Summer reading special

Lynn Truss

Daphne du Maurier was the subject of a splendid panel event at the Charleston Festival recently; in the course of it, one of the speakers referred to the pleasure of "innocent reading" - and everyone knew exactly what she meant. Personally, I had re-experienced "innocent reading" just a month or so previously, when I'd picked up My Cousin Rachel, started it on a Sunday afternoon, and actually stayed up half the night to finish it. It was fabulous. I was feverish with narrative anxiety. Did Rachel kill Ambrose, or did she love him? Was she bad, or just beautiful? Why didn't any modern novels make me stay up all night? Why did I usually turn a page or two in a ho-hum fashion and then think, gratefully, "Well, early start tomorrow!" and switch off the light?

I'm assuming a perfect summer read is one that hooks you in this way, but maybe I'm thinking only of single people who don't have to consider the feelings of companions who might welcome an occasional chat (or, indeed, any other sign of life besides rhythmic page-turning). Oh well. It can't be helped. For all happy solipsists, then, I would certainly recommend any Daphne du Maurier, but in particular The Scapegoat (Virago), which is one of the least well known. It's a doubles story set in France, in which one man not only takes on the life of another, but tries to live it better than its true owner, and I haven't read it for years but am really looking forward to it. I remember the bloated "Maman" with her addiction to morphine, and the child who's a religious maniac, and the moment our hero innocently doles out presents to the wrong people in his family, causing a lot of offence and confusion. The only trouble with such a summer read, in my view, is that it will last you a few hours at most, and then you'll want another one. So take a few, is my advice.

'A Certain Age', 12 monologues by Lynne Truss is published by Profile

Owen Sheers

The Welsh poet Dannie Abse's latest book, The Presence, might not be the most obvious summer read, but this journal/eulogy in memory of his late wife, his "lover, ally and friend" Joan, is, for all its painful honesty, a surprisingly joyful and compelling book. It is also simply too good and beautiful not to mention. Both a map of Abse's grief and his love, The Presence is a powerful reminder of how those two emotions are the rough and smooth sides of the same coin. Using contemporary triggers, Abse, one of the world's great anecdotalists, travels between "then" and " now" to paint not just the journey of his married life, but also a touching portrait of the man in the writing life, and the writer in the man's life.

Scattered with poems, extracts and reflections on art, The Presence is imbued with all the best qualities of what it means to be human and in love. Although the pain of loss is acute throughout, the book reaches a calm and confirming conclusion. The past may haunt us at times, but, Abse reminds us, "it can indeed be a sanctuary", too.

'Resistance' by Owen Sheers is published by Faber

Lavinia Greenlaw

Earlier this year I saw Katie Mitchell's remarkable stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and I've been hearing its voices ever since. As a student, I self-consciously read it as Modernist statement but what Mitchell made me think about was Woolf's more fundamental interest in how we build ourselves out of perpetual reconstruction and breaking down, and how the parts of ourselves can brighten or harden; how apart we are within ourselves as well as from each other. I am 25 years older than when I first read it, less interested in theory and more in "life in general", which is what Woolf intended the book to be about. I'll take it somewhere quiet and read it slowly , maybe even aloud.

'The Importance of Music to Girls' by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber in August

Neil Gaiman

Right now I'm sort of on holiday and when I can snatch a moment to read I'm rereading Kipling's The Jungle Book, and am surprised and fascinated, as I always am with Kipling, how what I imagine to be comfort reading really isn't - it's too spiky and too sharp. Kipling's jungle isn't Disney's, and death is always present. I think in memory I'd smoothed out some of the bumpier, stranger stuff, but Kipling is an author who can bear rereading. You aren't the same person you were the last time you read him.

'Fragile Things', a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman, is published by Headline Review

Antony Beevor

Carmen La Foret's astonishing first novel Nada (Harvill Secker trs Edith Grossman) is set in post-civil war Barcelona, an era made famous by The Shadow of the Wind, but her book is far better written and more important. Her semi-autobiographical character comes to Barcelona to study and has to lodge in a nightmare apartment inhabited by her grandmother and mad uncles and aunts. This bildungsroman is undoubtedly the most original and fascinating work revealing the moral vacuum at the heart of Franco's " New Spain" and Harvill is to be congratulated for bringing it to an English audience at long last.

