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Zadie Smith
For me summer reading is about immersion. Three novels fully absorbed me recently. Flesh by David Szalay is a very smart and stylish novel about the 1%, filtered through the life of a Hungarian bodyguard/driver in their midst. Cécé by Emmelie Prophète (out 23 September) vividly depicts the slums of contemporary Haiti via a very online young sex worker who lives her best life on Facebook. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features a series of unforgettable women trying to work out what love means. The summer read I’m looking forward to myself is Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, a true original.
David Nicholls
I would recommend two books, 800 pages and a shade under 150, depending on what you can carry. Helen Garner’s collected diaries, How to End a Story, are frank, gripping and revealing about family, marriage and the writing life, while Anthony Shapland’s debut, A Room Above a Shop, is a small, tender love story, almost a poem.
Bernardine Evaristo
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald is one of the best debut novels I’ve read in recent years. A family of women, mother, daughter and granddaughter, carry unresolved and unspoken trauma that’s passed down through the generations. This poisons their relationships and ability to fully function in society. Intense, visceral and beautifully written, McDonald’s novel captures their damaged souls. Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is the follow-up to her bestselling novel Detransition, Baby. Consisting of three short stories and a novella, this is adventurous, mind-expanding and provocative fiction that skilfully serves up different possibilities of gender and sexuality.
Yael van der Wouden
The Pretender by Jo Harkin tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the Tudor Pretender. It’s funny and it’s devastating. I’m having a fantastic time reading it.
Katherine Rundell
My favourite novel so far this year has been James by Percival Everett. It has the satirical bite of his previous work, but a furious generosity that is its own. A reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, its premise is that the language of the enslaved is a learned facade to appease the white slavers. I read Huckleberry Finn first and then James immediately afterwards: a fantastic reading experience.
Olivia Laing
I saved Gliff by Ali Smith for the perfect moment: the day that Keir Starmer gave his “island of strangers” speech. What a balm and a corrective, then, to read this propulsive dystopian novel about how to refuse the imperatives of fascism, how to stay open to strangers in all their guises. Beautiful and visionary.
Reading about spycops might not seem the obvious beach activity, but Disclosure by Kate Wilson is a gripping account of an environmental activist who discovered her former boyfriend was a police spy, a technique regularly used to infiltrate and discredit non-violent activists. The most invigorating aspect of this disturbing book is how the women turned the tables, piecing together evidence and eventually winning a victory in court.
Jonathan Coe
If you’re heading to a British seaside town this summer, the book you should take with you is Birding by Rose Ruane. Set in a desolate unnamed resort where the pastel facades of Victorian buildings “crumble like stale cake after a party”, and the pier boasts a helter skelter “crusted with stalactites of guano”, this is the bleak but hopeful story of Lydia, once one half of a fleetingly successful girl band, piecing her life back together in the face of falsely remembered trauma. Ruane is a marvellous writer whose prose glitters with perfect metaphors and wincingly caustic one-liners. In fact you should take this on holiday wherever you’re going.
Anne Enright
Literary biographies are a great choice for the summer: I raced through Frances Wilson’s whip-smart Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, and am currently loving An Afterlife, Francesca Wade’s searching and eloquent double biography of the life and posthumous reputation of Gertrude Stein. In fiction, my big recent discovery has been the work of Samanta Schweblin. Good and Evil and Other Stories is coming out in August and they are just stellar – extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled. Also there’s a backlist for me to catch up on. Time to clear a new space on my bookshelf.
Samantha Harvey
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft is complex in its themes of class and entitlement, but it’s also, fundamentally, a piece of great, satisfying storytelling to lose yourself in. Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, is slick, sharp, strange and singular. I love her work; she’s a writer who can conjure intrigue from the scantest detail, and you’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath.
Michael Rosen
Kiku: The Japanese Art of Good Listening by Dr Haru Yamada. It’s strange that when we say the word “conversation”, the first thing we think of is speakers. Yet, an equal part of conversation is listening. In fact, the speaker speaks with an eye and ear out on who the listener is and how they’re reacting. This is a great insight into how all this plays out, seen through the prism of Japanese culture and language.
I’d also recommend Beyond the Secret Garden: Racially Minoritised People in British Children’s Books by Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor. What’s it like as a child to read classic children’s books if you can’t see yourself in the garden? Or to only see yourself there as people who are “less than” the great characters and heroes? Or flip that over and ask, what does all this do for those who see themselves in books as always centre stage?
Colm Tóibín
More than a quarter of a century ago in Sydney, I caught a glimpse across a room of the novelist Helen Garner and her companion, the novelist Murray Bail. I could hardly imagine that I would become obsessed with both of them courtesy of Garner’s marvellous How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, all 800 pages of it. This diary begins by registering what is ordinary, how days are, what it is like to be a writer, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a citizen of Melbourne. Part of it is a doomed love story. So, I have also been reading some of the writings of the object of Garner’s attention, three short books by Bail: Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook; Notebooks 1970-2003; and his luminous and mysterious semi-novel called He.
