AS Byatt
Novelist
Top of anyone’s reading pile should be two beautifully written and original recent English novels – Will Cohu’s Nothing But Grass (Chatto & Windus £16.99) and Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time (Bloomsbury £12.99), which kept me awake until 3.30am. Years ago, I chose Gogol’s Dead Souls (Penguin £9.99) as the book I always meant to read – I did in fact read it, but suddenly feel the need to read and remember it again.
David Mitchell
Novelist
I shall be staying at home this summer and am looking forward to reading Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig (Pushkin Press £14.99). Literature in translation is enjoying a quiet surge in popularity and Pushkin Press is in the vanguard of this welcome change. This book is one of its recent offerings. Originally published in German between 1927 and 1940, these “historical miniatures” are accounts of 10 events, great, small and quirkily selected, which altered history. Zweig the storyteller assists Zweig the historian to fill in the blank spaces, but the result is still erudite, learned and always exuberant. Zweig’s contemporary admirers include John Gray, Clive James and Wes Anderson, which is good enough for me.
Jeremy Paxman
Broadcaster, journalist and author
I shall be taking three books on holiday. I may need to pay an excess baggage charge for Robert Caro’s monumental biography of the most powerful man in New York, The Power Broker (The Bodley Head £35). The story of how Robert Moses made and broke people and places is astonishing. It comes so highly recommended that it is unignorable.
I also look forward to finishing Rain, by the young British writer Barney Campbell (Michael Joseph £16.99), a raw novel about the war in Afghanistan and what it did to the young men and women sent to fight there. Campbell is a veteran of the conflict and the book smells completely authentic.
I hope also finally to tackle Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which has been on my conscience for years. I bet it’s a treat.
David Nicholls
Author and screenwriter
I seem to be in the middle of a run of fine novels – Anne Enright’s The Green Road (Jonathan Cape £16.99), Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (Faber £17.99), Atticus Lish’s Preparations for the Next Life (Oneworld £14.99). I loved Kent Haruf’s posthumous novella, the small-town love story Our Souls at Night (Picador £12.99) and also got great pleasure from revisiting PJ Kavanagh’s heartbreaking coming-of-age memoir The Perfect Stranger (September Publishing £14.99). I was a big fan of Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (Penguin £8.99) so will be pouncing on his new book, The Mark and the Void (Hamish Hamilton £18.99). This is also going to be the summer where I start (and finish) Middlemarch.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Screenwriter and novelist
I’m taking Akenfield by Ronald Blythe (Penguin £9.99). It’s a survey of English village life, written in the 1960s but looking back towards the first world war. I always meant to read it. Now I will.
Foul: The Secret World of Fifa by the heroic Andrew Jennings (HarperCollins £9.99) was actually published in 2006 but no one – me included – took any notice. It could not be more relevant now. Football is the fullest expression of predator capitalism. Fifa is where we are all headed.
And two forthcoming children’s books: The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury £12.99) and Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot by Horatio Clare (Firefly Press £6.99).
Rachel Joyce
Novelist and playwright
We are spending our holiday in a French village at the foot of Mont Ventoux that is sleepy all year but gets filled with cyclists every summer, eager to tackle the mountain. I plan to sit and applaud them while reading a stash of hardbacks. (No room for clothes in the suitcase. Just a hat, sundress and flip-flops.) I will be taking Instrumental by James Rhodes (Canongate £16.99) because I like his electric energy, Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape £25), which I have already read but it’s my favourite book of the year, and Remembered for a While (John Murray £35), a beautiful book about Nick Drake compiled by his sister, Gabrielle. I’ve also found Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (Penguin £7.99). I devoured it as a teenager and I’m curious to read it again.
Penelope Lively
Novelist
Ferdinand Mount’s The Tears of the Rajas (Simon & Schuster £25) is more than 700 pages and I would happily have it longer – vivid and frequently witty writing about the intense and often catastrophic relationship between India’s multiple local rulers and their British overlords during the run-up to the mutiny. Julia Blackburn has a talent for choosing esoteric and intriguing subject matter. Threads (Jonathan Cape £25) is the story of a Norfolk sailor/artist whose medium was wool embroidery – his masterpiece a remarkable evacuation of Dunkirk.
I have always had a resistance to Trollope. I shall try Can You Forgive Her? (Penguin £9.99). And I shall be in deepest west Somerset – where else would anyone want to be?