'The Battle for Spain' by Antony Beevor is published by Phoenix

Matthew Kneale

I'd nominate Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History (Pan). I've always been fascinated by this strange corner of history, when the Roman Empire began to disintegrate into medieval Europe. Peter Heather's dazzling new history is the first book that makes sense to me of what happened. Drawing together extensive new evidence accumulated during recent decades, his book is above all a corrective to the Gibbon myth. Heather's late western Roman Empire is an arrogant, cohesively Christian and very resilient beast, run by an educated ruling class that, memorably, he likens to the world of Jane Austen. Heather's Rome takes a long time to die, threatening, to the very end to come back to life. Sudden close ups, of a city, an individual, a moment, illustrate the larger changes with vivid clarity.

Heather, like Gibbon, believes that, in the long term, the Empire's fall was probably a good thing for Europe. But, chillingly, he also points out that with its death, literacy, which had been the entrance ticket to the Empire's huge, landowning elite, became a virtual monopoly of the church, making western knowledge a plaything of the theologians. A wonderful book, fascinating, illuminating and compulsive.

'When We Were Romans' by Matthew Kneale is published by Picador

Charles Spencer

Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk (Picador) is, put simply, brilliant. I wish it was not - I sadly resent my friends' literary successes - but there we are. Evelyn Waugh would be delighted with the malevolent crack of the whip with which Teddy controls his ghastly cast of upper-middle class ghouls. The tensions of family relationships, the failings of parents, the vulnerability of children: all are dissected with stabbing prose, which makes the reader wince at its cruel precision. St Aubyn has thrilled a small but appreciative fan-base in the past. This is his breakthrough novel - award-winning, spine-tingling, and totally unforgiving. It's not a comfortable summer read, but it is a compelling one. And quite unforgettable.

Esther Freud

I've just read the most wonderful book by Anita Amirrezvani. The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review) is set in 17th-century Iran and follows the adventures of a young woman who must depend upon the charity of relations and the hope of a good marriage after her father is struck down in the year an evil comet launches itself across the skies of her village. Her relations sell her off into a shameful marriage but she, a talented carpet maker, has other plans. It is fascinating, totally original and utterly gripping. It will remain one of my favourite books.

'Love Falls' by Esther Freud is published by Bloomsbury

Monica Ali

I'm taking a stack of research reading and I'll do what I always do in the summer holidays, revisit a classic or two or try to fill in one of the numerous gaps. This year I'm taking Gogol's Dead Souls and a collection of his plays because, to my shame, I've only read a few of his short stories. I'm also looking forward to Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (Fourth Estate) which I've been saving for a holiday read. And look out for The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander (Faber), published in August. It's a terrific novel, set at the start of Argentina's Dirty War. Englander's writing has been compared to Chekhov, and I suspect that reading him is what's made me want to plunge into Gogol this year.

'Alentejo Blue' by Monica Ali is published by Black Swan

D J Taylor

Summer holidays are about the only time in the year one can pursue the obscure, and in some cases barely admissable interests, that rarely get a look-in elsewhere in the calendar. One of mine is the kind of underground rock music from the 1970s represented in Carol Clerk's monumental The Saga of Hawkwind (Omnibus £10.95). Apart from this there are also classics to revisit. This year I have my eye on Thackeray's Pendennis, only a whit less good than Vanity Fair, and, like Gissing's New Grub Street and Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room, a grimly entertaining exposé of the fraught and cluttered landscapes in which books get written.

'Returning: Three Novels' by D J Taylor is published by Timewell Press

Paul Magrs

The perfect summer read for me this year is the complete sequence of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. When I read them last time I was younger than all of the characters, now I'm older than most. It's a hectic jigsaw - one great big novel covering decades. It's easy to forget how good and skilful he is as a novelist. I guess he gets underestimated because he's funny and life-affirming.

'Never the Bride' by Paul Magrs is published by Headline Review

Brian Thompson

Those who know him by the savage relish of his political cartoons , a jab in the eye with a sharp nib, will find Martin Rowson's Stuff (Cape) a wonderful and beautifully crafted memoir, perfect for a foreign beach. Indeed, had Stuff been first published in French and in Paris, that distinguished smoothie from the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the next table would be reading it with the attention due a work of art . Rowson is, as they say in France, un homme serieux. He writes like a dream, has compassion enough to make you gulp, and in these pages you will find a calm voice as memorable as the spluttering, frenetic line of his cartoons. A box of complicated delights. You won't be disappointed.

'Clever Girl' by Brian Thompson is published by Atlantic

Jeanette Winterson

I'd take Ali Smith anywhere with me, in person or in my pocket, and if for some weird reason you haven't read Hotel World or The Accidental (Penguin) now is the perfect holiday moment. If you don't fancy Ali, At the Same Time, Susan Sontag's final collection of essays, is just the thing for beach-guilt.

