perceptive – and highly entertaining. Lara Feigel attracted very good notices for her study of literary London during the Blitz, *The Love-charm of Bombs*. Admirers of Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay and Graham Greene will marvel at the extraordinary world they inhabited during the war. An ideal book for that wet afternoon by the beach. Finally, the classic I'd always take to add a bit of texture and shade to summer's bliss is Elizabeth Taylor's masterpiece, *Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont*. Taylor is one of Austen's heirs – a wonderful comic miniaturist who deserves never to be forgotten.
**Mary Beard*
*Classicist**
Jenn Ashworth's *The Friday Gospels* will make a nicely unsettling poolside read. Brought up in a Mormon family, here she turns her fictional talents to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both its dark and its hilarious sides. Dark in a different sense is Dante's *Divine Comedy*. Clive James's new translation is wonderfully unstuffy and injects fresh life back into the poem. For those of us making for Greece, the original 2nd-century guidebook, *Pausanias's Guide to Greece* (in Peter Levi's Penguin Classics translation), offers a useful antidote to the Rough Guide and tells you what tourists 2,000 years ago got told.
**Lara Feigel*
*Author and academic**
For me, this is a summer of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, so I'll be packing *Hemingway's Boat* by Paul Hendrickson. Hemingway loved his fishing boat more enduringly than any of his wives, so making it the focus of a biography is an inspired idea. Gellhorn is now best known for her incisive journalism but she was also a wonderful novelist. I'll take *Liana* (1944), which is set on a Caribbean island and so may make appropriate beach reading. In the evenings, I'll frighten myself with Stephen Romer's *French Decadent Tales*. These are grizzly, erotic stories of macabre maniacs, elegantly translated by Romer.
**Owen Jones*
*Columnist**
It's no cheery beach read, but I'll be reading up on the human impact of austerity across Europe in *The Body Economic* by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, exposing how people's health has suffered because of savage cuts in countries such as Greece. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in to Mike Power's *Drugs 2.0*, a clever and witty take on how drug deals have gone from shady alleyways to the click of a mouse. Finally, I've shamefully never read the late Iain Banks's notoriously dark but riveting classic *The Wasp Factory*: I can't wait to rectify that.
**Stephanie Merritt*
*Novelist**
I'm looking forward to reading Camilla Lackberg's new psychological thriller, *The Lost Boy*. I've raced through the rest of her series; she creates smart crime plots with plenty of twists and I like the way she weaves in the personal lives of her detectives. I'm also taking *The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink* by Olivia Laing, an exploration of the relationship between creativity and alcohol. I'm also determined to finish *The Great Gatsby*. It's one of those classics I always pretend I've read but actually haven't, and the film has inspired me to return to it.
**William Dalrymple*
*Travel writer**
I'm taking three books with me on holiday, all by friends, that I should have read by now. Mohsin Hamid's *How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia* has had rave reviews, as has Taiye Selasi's *Ghana Must Go*, and I'm really looking forward to getting into both beside a Tuscan pool. A classic I'm also taking with me is Steve Coll's *Ghost Wars*, about US meddling in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, which I've somehow never read. I'm weighing up the pros and cons of writing a history of the Indo-Pak conflict since 1947 and no one knows the Afpak repercussions of that rivalry better than Steve.
**Lucy Lethbridge *
*Historian**
I'll be reading *And Man Created God* by Selina O'Grady, for perspective; Edith Pearlman's collection of short stories, *Binocular Vision*, for surprises; and David Kynaston's *Modernity Britain* so I can read about Terylene and Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie under an alien sun.
**Salley Vickers*
*Novelist**
I'm packing *Mr Darwin's Gardener* by Kristina Carlson – a quiet novel (my favourite kind) set in Downe, the village where Darwin spent his last years. The book is Finnish but the translation, by a mother-and-daughter team, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, is terrific and the author's grasp of England circa 1880 is utterly convincing. *Gossip from the Forest* by Sara Maitland looks to be a delightful mix of nature and magic, with no soppiness. Each chapter explores a different British forest concluding in a retelling of an old fairytale. Finally, I am taking Keats's *Selected Letters*. I've read them many times but judging the Keats-Shelley prize this year has made me want to reread.