William Dalrymple
Writer and historian
The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal’s recent book The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide (Princeton Unversity Press £19.95) is top of my summer reading pile. It is about partition’s greatest chronicler, who just happens to be her great-uncle, Saadat Hasan Manto. The madness he witnessed at partition and the trauma he went through turned him into a helpless alcoholic and brought an early death at the age of 42. But the same pain also transformed Manto into a short story writer whose work can be mentioned in the same breath as Chekhov, Gogol and Maupassant.
Having read Jalal’s thoughtful biography, I look forward to going back to the original writing: Bombay Stories and Selected Stories. These should be read in conjunction with Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies (Amberley £20), a pacey new narrative history of partition which makes the complex and tragic story of the great divide into a page turner: no mean feat.
My other must-read this year is Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini by Sarah McPhee (Yale University Press £35), a brilliantly researched biography of the woman who was mistress not only of the greatest of all Roman sculptors, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but also his younger brother, Luigi. This extraordinary biography recreates the life and passions of Renaissance Rome like no other book I have ever read. I’ll be packing it when I go to Rome to see the wonderful Bernini exhibition currently on at the Fondazione Roma Museo, Palazzo Cipolla, which includes Bernini’s deeply sensual portrait bust of Costanza.
Sebastian Faulks
Novelist, journalist and broadcaster
I will be taking Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker £16.99); Paradise City by Elizabeth Day (Bloomsbury £16.99); Tokyo by Nicholas Hogg (Cargo £8.99) and A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury £8.99). We are going to Italy, so to balance these fierce young talents I’ll probably take old Dante too.
John Banville
Writer
I detest holidays and have to be dragged off on them; books are the only consolation. This year, to County Carlow and Lucca, I shall take Clive James’s Sentenced to Life (Picador £14.99), his superb, late poems on mortality, his own and everyone else’s. Also in my bag will be Pascal Garnier’s Boxes (Gallic Books £7.99), which is sure to freeze the cockles of my heart nicely. For those unacquainted with Garnier’s work, think Simenon and Patricia Highsmith mixed, with jokes added to the black brew. And I shall be rereading Theodor Fontane’s ineffable Effi Briest, in a new translation by Mike Mitchell (Oxford World’s Classics £8.99).
Craig Taylor
Journalist and playwright
My trip this summer is to meet a new nephew. He happens to be called Sebastian, so my classic must be Brideshead Revisited (Penguin £8.99), as the name is forever linked to Waugh. I love reading about what people do all day, so I’ll be taking along Joanna Biggs’s All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Profile £14.99). A few weeks ago, I procured a copy of Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special (WW Norton, £16.99). It’s best to keep the plot secret. British eyes glaze when the words “American football” appear. But as a fellow American-football-hater, I love what Bachelder’s novel says about ritual and masculinity, and I appreciate the sly experimentalism. I’m not a big fan of mixed martial arts either, but I can’t wait to read Kerry Howley’s Thrown (Hamish Hamilton £14.99). Maybe I’ll spend all summer reading great books about unwatchable sports.
Kirsty Wark
Journalist, broadcaster and writer
This summer, unusually, we are staying in Scotland and having a few short sojourns, one of which is to the Three Chimneys on Skye, a culinary and sensory treat – so I recommend the eponymous cookbook. I’m taking Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott (Oxford World’s Classics £12.99) with me to reread after many years, as I love the setting of this covenanting tale and Scott is a consummate storyteller.
I am a judge on the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction and this year we chose a wonderful novel by John Spurling, The Ten Thousand Things (Duckworth £16.99), in which he brings to life again the ancient Chinese artist Wang Meng, and through him we become immersed in a time of epic turmoil in China’s history. When he won the prize John Spurling said his novel had been rejected by 44 publishers. Oh what they missed.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently, I exited through the gift shop but not before looking enviously at a beautiful book, The Great American House by Gil Schafer III (Rizzoli New York). And of course with one click online on my mobile phone, it was mine to enjoy back home on the odd rainy Scottish summer’s day.
Alexander McCall Smith
Writer and lawyer
We shall be in Italy, near Montalcino. I shall have with me Andrew Pettegree’s intriguing The Invention of News (Yale University Press, £12.99), an account, as the subtitle has it, of how the world came to know about itself. I shall also have Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents (NYRB, £12.99), a new collection of his wonderful essays on 20th-century American writers. The never-finished classic is going to be Proust. Who among us can put a hand up and say: “I’ve read the whole thing”? Dreamy, prolix, funny – Proust is not intended to be finished.