Ali Smith
It’s a Muriel Spark summer for me. There’s the first volume of her Letters (1944-1963) edited by Dan Gunn (out 28 August); I can’t wait to read it. Brand new right now is Frances Wilson’s truly amazing biography of Spark’s formative years and work, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark. An electrifying work in itself, often as mazy and gripping as a psychological thriller and as unsettling, sharp and playfully uncanny as a piece of Spark’s own fiction, it’s also one of the most revealing books about societal postwar paranoia and nervous fracture I’ve ever read. My other summer recommendation is also a touch Sparkian in a world distracted by fakery: Nell Stevens’s marvel of a novel The Original, a story of creativity, legacy and real worth, is full of narrative cunning, narrative goodness. What a very good heart it has.
Mick Herron
If poetry on the beach appeals – and why wouldn’t it; it sounds like a cocktail – Michael Longley’s Ash Keys, published shortly before his death in January, is strongly recommended. Selected volumes are intended to provoke new readings of familiar poems, and this one works superbly – I had undervalued his later verse, thinking it slight in comparison to earlier work. This proves me wrong. Abigail Dean’s third novel, meanwhile, continues her winning streak, confirming her aptitude for examining the aftermath of trauma. The Death of Us, a love story interrupted by violent intrusion, is moving and deeply impressive.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn is a delicious, sexy, insightful, big-hearted joy (that, believe it or not, features both the pandemic and divorce). After her marriage ends, middle-aged Brooklyn mom-of-three Rachel Bloomstein goes on many dates with men and women, has wild yet as-responsible-as-possible sex, and works on creating an AI chatbot that will combine the best parts of all her romantic prospects. Rachel is so open, generous-hearted and funny that reading about her makes you feel like one of the friends who comes over for drinks on her balcony.
Rutger Bregman
Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild and Suffrage by Ellen Carol DuBois are two gripping accounts of what may be the greatest human rights movements in history: the fight to end slavery and the struggle for women’s suffrage. Both are powerful reminders that real change demands extraordinary perseverance. Of the 12 founders of the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one lived to see slavery abolished across the empire. Of the 68 women at the Seneca Falls convention, just one lived to see women gain the vote – and she was too ill to cast a ballot. Their stories are a call to all of us still fighting today: for tax justice, for democracy, for an end to the moral catastrophe of factory farming, and so much more.
William Dalrymple
Fara Dabhoiwala’s remarkable global history, What Is Free Speech? is ostensibly a very different book from his first, on the origins of sex, yet it shares its predecessor’s wit, fluency and dazzling erudition. Constantly surprising, it reminds us quite what an innovative idea free speech was when it was first upheld as a civilised goal in the 18th century. Examining who in history could speak, and who was silenced, Dabhoiwala reminds us of the crucial relationship between speech and power.
How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn is one of the most fascinating works of global history to appear for years. Incredibly wide-ranging, it connects disparate parts of the ancient world with dazzling shafts of insight and intuition, held together by vast scholarship, elegant prose and an enviable lightness of touch. It completely reframes our conception of the western classical world, allowing us to understand just how globalised and interconnected mankind has always been.
Finally, Pankaj Mishra illuminates the darkest of landscapes in The World After Gaza. It is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year.
Sarah Perry
Sarah Hall’s new novel Helm (out 28 August) is incandescently good (even by her incandescent standards). It spans thousands of years up to the present day, and concerns the Helm wind, a phenomenon that blows down from a Cumbrian hilltop and wreaks mischievous havoc. There are meteorologists and stone-age women visionaries and peculiar unbiddable girls and terrifying medieval priests: it is sexy and funny and erudite and strange, and the prose is dizzyingly good. Up there with her best.
I’m also looking forward to reading Mic Wright’s Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. Wright is always excoriatingly funny and righteously indignant: this promises to be all those things and more.
Nussaibah Younis
Jen Beagin’s clever, hilarious and absolutely bonkers novel Big Swiss will have you laughing out loud and questioning everything you think you know about trauma. Greta, a middle-aged woman fleeing her past, takes a job with therapist Om, transcribing his therapy sessions. But this is small town Hudson, and Greta soon bumps into voices she recognises. When she develops an obsession with Om’s sardonic and larger-than-life client Big Swiss, shenanigans ensue.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, a quartet of stories, covers utterly original ground, and will keep you captivated with its voice, energy and wit. There’s a hormone-inhibiting virus forcing cis people into parity with trans people; there are two loggers in the 1900s battling for the affections of the axeman-in-chief; there’s a sexually confused boarding school love story; and a trans fetishist competing for legitimacy with a trans traditionalist. And, randomly, there are a lot of pigs.
Florence Knapp
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami follows three sisters as they briefly return to their childhood home on the Japanese coast. It’s a book about belonging, often explored through language, with piercing observations around a family’s shorthand, a grandmother’s admonishments, and how the peculiarities of Japanese and English culture are highlighted in the words that are absent, and uniquely present, in our vocabularies. It is funny, gentle and warm, though Itami’s sentences are never fluffy. And it contains one of the best descriptions of overthinking I’ve ever read: “the inside of her head is like the final note of some operatic calamity vibrato-ing without end”.
Peter Frankopan
I greatly enjoyed Oliver Moody’s Baltic: The Future of Europe, which provides revelatory coverage of a region that is not only important but looks likely to be the next arena for competition between Russia and its neighbours. Patrick McGee’s Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company is terrific too – not only charting Apple’s rise but also that of China’s tech sector and its economy as a whole. McGee argues that Apple helped Make China Great Again. I also admired Bijan Omrani’s God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England – a finely judged and beautifully written account.
English (US)