50 hot books for summer

1. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Virago £16.99)

Waters forsakes her favourite Victorian period for her fourth and finest novel, a fractured love story set during the Second World War. Every background detail, every voice is perfect. The lives of four very different Londoners - among them a crime novelist and a female ambulance driver - overlap and interlock in a tale told backwards so brilliantly that although we already know the "end", we keep breathlessly turning the pages. A tour-de-force that really should have won the Orange Prize.

2. Terrorist by John Updike, Hamish Hamilton £17.99

A young student at a run-down high school in Newark, New Jersey, is being groomed as a suicide bomber. Updike brilliantly portrays this lean, fastidious Muslim against a backdrop of American obesity and decadence. A stunning achievement; you'd think he was 24, not 74. He shows no sign of slowing down. To be reviewed next week

3. Wicked! by Jilly Cooper (Bantam £17.99)

Feisty, flame-haired Janna is appointed head of a sink comprehensive in rural Larkshire; but just up the road is a posh public school headed by the suave Hengist Brett-Taylor. Wonderful characters, lashings of sex, faintly hilarious writing style - you never want it to end.

4. Cell by Stephen King (Hodder £17.99)

Leave your phone at home! As billions of people chatter on thier mobiles, a sinister force turns them all into brainless zombies, leaving just a few survivors. Nasty, fun, and a classic King that's perfect for the beach.

5. The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh (Canongate £12.99)

A dodgy magician, used to rubbing shoulders with strippers and villains, is hired to pull off the ultimate cabaret illusion in a dingy club in Berlin - but who's fooling who? Louise Welsh, author of The Cutting Room, is a mistress of misdirection and the plot resembles a hall of mirrors.

6. Pelé: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster £18.99)

A revealing account of the making of the world's first sporting superstar and a gentlemanly lament for a vanished era of honour and discipline.

7. The Weeping Women Hotel by Alexei Sayle (Sceptre £12.99)

Fat Harriet, who mends dresses for transvestites for a living, is desperate to escape her dead-end London life. But Patrick, a personal trainer at the local gym, Muscle Bitch, takes her on a bizarre journey of self-transformation she may live to regret. A savage, sharp, satirical read.

8. The Yellow House by Martin Gayford (Fig Tree £18.99)

Gripping retelling of the weeks leading up to Van Gogh's famous amputation. Was Vincent bi-polar? Why did he think a severed ear was a good present for a local prostitute? And what was it with the chairs? All is revealed in a poignant narrative.

9. Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey (Viking £25)

Forget The Da Vinci Code; here's he dark side of the City of Light. A mixture of enjoyably sinister trivia and deep scholarship, taking in the Knights Templar, ancient cemeteries, Joan of Arc, whores, flâneurs, poets and criminals.

10. The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers (Fourth Estate £14.99)

A therapist gently teases out the trauma of a troubled female patient, and uncovers a doomed love affair set in Rome and influenced by the paintings of Caravaggio.

11. Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn (Picador £12.99)

Pack this with Some Hope, a trilogy of novellas the same author (Picador £7.99). The further misadventures of Patrick Melrose, whom we met in the earlier books as an abused child, a heroin-addict and finally a clean, but confused young man. Mother's Milk sees our perennially baleful and sarcastic anti-hero struggling to bring up his beloved young sons while still processing the horrors of his own childhood, and finding that the mother who never nurtured him is now dying and in need of undeserved love and care herself. A brilliantly well-written novel which resonates for a long time.

12. Frost in May by Antonia White (Virago £7.99)

Crystalline tale of a young girl's Catholic education, terrifying, touching and passionate by turns. A 20th-century classic just reissued along with its progressively darkening sequels, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass. Nanda Gray, called Clara Batchelor in the later books, is an unforgettably intense heroine.

13. The Sea of Faith by Stephen O'Shea (Profile £20)

Hip historian tramps the battlefields around the Mediterranean to shed light on the great contention of Christian vs Muslim in the Middle Ages. A vast wave of learning, every page carrying a glittering freight of insight, detail and caustic observation.

14. The Killing Jar by Nicola Monaghan (Chatto £11.99)

On a rough estate in Nottingham, five-year-old Kerrie-Ann is pulled into a world of drugs, drug-dealing and violence by her unstable family. As she grows up, it only gets worse as her boyfriend becomes increasingly threatening, but, when Kerrie-Ann decides to leave, she realises it's not that simple. Incredibly impressive debut novel.