Jackie Kay
Poet and novelist
Since the life of the poet is very peripatetic, I am relishing the thought of a holiday at home, staying put and reading my advance copy of Lucia Berlin’s selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (Picador £14.99) – her stories are peopled with sharp, unpredictable, vital characters (often drunk!). They hit you with a force the moment you happen upon them. I’m looking forward to rereading Spunk, the powerful and irreverent stories of Zora Neale Hurston, who dazzled during the Harlem Renaissance. I imagine Berlin and Hurston could have been great friends if times had allowed. And Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark’s autobiography – been meaning to read this for years. Plus three writers I came across at the literary festival in Franschhoek, South Africa – Ivan Vladislavic’s tremendous 101 Detectives (And Other Stories £10), Beverly Rycroft’s incisive, moving poems about love and illness, Missing (Modjaji Books £15.95) and everything by Thando Mgqolozana, who impressed me by saying he was opting out of literary festivals altogether.
Helen Dunmore
Poet, novelist and children’s author
I have just bought Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend , because friends have praised her superb handling of women’s lives and friendships. There are two further novels in the trilogy and so that should take care of the summer’s fiction reading. My nonfiction treat would be Growing Citrus: The Essential Gardener’s Guide by Martin Page (Timber Books £19.99). I have two lemon trees and a calamondin, which produce good-sized, fragrant but oddly shaped fruit, so perhaps there’s more that they need. My classic choice is to search out the Ladybird book What to Look for in Summer, written by EL Grant Watson and illustrated by CF Tunnicliffe. The series is ravishingly illustrated, botanically accurate and evocative of childhood.
Maggie Gee
Novelist and academic
Oh, reading in the summer garden – what bliss. I shall eat up Irenosen Okojie’s debut novel, Butterfly Fish (Jacaranda Books £12.99), which I’ve read in draft and it is vital, vivid, witty, truthful; can’t wait to read it as a book. Also longing to reread Maureen Duffy’s brilliantly prescient novel about Scotland shearing off from the UK, In Times Like These (Jonathan Clowes £8.99) – she has the long view of the historian, setting a sharply observed near future against the 6th-century coming of St Columba to Scotland. Her predictions are coming true day by day.
My classic: loving Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (Penguin £8.99) as I do, I should have read Barry Lyndon (Oxford World’s Classics £9.99), and by August, read it I must… or shall I just watch his “uncommonly flexible” little Becky puppet tread the boards once again?
Joe Dunthorne
Novelist, poet and journalist
I’m not going anywhere this summer so have no fear of hauling around the 800 pages of Granta’s New American Stories (£12.99). It’s edited by Ben Marcus and has stories by many wonderful writers including Lydia Davis, Rivka Galchen and Denis Johnson. I’ve also ordered A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (Picador £8.99), a writer who I’ve often been recommended but, shamefully, it took his passing away for me to finally listen. If I were going on holiday, though, I would undoubtedly sit in a deckchair reading Happiness, the debut collection by one of my favourite poets, Jack Underwood (Faber £10.99).
Shami Chakrabarti
Director of Liberty and author
Top of my pile is Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (William Heinemann £18.99). The recently uncovered accompaniment to To Kill a Mockingbird comes out in mid-July and is an obvious “must-read” for all of us who turned to human rights via the American classic. Next comes Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett (Macmillan £20). I’ve been itching to read the latest from this Liberty member and master storyteller since it came out last autumn. And for my classic, I’ll choose What Moves at the Margin by Toni Morrison (University Press of Mississippi): I am really looking forward to immersing myself in Carolyn Denard’s collection of three decades of the Nobel Laureate’s work.
Charlotte Mendelson
Novelist and editor
Like everyone else in Italy I’ll be reading Elena Ferrante; will there be enough copies to go round? I may spend my holiday hanging out in underpasses, offering drugs in exchange for Book Two of the Neapolitan trilogy. During the long waits, by torchlight, I’ll begin Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur (Penguin, £19.99), because everyone says it’s a masterpiece; Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Granta £7.99); Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Penguin £8.99), which I’ve been pretending to have read for over a year; and, despite the panic this induces, a carefully rationed selection from my ever-decreasing pile of unread Ruth Rendells.
Rachel Cooke
Journalist and writer
I’ve known what I’ll be reading this summer – in France and Italy – since about March, which tells you a lot about me, if not the books themselves. In fiction, I’m going to get with the programme and read Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl (Bloomsbury £16.99), in which, I hear, George Eliot is brought vividly to life. In nonfiction, I am going to read Peter Korn’s memoir of woodworking Why We Make Things and Why it Matters (Square Peg £15). I think it will do my soul some good. My classic: The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett (Vintage £9.99), about two sisters whose lives take radically different courses. I want something really fat and satisfying and provincial and this is it.