Jeanette Winterson's new novel, 'The Stone Gods', is published by Hamish Hamilton in September

Mark Gatiss

I urge you to read North Soho 999 by Paul Willetts (Dewi Lewis). It's the absolutely gripping true story of an armed raid on a Fitzrovia jewellers/ pawnbrokers that escalated into a huge manhunt. The book drips with a fantastic Austerity Britain atmosphere, a place of flick-knives and gangsters and a capital awash with the plundered firearms of the recent war. It reads like a novel and is amazingly relevant, showing how the same terrors and preoccupations about society spinning out of control have always been with us.

'The Devil in Amber' by Mark Gatiss is published by Pocket Books

Gwendoline Riley

Another Life by Yuri Trifonov opens in Moscow in the 1970s, as Olga, recently widowed, tries to come to terms with her husband Sergei's death, and find the meaning in the life they spent together. Their first meeting, at a dacha, where they go night-swimming together, is as beautifully rendered as any of Chekhov's or Turgenev's accounts of young love. Later, living in a cramped apartment, the couple are beset by squabbles, a broken TV set, various in-laws. Sergei, a historian, feels the sting of his thwarted ambitions and the petty swipes of his colleagues. Olga, always so resourceful and strong, becomes annoyed and eventually terribly frightened of Sergei's fitful, desperate, search for "another life", which ultimately - and heart-breakingly - leads him to an obsession with parapsychology. Trifonov alludes to Pasternak in this novel, and nowhere more so than in the eerie final chapter, as, in a dream, Olga again walks with Sergei, recalling, to me at least, the refrain of Zhivago's final poem for Lara: "Tightly closing eyelids. / Heights and cloudy spheres. / Rivers. Waters. Boulders. / Centuries and years."

'Joshua Spassky' by Gwendoline Riley is published by Cape

Sam North

In summer, when I turn the pages of a book I want to feel a slight giddiness, a sense of wonder, and of being looked after. I found exactly these sensational ingredients in a novel on a recent flight back from the Greek island of Paros. I gripped this paperback hard in both hands, I was so pleased with it. I rocked back and forth in my airline seat, trying not to alarm my fellow passengers, thinking that such pleasure must look and sound like an epileptic fit, and of course made a worse fist of it, choking on half swallowed laughter. I stared at the large author photograph. Handsome toad! A writer who has triumphed over his cynicism long enough to be an utterly generous and giving and funny writer. James Hamilton-Paterson, come over right now and cook us a meal, any meal, and we'll eat it in my sunny yard! His book is the second Gerald Samper novel, and it's called Amazing Disgrace (Faber).

'The Old Country' by Sam North is published by Simon & Schuster

Sarah Hall

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman: this novel begins in 1911 with its narrator, and the artist of the book's title, introducing himself as the man responsible for murdering the local lighthouse keeper. Thereafter we learn what drove Fabian Vas to such an act, and how the eccentric folk in his remote community of Witless Bay relate to the crime. In the course of the story, Fabian has to navigate coffee-addiction, the tough ornithological tutorage of Isaac Sprague, his mother's infidelity, the bold affections of whisky-drinking Margaret Handle, an arranged marriage, a trial, and the rarely-spotted migratory garganey. But it is his art that finally provides him with the opportunity of redemption.

It's an original, salty, beautifully told tale - perfect to read with waves breaking in the background, transporting and invigorating for anyone stuck at home.

'The Carhullan Army' by Sarah Hall is published by Faber in August

Douglas Kennedy

Summer is, of course, the alleged escapism season. But perhaps the best escape is looking at other people's turgid realities - which is why I would instantly nominate Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as the ultimate summer read. Flaubert essentially invented the modern novel with this book, for he u nderstood before everyone else that boredom is one of the great motivating factors in human endeavour. This tough and uncompromising study of a doctor's wife in a small provincial town in northern France remains one of the great fictional accounts of the lengths we will go to in order to find meaning amidst the meaningless of quotidian existence. Note how Flaubert has Emma become a Diana-style fantasist in the initial throes of her passion for an opportunistic Army chap, then turns her into a shopaholic in the final stages of her depression. He comprehended, long before the mavens of pop psychology, the link between the acquisitive impulse and personal despair ... just as he also understood that the creation of a personal melodrama is one way of coping with existential ennui. It remains an amazing novel, simultaneously sad and appalling in its understanding of the banality with which we all grapple.