15. Mr Clarinet by Nick Stone (Michael Joseph £12.99)

For an alternative holiday destination, how about somewhere really hot and sultry, where the air-conditioning never works, small children throw rocks at tourists, and there's a definite lack of a sewer system. Welcome to Haiti, where a loaded pistol should nestle next to the sunscreen in your toilet bag, and where, in Nick Stone's superb first thriller, PI Max Mingus comes up against voodoo and worse whilst searching for a missing child. Not to be missed.

16. The Man who Saved Britain by Simon Winder (Picador £14.99)

A cultural history debunking 007 and his creator Ian Fleming; also a demolition of misplaced patriotism. Splenetic and funny: perfect reading for anyone heading for Cuba, Jamaica, or other Bond haunts.

17. Alentejo Blue by Monical Ali (Doubleday £14.99)

In a fictional village in Portugal, locals, expats and holiday-makers mingle, dream, collide and regret in a series of interwoven narrative strands. Definitely falls into the "difficult second novel" category, but worth checking out for fans of Brick Lane.

18. Wild Mary by Patrick Marnham (Chatto £18.99)

The novelist Mary Wesley began to publish in her seventies, drawing on material from her own life. And what a life - now we can read about the lovers, the tiffs, the trysts and the tragedies, most of which were transmuted into her wildly successful novels. A racy read, to be packed alongside her classic, The Camomile Lawn (Vintage £7.99), which has just been reissued.

19. Miss Webster and Chérif by Patricia Duncker (Bloomsbury £12.99)

An acerbic, retired ex-schoolteacher gets a new lease of life on a trip to North Africa, and befriends Saïda, the manageress of her hotel. But on her return she is surprised to be contacted by Chérif, a beautiful youth who claims to be Saïda's son. The stuffy villagers are scandalised by Miss Webster's new ménage, but is Chérif who he says he is, and can such a friendship ever be innocent in the post-9/11 world? A witty comedy of manners with sombre overtones.

20. The Story of You by Julie Myerson (Fourth Estate £14.99)

Rosy is taken on a holiday to Paris by her husband, to help them both recover from a bereavement. But she fleetingly glimpses a long-lost lover and finds herself drawn into an old relationship which never had time to mature. Is he a stalker, or something more mysterious, and is it ever safe to try and resurrect the past? Is Rosy hallucinating the whole affair? Something to make you shiver in the hottest sun.

21. The Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson (Penguin £12.99)

The début novel of the veteran South African journalist and political activist uses real archive material to relate the story of a man who moves from administering the colonial system to working for the apartheid regime which he despises. Essentially the story of the author's father, a decent, intelligent man trying to make sense of a world turned upside down, it's an outstanding achievement. To be reviewed next week

22. Shroom: a cultural history of the magic mushroom by Andy Letcher (Faber £12.99)

Punctures countless shroomer myths - apparently, there's no lineage of initiates stretching back to antiquity, driven underground by those stuffy Christians. Mushroom culture began in the 1950s. An entertaining companion for anyone on the modern hippie trail.

23.Sea Change by Robert B Parker (No Exit £16.99)

Paradise, Massachusetts. Sounds perfect doesn't it, especially during Race Week when the wealthy arrive in their floating gin palaces for seven days of fun and frolic. But maybe not for the young woman who turns up drowned in the bay after a sex and drugs party which goes horribly wrong. Local chief of police Jesse Stone turns over a lot of stones searching for the culprits, and Parker writes another quick-fire winner of a novel.

24. Bearders: My Life in Cricket by Bill Frindall (Chatto £18.99)

Bearders reveals the awesome complexity of the three-sheet cricket scoring system, that Frindall has used to delight Radio 4's Test Match Special listeners with his astonishingly detailed statistical analyses of play for over four decades. Far from being dry, this memoir is packed full of encomia for colleagues and lavish details of world tours disguised as drinking holidays - besides the odd recherché innings summary.

25. A Perfect Life by Raffaella Barker (Headline Review £12.99)

Angel seemingly has a "perfect life" in the countryside, with her handsome husband, Nick, a big house and her adorable children, ranging from tiny to teenage. But the children drive her up the wall, and she's not even sure she loves Nick any more. Barker tackles the unpleasant side of rural living in a novel that, unusually for her, is more bitter than sweet. A gripping family drama.

