Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers – part two | Books

Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers â€" part two | Books

John Banville

Colm Tóibín’s exhilarating House of Names (Viking £14.99) is a retelling of Aeschylus’s drama on the sacrificing by Agamemnon of his daughter Cassandra and its tragic consequences, including the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra. The book has a controlled, hushed quality, like that of a Morandi still life, which only serves to heighten the terror and pity of the tale. Michael Longley’s latest collection, Angel Hill (Jonathan Cape £10) â€" what a genius he has for titles â€" is at once lush and elegiac, delicate and muscular, melancholy and thrilling. I shall not be going anywhere â€" hate holidays â€" but will stay happily at home, rereading Evelyn Waugh’s second world war Sword of Honour trilogy (Penguin £14.99). Pure bliss.

Clover Stroud

With five children to entertain, I’m not sure how much reading I’ll actually do on holiday in Santander this summer, but luckily I have already romped through my best summer books.

Haunted by the shadow of a father killed in a motorbike accident, William Giraldi’s The Hero’s Body (No Exit Press £9.99) is a terse, gripping memoir set in working-class New Jersey. Giraldi’s hyper-masculine childhood is a foil for his revelations on the true fragility of male identity. I loved Elizabeth Day’s glamorous thriller The Party (4th Estate £12.99), about a sinister secret between two friends that unravels in midlife. Day’s writing is both elegant and claustrophobic, and deeply revealing of how entrenched questions of class remain today. I could not put it down. And I galloped through Mr Darley’s Arabian (John Murray £25), Christopher McGrath’s brilliantly colourful romp through the extraordinary horses and scandalous characters who make up the history of British horse racing.

AM Homes

Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (Chatto & Windus £16.99) is a brilliant novel, deeply compassionate and painterly, reminding me of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings. Mukherjee brings to life the colours and sounds of a place where modern life is constantly crashing against tradition. And in my suitcase: Howard Jacobson’s Pussy (Vintage £12.99), because as much as I need to laugh, I also need to confirm that my sense of horror is not just in my imagination but indeed shared; David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere (C Hurst & Co £20), because I am still looking for clues as to how we got where we are, and where we might be headed next; Don DeLillo’s entire backlist, and a bit of Norman Mailer â€" because in retrospect, despite what one might call his “personality problems” with women, he was an amazing writer with a political eye.

Curiously, I’m coming to the UK, spending a month in Oxford, keen to look at a landscape other than my own.

Curtis Sittenfeld

I loved the novel The Idiot (Jonathan Cape £16.99) by Elif Batuman. It’s about a girl in her first year at Harvard in the mid-90s, and her email correspondence (when email is still new) with an older male student. The whole novel is full of hilarious, brilliant observations about writing, life and crushes. I was also blown away by Jane Mayer’s nonfiction book Dark Money (Scribe Publications £9.99), which meticulously, fascinatingly and horrifyingly explains how eccentric American billionaires hijacked our democracy. I’m travelling to see my sister in Providence, Rhode Island, this summer, and I’ll take the story collection Strangers to Temptation (Hub City £13.33) by Scott Gould (about a boy in the American south of the 1970s) and the novel Silver Sparrow (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones (about two girls in the American south of the 1980s). I’m hearing b uzz about Jones’s 2018 novel (An American Marriage) so I thought I’d read this one first.

Melvyn Bragg

In the 11 skilfully detailed chapters of The Matter of the Heart (Bodley Head £20), Thomas Morris gives us the spectacular history of heart surgery. He spares us nothing and in gripping stories delivers everything you would want to know about his superbly chosen subject. Deaths of the Poets by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape £14.99) is a witty and erudite journey into the characters of doomed poets using location as a steer. Chatterton kicks off and along the way there are arguments for and against the notion of whether poets are especially doomed artists. Surprisingly entertaining. For my own travels, I shall be taking House of Names by Colm Tóibín (Viking £14.99). Tóibín’s recent masterworks, Brooklyn and Nora Webster, gave little intimation that he would home in on the bloodiest violence in Greek tragedy for this novel . I can’t wait to see what he does with it.