**Catherine O'Flynn*
*Novelist**
Having grown up in a corner shop in the West Midlands, I suspect Sathnam Sanghera's *Marriage Material* will resonate. I'm expecting acerbic wit, unsentimental tenderness and a Black Country setting – what could be better? I also love the sound of Donal Ryan's *The Spinning Heart*. Told from the points of view of 21 different characters in an Irish village, it focuses inevitably on the aftermath of the recession. I plan to round off the fun with some beautifully rendered ennui and isolation, courtesy of Norwegian cartoonist *Jason*, whose back catalogue I'll be wallowing in this summer.
**Rachel Joyce*
*Novelist**
I'll be reading *Life After Life* by Kate Atkinson and Alison Moore's collection, *The Pre-War House and Other Stories*. Life After Life intrigues me – the brilliant notion that you might live your life repeatedly, shaving away at your mistakes, until you got it "right". I also love the quiet control of Alison Moore's prose, the way she guides you – through the smallest detail – into strange, dark places. I'm finally going to read *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley and, having only just discovered *Mrs Palfrey At the Claremont*, I shall read Elizabeth Taylor's books by the armful. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.
**Louise Doughty*
*Novelist*
*
Well-written reportage or memoir is my relaxation reading. I loved Janet Malcolm's last book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and so will be falling upon her new one, *Forty-One False Starts*, a collection of essays and profiles, if only for the great title. While we are on numbered titles, I might catch up with Elif Shafak's *The Forty Rules of Love*; with recent events in Turkey, her work has become more important than ever. Each summer, I try to read something I'm ashamed to have not read and this summer it's going to be (big admission here) Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*.
**Julian Barnes** *
*Novelist*
*
For the flight (and for a reminder that the activity was once much more dangerous) I shall take Richard Holmes's history of ballooning and balloonatics, *Falling Upwards*. As every five years or so, it's time to reread *The Great Gatsby* (which also contains a theme of upward mobility); but for once it can be followed by the chaser of Sarah Churchwell's *Careless People*, a kind of biography of that perfect novel. John Williams's *Stoner* is not about drugs – or written by the guitarist – but by a forgotten American; first published in 1965, it is one of those purely sad, sadly pure novels that deserves to be rediscovered.
**Hilary Mantel** *
*Novelist*
*
Since I holiday at home and don't have to pay excess baggage, I look forward to *Modernity Britain*, the latest in David Kynaston's series of postwar histories: these are volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face. I can recommend Louise Doughty's new thriller, *Apple Tree Yard*: guaranteed to have you on the edge of your sun-lounger. And this may be the season I finally enjoy Richard Ford's modern classic *The Sportswriter*, which has sat on my shelves for many summers.
**John Lanchester*
*Novelist*
*
Two brilliant books by young writers that I've looked at and am looking forward to reading properly are *Money* by Felix Martin and *Idiopathy* by Sam Byers. They're respectively a fascinating new way of telling the story of what money is and a mordantly riveting first novel about what it's like to be a thirtysomething. Joe Brainard's *I Remember* is republished in a beautiful new form by Notting Hill Editions. Every section in it starts with the words "I remember": it was the inspiration for two of my favourite pieces of autobiographical writing, Georges Perec's Je me souviens and Harry Mathews's The Orchard. It's a quarter of a century since I read Proust so I'm going to tackle him again, starting with the translation of *Swann's Way* by one of my favourite writers, Lydia Davis.
**Helen Dunmore *
*Poet*
*
The recent publication of Deirdre Madden's Time Present and Time Past sent me back to her earlier novels. *One By One in the Darkness* is one of the finest books I know about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. A country child's confident world is eaten away while the all-powerful adults are revealed as vulnerable, fearful, even desperate. This is history from within and it grips the heart. I'm a rereader as much as a reader, and the classic that I would take with me is Colette's *Le blé en herbe*. This coming-of-age love triangle between a boy, a girl and an older woman is the essence of summer: tender, sensuous, poignant and without illusions.
**Robert Macfarlane** *
*Travel writer*
*
I'm chairing this year's Man Booker prize jury, and we've been on a novel a day for the past 100 days, and a novel every two days for the 100 before that. So fiction will certainly not be featuring as part of my summer reading (in fact, now I think about it, reading might not be featuring as part of my summer). But among the not-novels I've been looking forward to having time to turn to, once the bulk of the Booker is done – we longlist in late July – are Tim Dee's forthcoming *Four Fields*, about grass, sunshine, life and the pastoral, and *The View from Lazy Point* by Carl Safina, the story of "a natural year in an unnatural world", written by an oceanographer who has been acclaimed in the US as Rachel Carson's successor. Both books, I anticipate, will relate dazzling close observation to the larger politics of the environment. Oh, and as part of the research for a book called Underland that I'm slowly writing, about subterranea and the worlds beneath our feet, I'll also be reading Eyal Weizman's now-classic study *Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation* (Verso).