26. The Cold Moon (Hodder £14.99)

If you're heading to New York, beware, because horror and menace lurks along its mean streets and wide boulevards, as forensic pathologist Lincoln Rhyme and his beautiful assistant Amelia Sachs discover once more in Deaver's latest thriller. This is a novel that will chill your blood on the warmest day of any summer holiday. Keep looking over your shoulder...

27. The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb (Pushkin £8.99)

A rediscovered literary gem: one of Hungary's most celebrated authors, Szerb spent 1929-1930 researching in the British Library Reading Room, and this love letter to British culture and the Gothic novel was the happy result. A shy Hungarian scholar is invited to the castle of a mysterious Welsh aristocrat, the Earl of Gwynedd, to investigate the Pendragon family's historical links with the occult. Men in medieval costume stagger round the castle at night, spectral horsemen gallop through the grounds and the daughter of the house is a devastating femme fatale. A spirited and spiritual romp.

28. Title Deeds by Lisa Campbell, Doubleday (£14.99)

The daughter of the ill-fated 25th Thane of Cawdor wrote this memoir to exorcise the unhappy memories of growing up at the eponymous Scottish castle with a damaged and intimidating father and a crushed, betrayed mother. The torrent of misery, anger and family feuding continues to this day and was further fuelled by this fascinating and guiltily voyeuristic memoir.

29. The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais (Orion £12.99)

Los Angeles beckons with the promise of sun, surf and Hollywood celebrities. But even this paradise has its darker side, and one of the top crime writers portraying the underside of the city is Robert Crais. A prisoner is released from the big house just as his son is murdered in a drive-by shooting, and he decides to help solve the murder much to the displeasure of the LAPD. Crais knows his town well, having written scripts for film and TV before becoming a best-selling author. He's the king of LA crime and long may he reign.

30. Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott (Sceptre £12.99)

Johnny Chrome is an ageing, overweight rocker granted a new lease of life by Glam Rock. Just as long as he can squeeze into his silver trousers and hang on to Sweet Thing, the cynical young rent boy he adores, the hits such as "Hey, Hey (The Gang's All Here)" keep on coming. Flare-wearing hustlers, anarchists and squatters add to the period flavour. Wildly enjoyable.

31. Electricity by Ray Robinson (Picador £12.99)

Lily is a no-nonsense girl: she has had to take care of herself from an early age and cope with regular, sometimes severe, epileptic attacks. So when her brother goes missing, she sets out to find him. This moving debut novel brilliantly depicts life with epilepsy.

32. Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach (Fourth Estate £10.99)

Just after her successful novel, Dying Young, was made into a film starring Julia Roberts, Marti Leimbach's son was diagnosed with severe autism. This is her first novel since then, and it's an emotional account of a family struggling to cope with an autistic child, based partly on the author's own experiences. Although it is sad at times, Leimbach's upbeat attitude shines through, and it will leave you with a feeling that, with the right attitude, anything can be achieved.

33. The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (Faber £12.99)

A detective with a difference: Yashim is a retired court eunuch in 19th-century Istanbul, investigating the murder of an officer found stuffed into a cooking pot. The clues suggest the Janissaries, once the Sultan's elite troops, now corrupt and disgraced, were responsible. Goodwin brings all the scholarship and aplomb of his prizewinning non-fiction to his first novel, which steams with the stink of the tanneries and dazzles with the whirl of the dervishes.

34. Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr (Chatto £20)

Gifted new historian subjects Robespierre, the terrifying architect of the French Revolution, to intense scrutiny. A fascinating, chilling meditation on good intentions twisted into evil deeds, and a major new assessment of a remarkable, desperately flawed man.

35. Star People by Paul Burston (Time Warner £10.99)

He's Hollywood's most profitable all-action male star, and he's regularly seen with a pretty starlet by his side. So when he falls for a male prostitute and expresses a desire to do films with meaning, his agent will stop at nothing to hide the truth and keep him on track. Wonderfully entertaining (fictional) romp; essential reading for anyone touching down at LAX.

36. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre £16.99)

Fresh from his Richard and Judy triumph with Cloud Atlas, Mitchell returns with the last thing we'd ever have expected from him: a straightforward, semi-autobiographical, rites of passage novel. Well, sort of straightforward. It's 1982 and 13-year-old Jason Taylor's main preoccupations are how to keep the bullies off his back, and the Hangman (his stammer) at bay, while monitoring the progress of the Falklands War and trying to be a boy poet. Who knew Mitchell could be so funny?