Jackie Kay

I’d recommend readers take poetry with them on holiday â€" poetry is so portable, travels light, but digs deep. I’d take Hollie McNish’s Nobody Told Me (Blackfriars £13.99), winner of this year’s Ted Hughes award, and a funny, very moving collection, taken originally from the poet’s diaries, about motherhood. Another wonderful debut is Kayombo Chingonyi’s Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus £10) â€" a subtle and affecting, lyrical and powerful collection that explores boyhood, rites of passage, the ancient and the modern world. I’d pack the small poetry pamphlet Toots by Alyson Hallett (Mariscat Press £6) â€" poems so fresh and enlivening, you want to knock back the whole book with a cold beer. I’m hoping to go to the Greek island of Halki. I went last year and loved it. And I’m going to pack George Mackay Brown’s short stories Andrina (Polygon £7.99), having just come back from St Magnus festival in Orkney. I love the mystery and militancy he weaves into stories like The Box of Fish. And I’m also going to take Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race (Corsair £18.99) â€" a powerful memoir about growing up black in Australia.

Harriet Lane

Based on a True Story (Bloomsbury £12.99) by Delphine de Vigan (elegantly translated by George Miller) is a wonderful literary trompe l’oeil, a novel about identity and writing, reality and imagination. It’s dark, smart, compelling and extremely French. I also enjoyed James Lasdun’s The Fall Guy (Jonathan Cape £12.99), a creepy little satire in which several New Yorkers, none of them terribly appealing, escape the city heat for a summer in the Catskills, and Denise Mina’s bleak and atmospheric The Long Drop (Harvill Secker £12.99).

For my own holiday (rural East Sussex, near Eastbourne â€" the sunshine coast!), I will pack Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown £16.99) and Susie Steiner’s Persons Unknown (Harper Collins £12.99).

Patrick Ness

Definitely take two titles from the Bailey’s prize longlist this year (both of which, I think, are better than the winner): CE Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (4th Estate £16.99), contender for the Great American Novel, and Heather O’Neill’s The Lonely Hearts Hotel (Quercus £16.99). For your teen, After the Fire (Usborne £8.99) by Will Hill â€" a tough, enthralling YA novel about the Waco cult. I just got back from holiday, where I finally read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (Alma Books £4.99), which is, if we’re honest, ridiculous but ridiculously enjoyable, and Adam Johnson’s fascinating Pulitzer prize-winning novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son (Black Swan £8.99). Go big; you’ve got the time.

Lionel Shriver

I strongly recommend Lawrence Osborne’s forthcoming novel Beautiful Animals (Hogarth £14.99), about two young women who try to help a refugee washed up on the Greek island where their families are holidaying. The altruism doesn’t end well… I’m also intrigued by Dirk Kurbjuweit’s novel Fear (Text Publishing), about a stalker living downstairs. I’m not finished, but so far so good. While in both NY and on a quick first trip to Mexico, I also hope to get through Preparation for the Next Life (Oneworld £8.99) by Atticus Lish, a strenuous recommendation by my friend Tracy Chevalier, and perhaps to finally have a go at CE Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (4th Estate £16.99).

Kirsty Wark

Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber £8.99) is a novel so rich with character, so visceral in its action, that you literally hold your breath reading it. The character and voice of Thomas McNulty who escapes the Irish famine and becomes embroiled in both the American Indian wars and the American civil war will last in your mind much longer than your summer holiday. For a fast-paced, brilliantly constructed thriller with a difference, reach for Robert Harris’s Conclave (Cornerstone £20). All you wanted to know about the Vatican but were too scared to ask. I’ll be taking Richard Ford’s memoir Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Bloomsbury £12.99) in my own book bag in preparation for interviewing the author at the Edinburgh book festival (and also rereading Canada, which I loved first time around) as well as Judy Murray’s Knowing the Score: My Family and Ou r Tennis Story (Chatto & Windus £18.99) because, quite simply, she is inspirational, passionate and great fun. I admire her enormously and there’s always the chance that my serve might improve.