**Stuart Evers *
*Writer*
*
Both Evie Wyld's new novel, *All the Birds, Singing*, and James Scudamore's *Wreaking* have remote, rain-riven places at their heart – perfect, then, for any kind of squall or heatwave. I'll also be taking the first of the Carrigan and Miller novels, *A Dark Redemption*, by the UK's most important, underrated crime novelist, Stav Sherez, as well as the much vaunted web thriller *Kiss Me First* by Lottie Moggach. *The Walk* by Robert Walser is my "classic author I've never read" inclusion for the year, accompanied by Jane Jacob's *The Death and Life of Great American Cities* as my non-fiction choice.
**Alexander McCall Smith*
*Novelist*
*
Peter Davidson, an art historian, has written a remarkable and unusual book, *Distance and Memory*, which is a collection of essays about place and the effect of place. I have started this book but want to make it last the summer. It is a sustained prose poem, very moving in its effect. As for novels, I shall be reading James Robertson's *Professor of Truth*, a controversial fictionalisation of the Lockerbie issue that has haunted the Scottish legal system for some time. Robertson is a very great novelist. And then there is Rosemary Goring's *After Flodden*, another real treat.
**Ali Smith *
*Novelist*
*
I'm looking forward to Bernardine Evaristo's new novel, *Mr Loverman*, out in August. It's the story of Barry, Antiguan-born Hackney local hero/antihero, who, it turns out, has been living a secret gay life (especially secret from his wife and kids) for decades. I'm a fan of Evaristo, who can take any old trail and make it blaze. This novel looks full of explosive life and mischief. I'm also reading all I can find of the 20th-century Italian writer *Giorgio Bassani*. Bassani was Jewish; he survived imprisonment and escaped the fate of so many of his fellow Jewish Ferrarese inhabitants. He spent the postwar decades using fiction to work at the knots of politics, passion and betrayal that formed the psyche of the town he knew inside out. I recently reread his novels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, in powerful new translations by the poet Jamie McKendrick; these sent me back to his other books published in the 1960s and 70s, which I'll read in the knowledge and the pleasurable hope that at some point there'll surely be McKendrick versions of these too. Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity.
**Justin Cartwright *
*Novelist**
*The Accursed* by the prolific Joyce Carol Oates is apparently a gothic novel but turns out, I am told, to be a subtle novel about fiction. WG Sebald is a great hero of mine; his work is utterly beguiling, and I can't wait to read the latest, *A Place in the Country*, a collection of his essays. As for *Animal Farm*, I have never really wanted to read it after reading Down and Out in Paris and London, and wondering how bad that could have been with a trust fund to call on. But I am aware that Animal Farm has pierced the consciousness of the world to a very deep level, so this summer I am going to read it. And I do like pigs.
**Hari Kunzru *
*Novelist*
*
In fiction, I'm looking forward to reading the reissue of Antonio Tabucchi's novel of fascist Portugal, *Pereira Maintains*, to Javier Marías's latest, *The Infatuations*, and to *Barley Patch* by the overlooked Australian master, Gerald Murnane. I'll also be packing Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster's *Stay, Illusion!*, in which the husband and wife philosopher/psychoanalyst team dive deep into Hamlet, and William Dalrymple's account of Britain's first (but not last) Afghan disaster, *Return of a King*.
**Craig Taylor *
*Journalist and playwright*
*
This summer, I'll be so deep into Canadian fiction I'll practically be living in Moose Factory or Moose Jaw. There comes a point when people, and by people I mean me, need to play catch-up with the literature of their homeland, so Morley Callaghan and Margaret Laurence await, and also Gabrielle Roy and Madeleine Thien. I can't wait to read Leanne Simpson's collection of short stories *Islands of Decolonial Love*, *The Victoria System* by Eric Reinhardt and also a book made for anyone who cares about cities: Mark Binelli's *The Last Days of Detroit*.