37.The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (Vintage £7.99)

Hugely influential feminist retellings of classic fairy tales like Bluebeard and Mr Fox, reissued along with other key Carter works. Sharp, brilliant and thought-provoking stories from the much-missed doyenne of British magical realism.

38. Over Exposure by Hugo Rifkind (Canongate £9.99)

Self-loathing Jewish newspaper gossip-columnist incompetently investigates a series of celebrity jewel robberies at parties, premières and launches, while trying to find true love and sort out his eccentric family. Light enough to take to the beach, but there's depth under all the glitter, too.

39. Winter's Bone by Daniel Wood-rell (Sceptre £12.99)

Deep in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, you can get beaten up for asking the wrong questions, everyone knows how to fire a gun, and most families are cooking up crank on the back porch. A teenage girl takes on more than she bargains for when she sets out to find her missing father - or his body. Can it be that members of her own community know more than they're letting on? Brutal, violent and completely gripping, Winter's Bone will drop you right in the middle of the harsh environment of the Ozarks.

40. Clear Water by Will Ashon (Faber £12.99)

There's a debt to Michael Moorcock and to Douglas Coupland here, but Ashon's début is nontheless startlingly original and and defiantly British. Six dysfunctional characters, including a lifestyle journalist, a violent psychopath who calls himself King James, Binary Bob, a computer hacker, and a shop assistant, are brought into proximity via Clearwater, a giant shopping centre close to the Thames estuary in Kent. As the characters edge towards their inevitable fate it becomes clear that this a very dark book indeed, though not without bleak humour. Ashon is a major new talent.

41. A Gentleman's Relish by John Murray (Flambard £8.99)

Flann O'Brien-esque romp about a retired cartoonist's memories of his mad old dad, George, a satyromaniacal linguist and amateur ornithologist whose adventures include accidentally getting his father's ashes eaten by an Alsatian. More a series of vignettes than a coherent novel, but beautifully written and laugh-out-loud funny.

42. Midnight Mover by Bobby Womack (John Blake £17.99)

The drugs, the hookers, the music... the flares! Eye-popping, tell-all memoir by the legendary soul singer and guitarist who worked with The Stones, ferried Janis Joplin around in his limo, got high with Sly Stone and fought with John Lennon. Womack didn't so much walk on the wild side as build a sorcerer's castle there. Yet at his creative peak in the 1970s, he was one of the greatest tunesmiths and session players in the world. Essential reading for music lovers.

43. The Bloodstone Papers by Glen Duncan (Scribner £12.99)

Complex, multi-generational saga about an Anglo-Indian family, transferred to Bolton after the end of the Raj. Owen, who teaches English at a third-rate college in Wimbledon, is obsessed with writing The Book, a family memoir combined with a history of the Anglo-Indians, while also attempting to track down Skinner, who once scammed his father out of an ancestral bloodstone ring. A terrific yarn.

44. Passionate Minds by David Bodanis (L,B £17.99)

The love affair of between Voltaire and Emilie du Châtelet, two Enlightenment thinkers who bonded over physics. They set up home together (Emilie's husband turned a blind eye) and built a sophisticated laboratory with all the latest equipment, publishing their (conflicting) findings on the nature of fire in prestigious journals. These two egotists were not the nicest of people, but Bodanis, well-known for his historically based works of popular science, makes their story a fascinating one.

45.The Lost Luggage Porter by Andrew Martin (Faber £10.99)

Jim Stringer returns for another outing in the third of Martin's ripping Victorian railway mysteries, though he's given up his place on the footplate and become a detective in the railway police. There is something amiss at York station, as a wages snatch in an engine leads to murder and a breathtaking chase down the country's main lines and across the Channel to Paris. You can almost smell the sulphur, the steam oil and the grease. We never knew rivets could be so riveting.

46. The Libertines: Bound Together by Anthony Thornton & Roger Sargent (Time Warner £16.99)

So is Pete Doherty just a druggie fame-seeker who happened to go out with Kate Moss? Thornton has written a whole book to prove otherwise, with gorgeous accompanying pictures by Roger Sargent. A good, respectful account of the artistic project of Messrs Barât and Doherty, and an insight into the wider movement of disaffected youth of which they were a part.