Julian Baggini
Philosopher and writer
No comfort blankets on the beach for me. Reading Tobias Jones’s A Place of Refuge (Quercus £20), about his experiment in opening his family home to people in crisis, will make me feel guilty and selfish, while Daniel A Bell’s The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (University Press Group £19.95) will provide some uncomfortable challenges to my liberal beliefs. The only fictions this year are that I will actually take a holiday and that George Orwell’s Essays (Penguin £14.99) are not destined to be on my summer reading list for ever.
Sara Wheeler
Travel writer and biographer
I’m looking forward to Pushkin Hills, a Russian novel by Sergei Dovlatov (Alma Classics £7.99) that only appeared in English two years ago. I’m fascinated by the way Pushkin reverberates down the years in Russia, one of the many things that never changes there. As I’m going to the Mani, I’m taking a classic of Greek history, Deep Into Mani, by Peter Greenhalgh and Edward Eliopoulos (Faber). Then I plan to lie under an olive tree to devour Rosie Thomas’s Daughter of the House (HarperCollins £12.99), out this month.
Josie Rourke
Artistic director, Donmar Warehouse
I am 20 pages in and already hooked on Laura Barnett’s romantic counterfactual The Versions of Us (Weidenfeld & Nicholson £12.99), which is a kind of literary Sliding Doors. I’ll be catching up with Owen Sheers’s new thriller I Saw a Man (Faber £14.99). I loved his novel Resistance (Faber), another counterfactual, incidentally. This winter, I’m directing Christopher Hampton’s play of sexual intrigue among powerful aristocrats in pre-revolutionary France, Les Liaisons dangereuses. In preparation, I’ll be working through Choderlos de Laclos’s original, epistolary novel, using my schoolgirl French and a big Collins dictionary. We’ll see how long I last before reverting to an English translation…
Robert Peston
Broadcaster, author and journalist
It is a summer to indulge my obsessions. First book on my list, Why Information Grows by César Hidalgo (Allen Lane £20), is about how different countries are better and worse at generating and organising information – and how prowess in organising knowledge makes a country richer. Maybe it will help me to understand the great flaw in Britain’s economy, our crappy productivity (output per hour worked). Second book is about the most productive British football team of all time, my beloved Arsenal: it is Amy Lawrence’s Invincible (Penguin £9.99), the story of Arsenal’s 2003-4 season when the Gooners achieved the unique feat of never losing a single game. Finally, like many secular Jews, I’ve spent most of my life chasing after a non-religious Jewish identity, and fancy rereading Giorgio Bassani’s heartbreaking The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin £9.99).
Helen Simpson
Novelist and short story writer
I’ve chosen two new novels for my staycation: Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (Portobello Books £8.99) for its epic sweep and ingenious structure, and László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below (Profile £16.99) for a good chewy read. Plus a classic? I was looking at a slew of Penguin central European classics in my local Oxfam bookshop window when two young workmen in hi-vis vests and helmets stopped outside and one of them started pointing at the pile of books I was holding. I opened the door and asked, which one? It was Josef Skvorecky’s The Cowards (Penguin) – “Very good stuff!” he said earnestly. “From my country,” to his friend. So that’s my classic read this summer.
Marina Warner
Writer, historian and mythographer
I hope to have a quiet time at home this summer, but I’ll go to Venice to see the Biennale, with a week in Paris. I’ll take Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador £12.99). I like the way she does tricksterish and vigorous things with old stories. I will also pack Ave Maria by Sinan Antoon. The Iraqi-born poet has won huge praise for The Corpse Washer (Yale £15.99); this new book explores the figure of Mary in the religions of the Middle East – rather crucial in these times of religious strife. My classic will be The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness (Vintage £8.99), translated by Magnus Magnusson. His voice has a very funny peculiar, refreshing and intriguing mix of comic irony and metaphysical angst.
Fiona Maddocks
Observer classical music critic
I’ll be in Norfolk, the landscape of Graham Swift’s ever rereadable Waterland (Picador £8.99), but my choices are Irish. Colm Tóibín’s taut language and sense of silence work for me. I was gripped by Brooklyn (Penguin, 2009). Now I’ll read Nora Webster (Penguin £7.99). By association, my classic is Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Arrow £8.99), the 1943 American coming-of-age bestseller about an impoverished Irish-American family. To explain the context of all these Irish lives, I’ll first read Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (Penguin £10.99), just out in paperback. There’s also a debut novel that stands out: Laura Barnett’s subtle and complex The Versions of Us.