Cornelia Parker

Dadland (Vintage £8.99) by Keggie Carew is a brilliant, bittersweet biography of her maverick, charismatic father Tom Carew. He was an undercover agent in Vichy France, a guerrilla fighter, “Lawrence of Burma”, and very possibly the inspiration for his friend Patricia Highsmith’s infamous character Ripley. We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World (Profile £12.99) by Mark Stevenson is an inspiring book that makes you feel optimistic about the future; much needed at this moment in time. I have just finished reading Zeitoun (Penguin £9.99) by Dave Eggers â€" a chilling factual account of a family caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and an indictment of Bush’s America. I wonder how the inevitable climate-related disasters will fare under Trump?

Rohan Silva

You can’t go wrong with Harriet Harman’s wonderful autobiography A Woman’s Work (Allen Lane £20) â€" it’s just so human and inspiring, and my favourite book of the year so far. The Nature Fix (WW Norton & Co £20) by Florence Williams is an ideal holiday pick too, chock-full of insights about the health benefits of spending time in nature. (It turns out that lying on the beach is good for you.) And if you’re worried about the state of the world, Matthew Bolton’s brilliant How to Resist (Bloomsbury £9.99) shows how each of us can do our bit to fight populism.

As for me, I’ll be packing Arundhati Roy’s new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton £18.99), which I’ve been saving for my travels. I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait.

Carol Morley

When I go on holiday I love to read short stories. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (Granta £12.99) by the film-maker Kathleen Collins is a beautiful collection, written in the 60s and 70s, but unpublished in her lifetime. I also love the language and surprises in Irenosen Okojie’s collection Speak Gigantular (Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd £8.99). For August, I have pre-ordered We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press £9.99) by Preti Taneja. It sounds wonderful â€" an epic family tale involving corruption and betrayal that looks to hold a mirror to our times.

Mark Haddon

I need you to read four books, so I’ll be brief. The Man Booker-shortlisted Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (Oneworld £12.99) is a single afternoon’s disturbing read that will haunt you for weeks. Joe Moshenska’s A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby (Cornerstone £20) reads like a thrilling historical novel but amazingly happens to be nonfiction. The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Macmillan £20) is the best true-crime reportage and simultaneously the best memoir I’ve read for several years. And The Unaccompanied by Simon Armitage (Faber £14.99) won me over completely after a period of several years in which I suffered a profound allergy to poetry of all kinds.

My own summer reading (during a week in Portugal and a week in Switzerland in an attempt to satisfy all family members) will be the new translation of The Arabian Nights by Malcolm C Lyons (Penguin Classics). It’s three volumes of a thousand pages each so it may be my reading for the following summer as well.

Louise Doughty

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately and three very different books that I’ve admired are: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Macmillan £20), true crime in the same category as Truman Capote or Janet Malcolm; A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (Aurum Press £20), about friendship between famous female writers; and Hannah Lowe’s engaging cross-cultural memoir, Long Time No See (Periscope £9.99). It’s time for some novels on holiday â€" I think it’s going to be Croatia this year â€" and we’re living in a golden age for genre-busting fiction, narrative-driven books that are still beautifully written. Among the many I’m looking forward to catching up with are The Party by Elizabeth Day (4th Estate £12.99), The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig (Little, Brown £16.99) and t wo debuts, You Don’t Know Me by Imran Mahmood (Michael Joseph £12.99) and Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber £14.99) â€" good prose and a secret waiting to be unlocked are always a winning combination for me.

Laura Barnett

No suitcase should be without a copy of The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss (Granta £12.99) â€" one of the sharpest, most startlingly original novels I’ve read in years. And while A Manual for Heartache by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador £8.99) might not sound like holiday reading, it’s the perfect choice for anyone keen to use the time off to make sense of any recent emotional upheaval.

Many people I respect have raved about Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (Canongate £8.99), so I’ll be taking that to a yoga retreat in Sweden. And Fran Cooper’s debut novel These Dividing Walls (Hodder & Stoughton £14.99) will be coming with me on a weekend trip to Paris: it’s set in the city, and I can’t resist a location-appropriate holiday read.

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara.

Marina Warner

I recommend: The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories, edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (Solaris £10.99), entertaining, sexy, and mischievous; The Power (Penguin £12.99) an enthrallingly told Cassandra-like prophecy from the ever-inventive Naomi Alderman; and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s tales, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Headline £14.99), ranging from the memorably weird to the delicate and psychological. I’ll be going to Sicily, and am packing Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Allen Lane £20), which continues his brilliant recovery of the intertwined Mediterranean, and Jack Zipes’s Catarina the Wise (University of Chicago Press £15), a fabulous dish of frutti di mare.