47. In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant, (Little, Brown £12.99)

Taking Titian's famous painting of a prostitute fixing her client with a come-hither stare (known more modestly as The Venus of Urbino), Dunant has produced another cracker of a historical drama, concerning Fiammetta, a beautiful whore who comes to 16th-century Venice to try her luck after being driven out of Rome. Ever by her side is the narrator, a charismatic and witty dwarf who acts as her business manager. But time is passing, Venice is already well-stocked with whores, and worst of all, Fiammetta's sworn enemy, the author and pornographer Pietro Aretino, has also turned up in La Serenissima. The stink of canals and unwashed bodies is palpable.

48. The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber £12.99)

A Gothic-tinged, kinky Victorian thriller about the relationship between upper-class Arabella Reid and her lady's maid, Bessy Buckley. Arabella has some unusual requests for the young Irish girl, one of them being that she detail her experiences and thoughts - her "observations" in a diary for her mistress to read. But Bessy soon discovers that Arabella keeps her own diary, and that she is guiltily obsessed with the memory of a girl who came to a sticky end on the local railway line. Spookily effective, for fans of Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey and Wilkie Collins.

49. Darker Than the Deepest Sea: the search for Nick Drake by Trevor Dann (Portrait £17.99)

Gentle debunking of some of the myths that cling to the tragic young singer-songwriter who died by his own hand in 1974. Dann has rounded up friends and acquaintances who are finally prepared to talk frankly, and in some cases quite rudely. (Though it's funny how quite a few of the women claim Drake was desperately in love with them.) The result is a more realistic figure than the wounded, doomed bard of legend - which makes the story an even more tragic one.

50. Steal You Away by Niccolò Ammaniti (Canongate £12.99)

If you want the real Italy, Ammaniti serves up an antidote to all that Renaissance grandeur and majestic scenery. You're a long way from tourist Italy with his lowlifes and deadbeats. I'm Not Scared, subsequently filmed, broke him in the UK; in his follow up, a group of very frustrated dreamers remain anchored to Ischiano Scalo, a small, hinterland town by the sea. Pietro is 11 years old, crushed by his alcoholic father and mentally disturbed mother; Graziano is an ageing Casanova with a penchant for virgins. Their stories converge to a devasting climax, one that is entirely unexpected and morally ambiguous.

To buy any of the books listed here, with 10 per cent discount (free p&p), contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897

The Critics' Choice

David Mitchell

Flora Thompson died in 1947, and I'm not even sure if Lark Rise to Candleford, her trilogy of memoirs, is still in print. Snap up a second-hand copy if not. What I love is the clarity of the lens through which she shows her readers the rural Oxfordshire of her girlhood and its folkways. Compassionate but unsentimental, this is semi-alternative history: not as history is written, but as it builds, and blocks, routes for its generations to follow. And keep an eye open for David Peace's addictive factual fiction, 'The Damned Utd', which tracks Brian Clough's managership of Leeds in 1974.

Hari Kunzru

The ultimate holiday read should combine maximum density in smallest volume - I want to pack a book that will last me for a while but doesn't force me to pay excess baggage fees. So old Penguin classics are quite good - Buddenbrooks, Tom Jones, Sword of Honour, The Master and Margarita have all done well for me on long, developing-world bus journeys, but, for something slightly less well-known, the one-volume edition of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End will give you about 800 pages of narrative pleasure and weigh less than a pair of shoes.

Geoff Dyer

Albert Camus's Selected Essays and Notebooks (Penguin): full of good stuff, but it's the three volumes of so-called "lyrical" essays that make it essential summer reading. Two of them, written in his twenties, grow directly out of the world of poverty and sunlight in which Camus grew up in Algeria. In the third, written in the 1950s when he was a celebrated intellectual, Camus returns to these same places and themes and discovers, in the depths of winter, that there lies within him "an unconquerable summer".

Louise Welsh

Spending hours inside the head of an angry London cabbie might not sound like great Summer fun, but Will Self's The Book of Dave (Viking £17.99), an edgy evocation of modern London experienced partly through a post apocalyptic future, is blockbustingly brilliant. Guaranteed to keep you absorbed in plane, boat or train, Self's prose is a delight. He is rivalled only by JG Ballard in his chronicling of our times.