Geoff Dyer
Author
I’ve been in London watching Wimbledon – on TV. Now that it’s all but over, I’ll be reading The Argonauts, the always-brilliant Maggie Nelson’s meditation on her relationship with her transgender husband (Ingram International £23). Also looking forward to Anand Gopal’s in-depth narrative of America’s catastrophic involvement in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living (Metropolitan Books), and The Sellout (Farrar Strauss Giroux), the new novel by Paul Beatty (of White Boy Shuffle fame). Having just reread A Fringe of Leaves (even greater than I remember), I’ll be continuing my Patrick White revival. Will I finally get beyond 40 pages of Riders in the Chariot (Vintage £9.99)?
Blake Morrison
Writer and journalist
While by the east coast, I’ll have Julia Blackburn’s Threads (Jonathan Cape £25) with me, her illustrated biography of John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman who turned to painting and embroidery when he fell ill. Marine by Alan Jenkins and John Kinsella (Enitharmon £9.99) will also be essential reading – two very different poets both writing about the sea. Philip Glass is one of my favourite composers: I’ve just started his memoir Words Without Music (Faber £22.50). I’m looking forward to Claire Lowdon’s novel, Left of the Bang (Fourth Estate £14.99): she’s a fresh and sharp-minded writer. And I’ve always meant to read Zola’s Germinal – it’s now on the Kindle.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Writer
I have two first novels in the summer reading pile I’ll take on a trip to Rhode Island, one serious-sounding and one rather fizzy. Girl at War by Sara Novic (Little, Brown £14.99) is about a child soldier named Ana in Croatia in the early 1990s. I’ve heard that it’s dark but powerful. Meanwhile, Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin (Viking) is a fictitious memoir by a Hollywood actress who, based on the book’s flap copy, bears a strong resemblance to Katie Holmes. Part of the reason I’m intrigued is that Liftin is a veteran celebrity memoir ghostwriter, so I trust that she knows this world well. As for a classic, last year at this time in this forum, I declared my intention to finally read Middlemarch. Since it didn’t happen, I’m hereby renewing my vow.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Cultural historian and biographer
This year, I’m staying at home to watch the grass grow in our Suffolk garden, and finishing Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis (Jonathan Cape £20), a novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates. I’ll be reading Julia Blackburn’s hauntingly original Threads (Jonathan Cape £25). The story of John Craske – fisherman, invalid and master embroiderer – is one of its many strands. And I’ll be moving on to the second volume of Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy, written in the 1930s, with its wise, voluptuous, disenchanted vision of an aristocracy in decay, an east European counterpart to The Leopard.
Elizabeth Day
Author and Observer journalist
This summer, I seem to have organised my reading material but not any actual holiday. But even if I don’t go anywhere sun-soaked or glamorous, I fully intend to be reading Sweet Caress by William Boyd (Bloomsbury £18.99), which I’ve been looking forward to for ages, and High Dive by Jonathan Lee (William Heinemann £16.99). Lee is a brilliant writer and this – a fictionalised take on the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton – sounds right up my street. Is it too awful to admit I’ve never read Anna Karenina? Well, I haven’t. So I’ll finally be reading that too.
Lara Feigel
Academic, critic and author
I am holidaying in Italy, where I will enjoy returning to Twilight in Italy (IB Tauris £8.99), DH Lawrence’s sensuous celebration of southern heat and colour, written as he wandered around the country with Frieda. But I tend to be rather restless on holiday, so I will return imaginatively to London in all its gritty greyness, accompanied by the pellucid prose of Jon Day’s brilliant Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier (Notting Hill Editions £14.99), and to the struggle of the everyday, with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Dancing in the Dark (Harvill Secker £17.99) and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (Faber £8.99).
Damian Barr
Journalist and author
I’ve found a secret garden in Brighton with high flint walls and shade-dappled corners. I am going to cool my feet, and some bottles, in the pond. I discovered To Kill a Mockingbird when I turned 13 – I wonder if I’ll revert to my teen self when I reread it in prep for the new Harper Lee. I will have to ration Janice Galloway’s new short story collection, Jellyfish (Freight £12.99). I keep forgetting I haven’t read The Girls of Slender Means (Penguin £8.99) so maybe I’ll take that to my secret garden too.