'The Woman in the Fifth' by Douglas Kennedy is published by Hutchinson

Richard Flanagan

In Australia it is often a hot and laborious journey to the beach, no matter how close, and so I tend to concentrate my pleasures. Accordingly, I would recommend three of the greatest novels ever written: Anna Karenina (the best book ever on love), Anna Karenina (the most wonderful characters in literature), and Anna Karenina (the most insightful rendering of society). My preferred translation is by Pevear and Volokhonsky, though its brilliance survives the perils and fires of any translation. Anna Karenina incurs a lesser carbon credit than a bag of several lesser books for those nations that must fly to find sun.

'The Unknown Terrorist' by Richard Flanagan is published by Atlantic

Sue Gee

Summer 2003: a Turkish fishing village. Shady villa, in a burning garden, the sea just over the wall. At last I read Proust: Swann's Way, volume one of Remembrance of Things Past. I lost myself in a French provincial town. At the centre, a child haunted by night terrors, longing for mama, growing up to move through the glittering salons of Paris, bewitched by Odette, his first love. He dips a little cake in a fragrant cup of tea, and is flooded by recollection. Now, spending so much time in the past, I admire more than ever Proust's magical recreation.

'Reading in Bed' by Sue Gee is published by Headline Review

Claire Tomalin

Rose Tremain is a marvellous novelist, bold, adventurous, always surprising, and The Road Home (Chatto) puts us inside Lev, who journeys on the bus from Eastern Europe to make money in London. The time is now, and his poverty and struggle are painfully believable, and make a walk round town quite a different experience.

Tono-Bungay, H.G. Wells's 1909 account of how a good PR campaign can make a man selling rubbish into a millionaire, is worth reading, or re-reading, for its energy, intelligence and inventiveness. And don't forget to pick up a copy of On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan's curdling tale of a wedding night that goes wrong, carrying embarrassment to a depth probably never before plumbed. Wow!

'Thomas Hardy: the time-torn man' by Clarie Tomalin is published by Penguin

Julia Stuart

Heathrow in the summer is a unique form of torture. Your best method of defence is to slip a copy of Edward Gorey's The Unstrung Harp into your hand luggage. You will have finished it by the time you board the plane. In the meantime, you will have made an unforgettable journey to the droll and eccentric world of Mr Earbrass as he endeavours to write his next novel. Gorey's illustrations are as masterful as his prose.

'The Matchmaker of Périgord' by Julia Stuart is published by Doubleday

Peter Stanford

There is something about being away from the frenzy of daily life that allows you sufficient distance to reflect on how you are doing as a parent, and, therefore, almost inevitably, on how you were parented. That's why memoirs are always my favourite summer reading, as I gain insights into my own family background by reading about others. John Lanchester's Family Romance (Faber, £16.99) unveils a distorting secret in his childhood. Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House (Simon and Schuster) has an unusual setting and the steadying device of her mother's commentary as her daughter revisits her girlhood, and Andrew Motion's In The Blood (Faber) sounds a warning for all boys who love their mums a bit too much.

'C Day-Lewis: A Life' by Peter Stanford is published by Continuum

Adam Thirlwell

Exhausted by the pool, ravaged by the heat, the holidaying reader needs, I think, the pleasures of plot. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is massive, funny, moving, exhaustingly gripping: a melodrama, a revenge drama and, literally, bodice-ripping. And a new translation by Richard Pevear has just come out in paperback from Penguin, deftly accurate to the spikiness and speed of Dumas's storytelling chutzpah.

'Miss Herbert' by Adam Thirlwell is published by Cape in October

Amanda Craig

I recommend Steph Penney's dazzling detective story, The Tenderness of Wolves (Quercus), about a middle-aged mother with agoraphobia crossing the Canadian wastes with a native tracker to find her lost son. Douglas Kennedy's gripping, noir vision of Paris through an American's in The Woman in the Fifth is an ideal companion to take as you flee the city.

'Love in Idleness' by Amanda Craig is published by Abacus

Toby Litt

If, like me, you've always been a bit suspicious of musicians who insist that they're keeping it real, then Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor (Faber) should help you pinpoint why. Starting with a chapter on Kurt Cobain's death-bound cover of Leadbelly's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", the book amusingly anatomises a whole series of case studies, from the Archies to Neil Young. Musicians generally talk a lot of rubbish - as self-protection, for the most part. This book is, in all senses, a reality check.