Nick Hornby

Two books have stood out for me so far this year: Keggie Carew’s Dadland (Chatto & Windus £16.99) and Francesca Segal’s The Awkward Age (Chatto & Windus £14.99). Carew’s memoir about her father follows a winding, extraordinary path through the thickets of dementia and the jungles of Burma â€" a thrilling, bloody, educative history of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (AKA the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) in the second world war combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author’s father. Segal’s The Awkward Age is a very smart, soulful, compelling, elegantly written domestic novel about a wedged-together family, and what can go wrong when teenage children decide they have minds (and hormones) of their own. I will be sitting on a sun-lounger reading Glenn Frankel’s High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (Bloomsbury £30), Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Penguin £12.99), and one of the many classics that I have hitherto ignored, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (Virago £8.99).

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

I recommend A Bold and Dangerous Family (Chatto & Windus £20), Caroline Moorehead’s humane and engrossing book about two brothers, both courageous anti-fascists, murdered by Mussolini’s hit men. Also Standard Deviation (4th Estate £12.99) â€" Katherine Heiny’s novel is a comic masterpiece and her Audra is the funniest heroine ever. A faltering marriage, a vulnerable child, an origami class full of seriously weird loners â€" dark material transformed into pure gold by Heiny’s spot-on comic timing. I’ll be in Suffolk rereading another comic masterpiece â€" The Diary of a Nobody (Penguin £6.99) â€" because Rough Haired Pointer’s hilarious stage version (directed by my daughter Mary Franklin) returns to the Kings Head Islington from 31 October.

Julie Myerson

I’ve been writing a novel of my own, which means I can only allow in certain voices and so am woefully behind on reading, but Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story (Bloomsbury £12.99) hit the exact right note: frighteningly honest, precise and thrilling. I hope to spend most of August by the bluest of blue seas in East Sussex where I will sit under a huge purple umbrella reading Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking £12.99), Monique Roffey’s The Tryst (Dodo Ink £8.99) and Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami (Jonathan Cape £16.99) â€" all of them enticing-sounding books by proper grown-up writers who aren’t afraid to go to uneasy places and whose work I have previously found so inspiring.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Andrew O’Hagan’s The Secret Life (Faber £14.99) brings together three brilliant pieces he’s written about the impact of the digital world on our fleshly selves. They are written like thrillers freighted with challenging and urgent questions. In these dark times we have a responsibility to imagine what good times would look like. Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists (Bloomsbury £16.99) is a cheery rough guide to an archipelago of ideal societies. In my suitcase, as we head to the west of Ireland, is Walter Miller’s sci-fi classic about a future monastic society, A Canticle for Leibovitz (Orbit £9.99), and this year’s Carnegie winner, Ruta Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea (Puffin £7.99) â€" the story of the greatest maritime disaster of all time. On audible I’ve got Stay With Me (Canongate £14.99) by Ayòbámi Adébáyò.

Alex Preston

I’m going to be speaking about a neglected classic â€" Charles Sprawson’s extraordinary literary history of swimming, Haunts of the Black Masseur (Vintage £9.99) â€" on the brilliant Backlisted podcast in a few weeks’ time. It’s the perfect poolside companion. If you’re holidaying in more rugged terrain, how about Adam Nicolson’s light-filled hymn to the birds of our coasts and oceans, The Seabird’s Cry (HarperCollins £16.99)? I adored it. Finally, I’ve been delighted to see Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown £16.99) being garlanded with such praise. It’s a hell of a novel â€" dark, gripping and beautifully written. For my own holidays in France, I’ll be taking two advance proofs that have got me moist-palmed with anticipation. I’ve read bits of Anthony McGowan’s The Art of Failing (Oneworld £12.99, out in September) and can’t wait to immerse myself in this excruciating memoir of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Kamila Shamsie’s new one, Home Fire (Bloomsbury £16.99, also September), reimagines Antigone in two modern Muslim families.