Justin Cartwright
Novelist
This summer, I am going to read A Complicated Kindness by the Canadian Miriam Toews (Faber £6.99) because I loved her book, All My Puny Sorrows – funny, desperate and joyful. I also have my eyes on Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Penguin £7.99) for his unfailing ability to draw the reader into his world. I was beguiled by Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind (Granta £9.99), its beautiful prose and wonderful insights, and I am longing to read his latest Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton £20). The classic: Middlemarch. Every two years I get the urge to take the plunge. It is one of our greatest and most influential novels.
Stephanie Merritt
Journalist and author
This summer, I’m finally going to start Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series that so many people are raving about, beginning with My Brilliant Friend. One friend was recently so engrossed in the latest volume that she refused to travel in the car with her family on holiday and instead went separately by train so she didn’t have to interrupt her reading, so I want to find out what the fuss is about. Though I should probably have started them last summer when I was staying in the Bay of Naples, for an added sense of place – this year I’ll be on the Île de Ré in France.
I’m also on a mission to reread my way through Ruth Rendell’s Barbara Vine novels. I think the current fascination for domestic noir – psychological thrillers based around family secrets – owes a great deal to her influence and she’s still the best. I’ve just finished A Dark-Adapted Eye (Penguin £8.99) so I’ll be taking the next one, A Fatal Inversion (Penguin £8.99).
Viv Albertine
Musician
I wasn’t going to go away this summer as I blew so much on last year’s holiday to Iceland – totally worth it – but my daughter has just taken her GCSEs and I want to treat her. Also, this may be the last summer we go away together; she’s 16 and it will probably be all friends and festivals from now on. We’re going to Deià, a coastal village in Mallorca, which I’ve heard so much about over the years from arty friends, people who lived childhoods that I could only dream of. I offered my daughter the choice of two weeks in a cheap hotel or five days at La Residencia, a five-star luxury spa hotel that used to be owned by Richard Branson. Guess which one she chose.
I’ll be taking with me Country Girl, Edna O’Brien’s memoir (Faber £9.99). O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was the first book I read as a girl that talked about me and to me. I think she is a goddess, powerful, extraordinary, a true artist and an activist. I can’t wait to read about all her adventures and knock-backs.
I’m also going to take Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (Fourth Estate £20). First published last year when she was 50, though she has been writing for many years. A mixture of sex, birding and marriage hell appeals to me. I’m always interested in women writing honestly about sex and sexual politics because I can’t figure the whole thing out at all. My classic is La bâtarde, a memoir by Violette Leduc. I read it in the 1970s and it inspired some of my lyric writing in the Slits. This book is extremely raw and revealing and the writing makes me want to cry. It is exquisite.
Julie Myerson
Author and critic
I hope to be on a roof terrace in Rome in September with Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (Fourth Estate £20), Anne Enright’s The Green Road (Jonathan Cape £16.99) and TC Boyle’s The Harder They Come (Bloomsbury £18.99). Their previous novels all gripped me on my last holiday and I want the same feeling all over again! I’m also taking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Penguin £14.99), James Agee and Walker Evans’s classic about families in the 1930s American deep south: I’d never heard of it until recently, but one look at the photographs and I knew I had to go there.
Kate Kellaway
Observer journalist and critic
Who needs a Kindle when you can travel light with Notting Hill Editions’ beautiful, slender, pocketable hardbacks? They are my latest infatuation and a couple will go to France with me: Essays on the Self by Virginia Woolf (£14.99), because I have not revelled in her prose for so long, and John Wilson Foster’s Pilgrims of the Air (£14.99) about American passenger pigeons which looks beckoningly odd. I love James Salter’s sensuous writing and A Sport and a Pastime (Picador £8.99), a novel set in France, is reputed to be his best.
John Gray
Philosopher
When going on holiday, I tend to take with me books I’ve already read. One I’ll be carrying this summer is The Death of Napoleon (£8.99), a novella by the Belgian-Australian sinologist and essayist Simon Leys (real name: Pierre Ryckmans), which has just been reissued by New York Review of Books. A meditation on the insignificance of power, it’s the story of how Napoleon escapes from St Helena, leaving a double behind him, hoping to join a secret organisation that will return him to imperial glory. But when the journey of the ship on which he is working incognito as a cabin hand is rerouted Napoleon finds himself alone, ends up living with a watermelon seller and – well, I won’t spoil the plot.
Though I’ll be travelling mostly in Europe, I’ll be taking with me and rereading two classics dealing with faraway places: Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, set in Borneo in the late 19th century, and Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage £11.99), a collection of stories about New York City in the 1940s, which invokes a world that is no less exotic and has also vanished.