**Kamila Shamsie *
*Novelist**
This summer, as every summer for the past decade, I plan to read *Middlemarch* for the first time. I feel more confident that I'll get around to the more recently published books on my list (possibly because I actually own copies of them): Claire Messud's *The Woman Upstairs*, Patrick Flanery's *Fallen Land*, and the always brilliant Ali Smith's collection of lectures, *Artful*.
**Rachel Cooke *
*Observer writer**
I can't get on with my Kindle, but I will use it for reading Meg Wolitzer's fat new novel, *The Interestings*, which tells the story of six friends down the decades following their first meeting as teenagers in the summer that Nixon resigns. In paperback, I'll be taking Virago Modern Classics' new edition, with an introduction by Barbara Trapido, of Barbara Comyns's 1947 novel, *Sisters By a River*, an autobiographical tale with a wild gothic streak about five girls' struggle to bring themselves up. Comyns is brilliant, and if you haven't read her, you should. My non-fiction is going to be *Careless People* by Sarah Churchwell. Looks juicy, to say the least.
**Ali Shaw *
*Novelist**
For the past few years, when the weather's grown hotter, I've ended up reading about snow. This year, I'm about to start Yasunari Kawabata's *Snow Country*, which has been described as haiku in prose and seems like a novel to return to over and over. I shan't get as far afield as Japan this summer but I will be taking *Holloway* to Dorset. It's a short and atmospherically illustrated book about that county's sunken paths, joint-authored by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards. I'm going to find one such holloway and sit in its tunnel of branches until I've finished reading.
**Colin Thubron*
*Travel writer**
Holidays routinely promise more reading time than ever happens, but I shall take with me Gavin Francis's *Empire Antarctica*, which records 14 months among king penguins in the beauty of the west Antarctic. And* **On the Map* by Simon Garfield offers a subtle study of how maps shaped us and vice versa. Finally, I hope to tackle David Foster Wallace's enormous and extraordinary novel *Infinite Jest*, a masterpiece (it is said) of comic seriousness.
**Kate Kellaway *
*Observer writer**
I have a pile of books in waiting. They involve truancy – or a departure from the run of the mill. The new edition of *Wild Swimming* by Daniel Start could not be more beckoning, identifying every British puddle and lake worth swimming in. Jane Robins's *The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams* is a true story that has had blood-curdlingly good reviews. It is about a 1950s GP who bumped off widows with barbiturates (one to keep you alert on the beach). And I have never read *Chekhov's letters*. I expect them to be as good as – perhaps comparable to – Keats's letters.
**Wendy Cope *
*Poet**
I will be spending a month in Stratford-upon-Avon as a writer in residence, so I'll be brushing up my Shakespeare – reading plays I've never got around to, such as Timon of Athens, and rereading others. My copy of Charles Moore's *Margaret Thatcher* biography has just arrived. I know I'll enjoy that because Moore is such a good writer. However, it is a very big, heavy book – more suitable for reading at home than for travelling with. Other new books I'm keen to read include *A Delicate Truth* by John Le Carré, Fleur Adcock's new collection of poems, *Glass Wings*, and *Fifty Years in Time and Space: A Short History of Dr Who* by Frank Danes.
**Elizabeth Day *
*Observer writer**
The best holiday reading experience I had all year was taking *Americanah* by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie away with me over Easter. It is a brilliant novel: epic in scope, personal in resonance and with lots to say. This summer, I'm hugely looking forward to Viv Groskop's *I Laughed, I Cried*. I'm a big fan of Groskop's journalism and the premise of this memoir – an amateur does 100 standup gigs in 100 days – is too intriguing to resist. I've had an untouched copy of *Moby-Dick* on my bedside table for so long it's now getting embarrassing. I seem to have read an awful lot of novels inspired by it (the latest being The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach) so this might be the year that I take the plunge.
**Julie Myerson *
*Novelist**
I can't wait to reread my friend Mark Lawson's astonishingly expansive, hilarious and heartbreakingly dark new novel, *The Deaths*, which is to be published in September; I was treated to a sneak preview last year but now want to savour it as slowly as possible. I'm also going to take Kate Worsley's gender-switching *She Rises*, partly because I love historical novels but also because she's the latest graduate to be published from my husband's creative writing MA at City University. Meanwhile, Halldór Laxness's 1948 classic, *The Atom Station*, has been on my pile for a while, pressed on me by my daughter who has fantastically good taste and is fast becoming much better read than me.