Linda Grant

The most memorable nonfiction work of the year so far has been Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate £14.99), his account of a search for family and the solace of gardening which for me, as a new gardener, was an instructive pleasure. Gwendolyn Riley’s First Love (Granta £12.99) is a tremendous novel with an unreliable narrator and one of the most enjoyable monsters in contemporary fiction, the mother, holding forth in a Liverpool cafe. Loved it. I’ve come absurdly late to Henry James having developed an allergy reading The Ambassadors as a set university text. I expect to finish The Portrait of a Lady (Vintage, £6.99) in Fowey, Cornwall. So much more fun than Middlemarch.

Geoff Dyer

For long summer days I warmly recommend Gerard Reves’s hilariously gloomy The Evenings (originally published in Dutch in 1947 but only recently appearing in English courtesy of the Pushkin Press, £12.99). I see it as a Dutch version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which the narrator â€" who lives at home with his parents â€" instead of turning into a giant bug undergoes a psychic disintegration which is all but unnoticeable on the outside. In the intriguingly titled Novel 11, Book 18 (Vintage £8.99) Norwegian writer Dag Solstad serves up another helping of his wan and wise almost-comedy. (Lydia Davis taught herself Norwegian entirely from his books.) My wife and I are heading that way-ish, to Iceland, where I’ll be reading Raja Shehadeh’s Where the Line Is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine (Profile £14.99).

Charlotte Mendelson

Reading has always been everything: until now. My concentration is shot; life is complicated, the news is so bad. Dozens of just-begun books pile up by my bed; the only two that gripped me to the end are Susie Steiner’s novel Persons Unknown (HarperCollins £12.99) and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body (Macmillan £20). Holiday reading makes me panic at the best of times, which this is not. The classics I mean to bring â€" Laxness, Chekhov â€" will stay on the shelf. I can manage Elizabeth Strout, and Alys Fowler’s Hidden Nature (Hodder & Stoughton £20); I’m impatient for Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am (Headline £16.99), out in August, and Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel The Sparsholt Affair (Picador, October). Please hurry; meanwhile it’s back to my crime stockpile, a nd trying to ignore the news enough to write.

Alastair Campbell

At the risk of coming over all Remainiac, I am recommending a French book as the best I have read this year. Lettres à Anne by François Mitterrand (Gallimard €35), is a 1,200-page collection of the letters the former French president wrote to his mistress, Anne Pingeot, over the decades of their love affair. It is breathtakingly romantic at times. I would also recommend The End of Europe by James Kirchick (Yale University Press £18.99), a young American’s brilliant analysis of the dire state of world politics. The subtitle, Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age, gives you a flavour. Putin, Trump and Brexit figure large, and Kirchick shares my exasperation that we are turning away from liberal values and the benefits of the EU. Top of my reading list for the summer is The Jacobite Trilogy by DK Broster. I have read the first of the three, Flight of the Heron. I have also g ot the new book about Emmanuel Macron, Un jeune homme si parfait, by Anne Fulda (Plon €15,90). And, yes, I am going to France.

Julian Baggini

Travel will for once broaden your mind this year if you pack Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason (Allen Lane £25). It takes the new common sense that human beings are governed by irrational emotions and shows why these are not design flaws in the brain but design features. Erica Benner’s Be Like the Fox (Allen Lane £20) turns more conventional wisdom upside down by showing that Machiavelli was not as Machiavellian as you thought. I’m hoping to be in post-deadline mode at home reading David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, String Theory (Turnaround £16.99), ready to start watching the real thing if it disappoints.

Suzanne O’Sullivan

I will be alternating scuba diving with lots of reading on a Maldivian island this summer. I plan to take The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Pan £8.99). Henrietta’s story is extraordinary â€" she changed the world without ever knowing it. I will also be reading Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt (Granta £12.99). I’m a big admirer of deWitt’s originality. And I recommend In Pursuit of Memory by Joseph Jebelli (John Murray £20). On the surface it’s about Alzheimer’s disease but more than that it demonstrates how challenging it is to understand the brain. For fiction Linda Grant’s The Dark Circle (Virago £16.99) is simply a great story and one I’ve never heard before.