Robert McCrum
Associate editor, the Observer
I’m going on holiday to the Aegean very soon and want to travel light. So I will take some new poetry, The Curiosities by Christopher Reid (Faber £14.99); some stories, The Boy Who Could See Death (Viking £14.99) by Salley Vickers, a favourite writer; and Histories by Herodotus (Penguin £9.99), a classical classic I’ve never read from cover to cover. Poems, spectral tales and the beginnings of Greek history should make a nice mix with the wine-dark sea.
Margaret Drabble
Novelist, biographer and critic
I shall read more of mystery woman Elena Ferrante’s Naples novels, having just read the first, My Brilliant Friend, which transports the reader to the Naples I saw on my first visit long ago. I’m also reading Fiona Rintoul’s first novel, The Leipizig Affair (Aurora Metro £8.99), a page-turner that reminds one of the horrors of the cold war and the astonishing fall of the Berlin Wall. And I’ll read another José Saramago – perhaps All the Names (Harvill Secker £8.99), one I’ve missed. I always spend the summer in Somerset and travel in fiction.
Val McDermid
Novelist
Summer is the time for great storytelling and I’ve been saving up Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress (Bloomsbury £18.99), a collection of nine tales that I expect to enthral me as I drift down the waterways of Burgundy. And thanks to my book group, I’ve rediscovered my love for Robertson Davies with Fifth Business which will no doubt lead me to the rest of the Deptford trilogy (Penguin £18.99). I’ve never read HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds (Penguin £5.99) and I’m planning to put that right because I’m currently adapting John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes for radio.
Mariella Frostrup
Journalist and broadcaster
I’m a glutton for a saga in summer with long idle days allowing for deep literary immersion and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (Picador £14.99) is just the ticket. It enters the lives of a group of young men, driven by circumstance, discrimination and poverty to make the perilous journey from the Indian subcontinent to the UK and the mysterious young Sikh woman whose fate becomes intertwined with theirs. To tell you any more would be to spoil the richly rewarding experience of being buried in its pages.
Keeping the temperature high, Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved (Picador £12.99) is a visceral exploration of the LA riots through the eyes of a series of characters, from gang members to firefighters in one LA ghetto. It offers not only a journey down memory lane – I was in the city the day the riots kicked off – but also a long overdue exploration of the lives of those trapped by the daily violence and injustice that resulted in the controversial Rodney King verdict igniting the city in a maelstrom of anarchy.
For thriller lovers not tied up with Stieg Larsson sequels, Orient by Christopher Bollen (Simon & Schuster £16.99) is expansive, immersive and particularly perfect if you’re heading to America’s east coast on vacation. An unsettling tale of culture clash and homicide set in a picturesque fishing village at the newly fashionable far end of Long Island, it’s that rare beast – a beautifully wrought page-turner.
The classics on my bedside table tell a tragic tale of frustrated ambitions. Every year, far from diminishing, the list of books unread just seems to get longer. I’m hoping that a 10-day trip to my childhood stamping ground of Connemara will allow enough breathing space finally to digest Ulysses, the only Joyce novel I’ve got left to tackle and certainly for me the most daunting. That should keep me busy until summer turns again to autumn.
Louise Doughty
Novelist, playwright and journalist
We’re off to Slovenia, where we will be joining an InterRailing teenager and exchanging a bag of clean clothing for one full of laundry to bring home – I’m not sure how much room there will be in the luggage for books. I’m a judge for the Costa Novel prize so it will be mostly novels but there will have to be some nonfiction for variety. I’m going to take James Rhodes’s Instrumental (Canongate £16.99) and an acclaimed memoir by my fellow Costa judge, Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Last Act of Love (Picador £14.99). As far as classics are concerned, I’ll probably need some light relief: I’ve never read Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith.
Antonia Fraser
Biographer, historian and novelist
I plan to be in Cornwall – in body, that is, at Land’s End, but in spirit I plan to be in the Ardennes, reading Antony Beevor’s new book. I am a tremendous fan of his writing. Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble (Viking £25) is obviously a grim story as the pace of reprisals among the civilian population rises, quite apart from military atrocities (although it can hardly be grimmer than the same author’s Berlin). Nevertheless I shall gaze out from among the Cornish rocks at the rough sea and feel glad I am not living in even rougher times and territory.