Will Self

My all-time best summer read is À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Don't be put off by the heft of the thing - it comes in multi-volume editions. The plot is as gripping as any soap opera, the jokes come thick and fast, and the refined manners and preoccupations of the Faubourg St Germain are bound to be an amusing counterpoint to the nudie gambolling on whatever beach you find yourself marooned on. Proust's is a world entire - so why not take it with you anywhere in the world?

Bernardine Evaristo

I'd nominate Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Harvill Press £8.99). Originally published in 1947, it helped win Laxness the Nobel Prize in 1955. Bjartur is a stubborn old curmudgeon determined to farm independently in the bleak Icelandic countryside in the early 20th century. Sounds boring? It ain't. This is a breath-taking, heart-breaking, heart-warming masterpiece of a novel about a man pursuing his dream and becoming his own worst enemy in the process.

Sarah Waters

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Each of the 12 short novels which make up this 20th-century sequence is a brilliant little fictional gem, with wonderfully memorable characters and scenes. Together they form a meditation on love, friendship, politics and the passage of time that's both achingly poignant and completely compelling. A superior holiday read.

Matt Thorne

This summer's ultimate holiday read has to be Joanna Briscoe's Sleep With Me (Bloomsbury £7.99). Available from most airport bookshops, it will increase your delight at being on a beach and not in the middle of a terrifying love affair (unless, of course, you're on a beach and in the middle of a terrifying love affair).

Julie Myerson

Not enough people in this country know about Sue Miller. She's like Anne Tyler, only grittier and her characters have sex, which Tyler's never seem to. While I Was Gone (Bloomsbury £6.99) is everything a good novel should be - part emotional thriller, part unnervingly honest dissection of a marriage, with that cool delicious prose that Americans do so well. Start with The Good Mother (Orion £6.99) and just keep on going.

Richard Mason

My choice would be Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos: long enough to see you through the dreariest vacation and highbrow enough to act as great cover when you need to escape from your friends. A devastatingly sophisticated moral tale of pre-revolutionary decadence and intrigue. Knocks Dallas into the shade.

Maggie O'Farrell

I'm not one who believes in holiday reading equalling light reading. What I want from a holiday book is an escape, a total, addictive immersion in something other. You can't do better, then, than almost anything by William Boyd. My favourites are The New Confessions and Any Human Heart (both Penguin £7.99). I haven't yet tried his new one, Restless (Bloomsbury £17.99, but I will.

Barbara Trapido

Jane Gardam's Old Filth (Abacus £6.99) is my book for the beach. The life story of a Raj "orphan" Sir Edward Feathers QC, it spans the century via a foster mother in Wales, a schoolmaster called "Sir", a brace of cheating aunts, an ingenious chum called Islam and a sojourn with Queen Mary. At 260 pages, it's no challenge to one's hand luggage and it lasts a longer than a pile of whodunnits.

Ali Smith

Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow (Chatto £17.99) is gripping and strange. Two volumes of this brilliant Spanish trilogy are available now in English in a striking translation. As if written by a postmodern, cerebral, rather self-indulgent Graham Greene, they look at love and violence and survival, and at English and European culture and history, with wit, really scary resonance and a great deal of revelation.

Justin Cartwright

The ultimate summer read suggests something not too demanding. But I like to read difficult books at leisure: The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald is one such (Vintage £7.99). Unclassifiable, wonderfully well written, it purports to be a walk around Suffolk, but in fact is a meditation on English and European history.

Scarlett Thomas

What I really want on my holidays is the familiarity of, say, donkey rides, but with bad, dangerous donkeys that'll break free and take you somewhere you've never been before. Holiday fiction should be the same. Stone Junction, by Jim Dodge (Canongate £7.99), is described as an "alchemical pot-boiler", and tells of Daniel, a young recruit to the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. Daniel goes on a quest for ultimate knowledge, learning useful skills like gambling and meditation along the way. It'll certainly last the whole holiday - and make it pleasantly strange.

Michèle Roberts

Stuck in a hot city and desperate for escape? Read Tim Binding's spellbinding feat of imagination, Man Overboard (Picador £7.99), based on fact, a funny and moving tale of espionage and Englishness, chaps and rubber flippers, and Russian submarines. From armchair travelling to deckchair cookery: Classic Jamaican Cooking (Serif £9.99) by Caroline Sullivan is a 19th-century cornucopia of treats. Coconut ice-cream (page 107) will cool your brain before you start re-reading Proust.

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