**Philip French *
*Observer film critic**
The weighty volume in my holiday book bag is *Careless People*, Sarah Churchwell's enticing survey of "Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby". It has a striking cover based on Fitzgerald's 1925 bookplate. My fiction choice is John le Carré's *A Delicate Truth*. I'll be reading it in Sweden where he should have been shortlisted long ago for the Nobel prize. I've plucked from my shelves a classic I've long been intending to read: *Hunger*, the Norwegian Nobel prize-winner Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel, of which I've too often said: "No, but I've seen the movie."
**Sam Jordison *
*Writer**
I'll be taking *Elvis Died for Somebody's Sins But Not Mine* by Mick Farren. Farren wrote about everything from Johnny Cash to Richard Nixon to ebola and did it all with rage and humour, not to mention unusual precision. I'll interweave that with JW Ironmonger's *The Coincidence Authority*, hoping it will be as surprising and touching as last year's Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder. But I expect most of my time will be spent basking in *Sodom and Gomorrah*, book four of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I started reading the first book earlier this year and there's been no turning back. I know it's hardly news that Proust is good – but no one had told me how much fun he is too: how funny, how bitchy and how gloriously naughty. Getting through those millions of words isn't a challenge. It's a delight.
**Alex Preston *
*Author and journalist*
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To Spain, in August, I'll be taking Evie Wyld's second novel, *All the Birds, Singing*. I adored her first, After the Fire, and I'm looking forward to lingering over this one on a terrace, with a glass of wine, in those precious hours after the kids are in bed. A stray comment in an interview with Günter Grass put me on to Wolfgang Koeppen's *Death in Rome*. It's an extraordinary novel, beautifully translated by Michael Hoffmann. I'm looking forward to reading the others in his "trilogy of failure"– *Pigeons on the Grass* and *The Hothouse*. Finally, I'll pack a proof copy of Anthony McGowan's *Hello Darkness*. His novels – ostensibly "young adult"– are brilliant, dark and very funny.
**Sara Wheeler *
*Travel writer and biographer*
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I am learning Russian this year so all books point east. Much looking forward to *Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking*, a memoir by American journalist Anya von Bremzen. Also Joseph Frank's monumental biography of *Dostoevsky* – though I will have to pay excess baggage, as the condensed version comes in at 1,000 pages. Then it's *Chekhov's short stories* in a bilingual edition, starting, naturally, with "The Lady With the Dog". A daunting prospect, but what's the point in learning Russian if you can't battle through Chekhov in the original?
**Talitha Stevenson*
*Author and journalist**
I'll be rereading George Saunders's collection of short stories, *Tenth of December*, this summer – and reading all his other work for the first time. I'll also read James Salter's new novel, *All That is*. I was lucky enough to see Salter talk at the South Bank this May and he was still fiery with wit and compassion at the age of 88. I'll also be rereading Marilynne Robinson's novel *Home*, which I have been afraid to look at again for three years because she knows how to break my heart.
**Robert McCrum*
*Observer writer**
Joanna Kavenna is one of the recent "Best of Young British" Granta selections, and her satire, *Come to the Edge*, a Cold Comfort Farm for the new millennium, makes perfect summer reading: pointed, perverse, perceptive – and highly entertaining. Lara Feigel attracted very good notices for her study of literary London during the Blitz, *The Love-charm of Bombs*. Admirers of Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay and Graham Greene will marvel at the extraordinary world they inhabited during the war. An ideal book for that wet afternoon by the beach. Finally, the classic I'd always take to add a bit of texture and shade to summer's bliss is Elizabeth Taylor's masterpiece, *Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont*. Taylor is one of Austen's heirs – a wonderful comic miniaturist who deserves never to be forgotten.
**Mary Beard*
*Classicist**
Jenn Ashworth's *The Friday Gospels* will make a nicely unsettling poolside read. Brought up in a Mormon family, here she turns her fictional talents to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both its dark and its hilarious sides. Dark in a different sense is Dante's *Divine Comedy*. Clive James's new translation is wonderfully unstuffy and injects fresh life back into the poem. For those of us making for Greece, the original 2nd-century guidebook, *Pausanias's Guide to Greece* (in Peter Levi's Penguin Classics translation), offers a useful antidote to the Rough Guide and tells you what tourists 2,000 years ago got told.