'Hospital' by Toby Litt is published by Hamish Hamilton

Christopher Fowler

Summer Chills (Carroll & Graf) is a terrific anthology of creepy vacation tales that may put you off taking a holiday at all; The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin (Faber) is an intelligent, gorgeous and evocative mystery set in the Ottoman Empire; and I'd also recommend Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties by Peter Hennessey (Penguin £9.99). While you're sipping a cocktail, look back to a time when the very idea was decadent beyond belief.

'White Corridor' by Chistopher Fowler is published by Doubleday

Six crime novels to keep you absorbed while queueing at the airport

White Corridor by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)

Another triumph for the Peculiar Crimes Unit as Bryant and May, the geriatric 'tecs, solve a murder while stuck in a snowdrift

The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics by Nury Vittachi (Polygon)

Feng Shui master C F Wong thwarts a gang of vegan terrorists with his crazy band of psychic practitioners. Wacky, original and fun

End Games by Michael Dibdin (Faber)

An American billionaire filming in Sicily, a complicated scam involving antiquities, and echoes of the 'Book of Revelation'. Aurelio Zen's last case, alas

Little Sister by Laura Lippman (Orion)

One of two sisters abducted in the 1980s returns home, but is she an imposter? And what happened to the other girl? You won't guess until the last page

Invisible Prey by John Sandford (Simon & Schuster)

A pair of old ladies are murdered and valuable artefacts go missing. It's made to look random, but Detective Lucas Davenport ain't fooled

Chasers by Lorenzo Carcaterra (Simon & Schuster)

A posse of New York vigilantes takes on the South American criminals looking to take over the city's drug trade. Outstanding

Engrossing non-fiction for those who like to look intellectual on the beach

Decency and Disorder by Ben Wilson (Faber)

How did the racy Georgians turn into the staid Victorians? Brilliant 27-year-old historian Ben Wilson outlines the vast cultural forces at work in the 'Age of Cant'

Thomas Cromwell by Robert Hutchinson (Weidenfeld)

Henry VIII's sinister henchman brought to book in an excellent study of greed, power and paranoia. Full-blooded Tudor history

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin (Picador)

The author of 'Mukiwa: a white boy in Africa' returns to a Zimbabwe, in ruins: shocking, moving and unputdownable

Paper Houses by Michèle Roberts (Little, Brown)

The acclaimed novelist looks back wryly at her radical feminist youth, a time of agitprop and experiments in love and living

Wild by Jay Griffiths (Hamish Hamilton)

A study of the world's wildernesses that is passionate, original and revealing, moving from the Amazon to the Arctic to the outback

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic)

Formidably intelligent, razor-sharp investigation of the claims and nature of religion. The 'anti' case has never been put so brilliantly

Gripping literary fiction to transport you to another dimension...

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas (Canongate)

Young academic Ariel Manto reads a cursed book which propels her into an alternative reality where she finds herself in great danger

Love Falls by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury)

Innocence meets libertinism as a teenager summering in Tuscany with her old goat of a father falls in with the local wealthy set

South of the River by Blake Morrison (Chatto)

The Blair years surveyed from the vantage point of a failed, adulterous writer and his ambitious wife

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (Picador)

Futuristic love story set in a broken-down, ruinous America as a mismatched couple risk bandits, murder and abduction to flee for the coast

The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson (Canongate)

A reclusive writer holed up in a palazzo in Venice takes in a young, would-be biographer and a deadly game of cat-and-mouse begins

Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)

Druggies, refugees, misfits and the deranged converge on Ashford in Kent. An idiosyncratic, witty and utterly original vision of Albion

Travelling light? There's room for a slender volume of poetry in the tiniest bag

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight trs Simon Armitage (Faber)

Gawain sets off to fight the terrifying Green Knight but is waylaid in a hospitable castle on the way. A new classic

The Best Man That Ever Was by Annie Freud (Picador)

Sly humour and a sharp eye for human foibles and the vagaries of modern life are the hallmarks of this quirky debut

Windrush Songs by James Berry (Bloodaxe)

The poignant, hopeful voices of Jamaicans who came to Britain in 1948 on the Windrush echo through this dramatic collection

The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig (Picador)

Taking inspiration from the 14th-century 'Roman de Fauvel', Duhig's witty, serious verse finds much modern resonance in the world of the Crusades

Orpheus by Don Paterson (Faber)

A version of Rilke's tricky and profound 'Sonnets to Orpheus' by one of our most accomplished poets, this is beautifully baffling and intriguing by turns

New Caribbean Poetry ed Kei Miller (Carcanet)

A tremendous range of writing as excellent Jamaican poets rub shoulders with peers from Haiti, Trinidad and the Bahamas. Diverse and stimulating

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