Perhaps the only thing better than a great book recommendation is a great book recommendation to take with you on holiday. A summer read just hits different, as the kids say. Something that would typically be an annoyance like, say, your pages getting stuck together isn’t so annoying when the cause isn’t the leftovers of a sad desk lunch but sea salt or the juice of a ripe nectarine.
And while there is a certain type of book that comes to mind when you hear “summer read”, really it’s a term as loose and free-floating as a kaftan in the breeze. From sexy romantasy to hard-hitting polemics and witty travelogues, anything goes.
That said, not all book recommendations are created equal and I myself have been burned by a bad one or two (cut to me in a rural bookstore-less town in Spain with only the impenetrable, experimental prose of a 19th-century author as company). And so we’ve turned to 12 of our favourite writers to see what’s top of their reading pile this month.
Jem Calder, author of I Want You To Be Happy
I recently enjoyed Emma Cline’s forthcoming novel, Switzy. Written in taut, DeLillo-ish sentences, the novel follows David, a wealthy American businessman (pretty much a displaced DeLillo protagonist) with a neurodegenerative disease, as he prepares to end his life via euthanasia in Zurich. Cline is an alert, sensitised writer, and there’s real pathos in seeing her attentiveness filtered through David’s worsening cognitive decline. Poignant but unsentimental, it is her best novel yet.
Virginia Evans, author of the Women’s Prize-winning novel The Correspondent
A summer read that I go back to, and plan to revisit this year, is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Delicious and transportive. I also recently felt this way reading Whistler, Ann Patchett’s newest novel. My most common summer recommendation is Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, which delivers in every way and is, to me, a perfect novel.
Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones
Today I’m reading Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. I’m currently writing about LA so obviously trying to copy everyone else’s plots and style. I was always a bit scared of reading Joan Didion as she seemed intimidatingly cool, and serious. But I love this novel: it’s a fast, seductive read. It is dark but really captures a certain LA at a certain time.
Andrew Sean Greer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Loss and Villa Coco
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is my go-to for a crickets-chirping, fish-slapping summer delight. Not a novel except in the sense he clearly exaggerated his family in every sense and from them spun a charming tale of childhood in Corfu. A classic worth picking up again.
Annie Lord, Vogue dating columnist and author of The Project
The chapters in Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite follow two different timelines. In the past we follow a teenage Sophia on a holiday in Sicily with her absent father who is shagging around and writing and also writing a novel about shagging around and writing. And then we skip forward to 2020 where Sophia’s father watches a play she wrote about said holiday without giving him a heads up about how much of a dick he comes off in it.
In under 300 pages, Hamya intelligently explores everything from dysfunctional family dynamics, class tensions, generational divides, art and who has the right to tell a story, consent, I could go on. It’s the sort of book you’ll be begging your mate to read so you can talk about it with them. The chapters set in Italy ooze holiday, cold beers, sticky, sun-creamed skin, the echoes of a tiled kitchen, crashy waves, bleached arm hair, because when you’re on holiday don’t you always want to read about other people on holiday?
Patrice Lawrence, author of Orangeboy and Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2026-2028
I’m trying to improve my knowledge of illustrated books for older readers. I’ll be diving into Zodiac, a graphic memoir by Ai Weiwei (also Elettra Stamboulis, illustrated by Gianluca Costantini), structured around the signs of the Chinese zodiac. Plus Hyo and the Deep-Rooted Demon, written and illustrated by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh. I love cross-genre stories. This is a murder mystery with a Ghibli-ish feel set on an island where gods live aside humans and Hyo can be commissioned to make personal hells.
Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider series
I have just finished Masterpiece by Hannah Rothschild, which tells the story of “The Resurrection”, by the 15th-century artist, Piero della Francesca, famously described as “the greatest picture in the world”. It’s an enthralling meditation on the nature of art and the power of love across several centuries, superbly researched and full of memorable characters. I actually visited Sansepolcro in Tuscany and saw the painting while I was reading the book. It’s an experience I’ll never forget.
Lily King, author of Heart the Lover
I am caught in the vortex of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume volumes, racing to the store today to get book IV! It is deeply satisfying and absorbing, a thought experiment that has bloomed and flourished in literary form. I’m utterly addicted.
Chloe Ashby, author of Family Friends
Holiday reading isn’t what it used to be now that I have a toddler in tow, but happily short stories are well suited to brief spells in the sun. I recently read and loved The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken, a sharp-witted not-quite novel, not-quite memoir about a grieving grown-up daughter, and this summer I’m eager to burrow into her back catalogue. I plan to begin with The Souvenir Museum, a bright collection about families muddling through, and Thunderstruck, which sounds more morose, but who said summer reads need to be all sunny delight?
Daniyal Mueenuddin, author of This Is Where the Serpent Lives
In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, Edmund White has found new ways of discussing a very old subject, in this book that borders on pornography, and which yet describes encounters and relationships that mattered to him more than anything else. This tender, subtle book about love and sex and love-in-sex and sex-in-love will knock your socks off. No problem: for in the summer, you can go barefoot.
Lisa Owens, author of Natural Disaster
I am halfway through A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello and have only been able to put it down to recommend it here. It begins in Dublin, 1985 and follows a young woman, Anna, who falls helplessly, hopelessly in love with an older man. I’m as bewitched by Costello’s gripping, sensitive, insightful writing as Anna is by her lover Peter.
Elif Shafak, author of The Forty Rules of Love and president of the Royal Society of Literature
This summer I am judging the Baillie Gifford prize with my fellow judges, and I have a massive list of non-fiction books on my desk, covering a wide range of disciplines, from history to politics to science, botany and the arts. As a novelist, I deeply appreciate interdisciplinary and intercultural reading lists. At the same time, always, fiction is where my heart beats, and there are three remarkable debut novels that I especially want to mention: Tara Menon’s Under Water, Portia Elan’s Homebound and Amy Abdelnoor’s Ever Land.