For fiction, I am halfway through Elena Ferrante’s amazing compulsive Neapolitan trilogy: that is The Story of a New Name, following on from My Brilliant Friend, with Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay still to come. Ferrante was a recommendation from a book-mad friend for which I am eternally grateful (there are plenty of other books I note happily). The classic: on my way, as it were, to see the new film of Far From the Madding Crowd, I couldn’t resist watching the old version with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp; so I never got there. Now it’s back to source: I’m going to read Hardy’s book again for the first time in 40 years.
Philip Hensher
Novelist
Virginia Baily’s Early One Morning (Virago £14.99) is a real treat; a beautifully written account of the long consequences of war, set in a richly evoked Rome of the 1970s. Perhaps not exactly holiday reading, but I really admired Salil Tripathi’s superb and harrowing The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (Aleph), a fine and judicious account of the horrors of the Bangladesh war of independence. The classics I’m taking away are the collected short stories of Malachi Whitaker. Preparing The Penguin Book of the British Short Story (out in November) I made many discoveries. She was one of the finest. She wrote four sublime collections in the early 1930s before retiring. Her last four decades were silent. Honeymoon is the best of her volumes, a masterpiece.
Mark Haddon
Novelist
We’re off to the south of France and the Pembrokeshire coast. I’ll be packing Per Petterson’s I Refuse (Harvill Secker £16.99) and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (Unbound £8.99). An unread classic? The Anatomy of Melancholy has been glaring at me for many years, but The Sorrows of Young Werther (Oxford World’s Classics £7.99) is sitting next to it and is a thousand pages shorter, which might just swing it.
Susannah Clapp
Observer theatre critic and author
In (I hope) sunny Siena I shall relish Karin Altenberg’s crystalline evocation of dark Dartmoor. Her Breaking Light is now out in paperback from Quercus (£8.99). The novelist Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most subtle writers of the 20th century. I have read all her books save Angel and plan to put that right by taking Virago’s edition (£9.99) with me. Having dipped into John Lahr’s rambunctious biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Bloomsbury £30), I see it will be invaluable. I’ll be carrying it as excess baggage.
Alex Preston
Journalist and author
I’ll be driving from Miami to New York with a proof of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Where My Heart Used to Beat (Hutchinson £20, out September). It’s Engleby meets Birdsong, apparently; sounds like heaven. I’ll also be taking The Seed Collectors by Scarlett Thomas (Canongate £14.99). She’s a gloriously inventive novelist and I’ve heard very good things about this one. Finally, Adam Foulds recommended VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (Picador £9.99) during a conversation on Facebook. I’ll read it sipping juleps in Charleston.
Ian Rankin
Novelist
John Niven manages the trick of being both profane and humane. His latest novel, The Sunshine Cruise Company (William Heinemann £14.99), describes itself as “Thelma & Louise meets The Lavender Hill Mob”. Sold. Philip Kerr’s second world war private eye is back in The Lady from Zagreb (Quercus £18.99). This time, Bernie Gunther must solve a case for propaganda minister Goebbels – or else. I’ll also be taking Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent (Vintage £8.99). I found it on my bookshelves and have no memory of reading it. Time to put that right, over a pint of the local beer at one or other of Cromarty’s two pubs, having eaten my fill of seafood.
Hari Kunzru
Novelist and journalist
I’m hearing very good things about Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which recently won the Independent foreign fiction prize. I’ve got a pile of unread fiction that is about to collapse and bury me, but in an ideal world, I’ll finally get to read Marlon James’s Jamaican epic A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld £8.99) and one of the newly translated novels by the ludic Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, either The Illogic of Kassel (Harvill Secker £16.99) or A Brief History of Portable Literature (WW Norton £8.99). Perhaps both.
Salley Vickers
Novelist
I’m retreating to Gladstone’s Library, a wonderfully evocative venue, where one can read, write and sleep in the seductive environs of Gladstone’s own books, to complete my latest novel, Cousins. And thus taking with me Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (melancholy being a relevant subject) along with the second and third of the Elena Ferrante cycle of novels, which follows the fortunes of a pair of Neapolitan girls as they grow and change. The first, My Brilliant Friend ( Editions £11.99), was hugely readable and absorbing.
Laura Barnett
Journalist and author
I’ll spend much of this summer in my garden, cherishing every sentence of Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. He writes about landscape with such scalpel-sharp precision and always leaves me with a cache of shiny new words. Then, in August, I’ll head to Greece, armed with Some Luck by Jane Smiley (Picador £7.99) – I adored Private Life, and can’t wait to start this novel, the first in a new trilogy – and Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (Penguin £9.99). I’ve been meaning to read it for years and my paperback edition is almost weightless – ideal for my beach bag.
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