**Lara Feigel*
*Author and academic**
For me, this is a summer of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, so I'll be packing *Hemingway's Boat* by Paul Hendrickson. Hemingway loved his fishing boat more enduringly than any of his wives, so making it the focus of a biography is an inspired idea. Gellhorn is now best known for her incisive journalism but she was also a wonderful novelist. I'll take *Liana* (1944), which is set on a Caribbean island and so may make appropriate beach reading. In the evenings, I'll frighten myself with Stephen Romer's *French Decadent Tales*. These are grizzly, erotic stories of macabre maniacs, elegantly translated by Romer.
**Owen Jones*
*Columnist**
It's no cheery beach read, but I'll be reading up on the human impact of austerity across Europe in *The Body Economic* by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, exposing how people's health has suffered because of savage cuts in countries such as Greece. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in to Mike Power's *Drugs 2.0*, a clever and witty take on how drug deals have gone from shady alleyways to the click of a mouse. Finally, I've shamefully never read the late Iain Banks's notoriously dark but riveting classic *The Wasp Factory*: I can't wait to rectify that.
**Stephanie Merritt*
*Novelist**
I'm looking forward to reading Camilla Lackberg's new psychological thriller, *The Lost Boy*. I've raced through the rest of her series; she creates smart crime plots with plenty of twists and I like the way she weaves in the personal lives of her detectives. I'm also taking *The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink* by Olivia Laing, an exploration of the relationship between creativity and alcohol. I'm also determined to finish *The Great Gatsby*. It's one of those classics I always pretend I've read but actually haven't, and the film has inspired me to return to it.
**William Dalrymple*
*Travel writer**
I'm taking three books with me on holiday, all by friends, that I should have read by now. Mohsin Hamid's *How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia* has had rave reviews, as has Taiye Selasi's *Ghana Must Go*, and I'm really looking forward to getting into both beside a Tuscan pool. A classic I'm also taking with me is Steve Coll's *Ghost Wars*, about US meddling in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, which I've somehow never read. I'm weighing up the pros and cons of writing a history of the Indo-Pak conflict since 1947 and no one knows the Afpak repercussions of that rivalry better than Steve.
**Lucy Lethbridge *
*Historian**
I'll be reading *And Man Created God* by Selina O'Grady, for perspective; Edith Pearlman's collection of short stories, *Binocular Vision*, for surprises; and David Kynaston's *Modernity Britain* so I can read about Terylene and Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie under an alien sun.
**Salley Vickers*
*Novelist**
I'm packing *Mr Darwin's Gardener* by Kristina Carlson – a quiet novel (my favourite kind) set in Downe, the village where Darwin spent his last years. The book is Finnish but the translation, by a mother-and-daughter team, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, is terrific and the author's grasp of England circa 1880 is utterly convincing. *Gossip from the Forest* by Sara Maitland looks to be a delightful mix of nature and magic, with no soppiness. Each chapter explores a different British forest concluding in a retelling of an old fairytale. Finally, I am taking Keats's *Selected Letters*. I've read them many times but judging the Keats-Shelley prize this year has made me want to reread.
**Catherine O'Flynn*
*Novelist**
Having grown up in a corner shop in the West Midlands, I suspect Sathnam Sanghera's *Marriage Material* will resonate. I'm expecting acerbic wit, unsentimental tenderness and a Black Country setting – what could be better? I also love the sound of Donal Ryan's *The Spinning Heart*. Told from the points of view of 21 different characters in an Irish village, it focuses inevitably on the aftermath of the recession. I plan to round off the fun with some beautifully rendered ennui and isolation, courtesy of Norwegian cartoonist *Jason*, whose back catalogue I'll be wallowing in this summer.
**Rachel Joyce*
*Novelist**
I'll be reading *Life After Life* by Kate Atkinson and Alison Moore's collection, *The Pre-War House and Other Stories*. Life After Life intrigues me – the brilliant notion that you might live your life repeatedly, shaving away at your mistakes, until you got it "right". I also love the quiet control of Alison Moore's prose, the way she guides you – through the smallest detail – into strange, dark places. I'm finally going to read *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley and, having only just discovered *Mrs Palfrey At the Claremont*, I shall read Elizabeth Taylor's books by the armful. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.