Aravind Adiga

Ross Raisin’s novel A Natural (Jonathan Cape £14.99) is a brave and moving story of a gay football player: and I am one of those who calls the game “soccer” and has never been to a club match. When I think of Raisin I remember Henry James’s phrase, “a knock-down insolence of talent”. On my summer holiday â€" to lovely Sri Lanka â€" I’ll be taking along a classic set of essays on the environment by my favourite Indian author, Ramachandra Guha, called How Much Should a Person Consume? (University of California Press). I’m trying to read everything written by Patrick White: The Vivisector (Vintage £9.99), a novel about an Australian painter, will also fly with me to Colombo.

Matt Haig

I really enjoyed reading The Secret Life by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber £14.99). It contains three long essays looking at different aspects of the relationship between cyberspace and the real world, including Ghosting, his brilliant essay about his experience ghostwriting for Julian Assange. I also enjoyed Tin Man by Sarah Winman (Headline £12.99), which is a brilliantly simple and sad novel. I will be going to Mykonos this summer, to do nothing at all except read and eat and bake in the sun, in order to rest before my own book tour. I will be taking with me Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (Hamish Hamilton £14.99), which I hear from reliable sources is great, and also Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis (Bodley Head £20), the former Greek finance minister’s memoir, which sounds fascinating on European politics, Greek life and capitalism.

Laura Dockrill

I’d have to chose Open: A Toolkit For How Magic and Messed Up Life Can Be by Gemma Cairney (Macmillan Children’s Books £12.99). You could let it be your only hand luggage and order a gin and tonic on the plane and you’d be happy. It’s perfect for a holiday because you can flick through it in between naps and sleeps. Gemma’s warm, comforting voice makes for perfect company on a beach. Next would have to be Plum by Hollie McNish (Picador £9.99). I absolutely adore Hollie’s writing style, her natural tone and charm. This book is wicked. I love her. And then I’d say Juno Dawson’s The Gender Games (Hodder & Stoughton £16.99). Juno is one of the bravest, freshest voices in young adult writing. I’m so glad she exists. I’m going to Morocco for the sun. My new favourite writer is Maggie Nelson. I started off with Bluets but I’ll take The Argonauts (M elville House £9.99), The Power by Naomi Alderman (Penguin £12.99) and one of my favourite books of 2016 â€" Sabrina Mahfouz’s How You Might Know Me (Out-Spoken Press £8). I’m really into little books right now that I can read in a couple of days and adore Richard Brautigan â€" his short works make for a perfect poolside read â€" In Watermelon Sugar (Vintage £8.99) or So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away (Canongate £8.99).

Philip Hensher

Whenever politicians try to restrict our prospects, we can as readers choose to roam more widely. I made a personal resolution on the day of Brexit that I was going to read a novel in a foreign language once a month. Next month, I’m going to take Édouard Louis’s second novel, Histoire de la violence (Seuil €18). His first, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (available in English as The End of Eddy, Harvill Secker £12.99), was a scarifying joy. I also want to take a magnificent anthology, The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told (Aleph £12.99), chosen and translated by Arunava Sinha â€" he is one of the most wonderful translators at work today, and this is a superb selection from a very rich tradition. I’m hoping for an early sight of my old friend Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair. We’re mostly staying at home in Switzerland, apart from a week spent walking in the Austri an alps.

Val McDermid

I love Ali Smith’s writing, and I’ve been keeping Autumn (Penguin £16.99) for an end-of-book holiday treat. It’s billed as the first post-Brexit novel and I imagine it will still be brutally topical. James Robertson is a versatile and provocative writer, particularly about modern Scotland. To Be Continued (Hamish Hamilton £16.99) is a surreal romp of a road novel featuring a talking toad, with more than a nod to Compton Mackenzie. I can’t wait. Christopher Brookmyre’s crime fiction has gone from strength to strength in recent years, seeing him flexing his narrative muscles with different protagonists. But Want You Gone (Little, Brown £18.99) revisits the always engaging Jack Parlabane whose knack for finding trouble is unrivalled.

Ned Beauman

At the moment I’m really enjoying Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings (Gibbs Smith £12.99), a novel with tremendous moral and political depths but also (and I always love this) lots of good detail about somebody’s day job (as an eviction removal man). I have no plans to go anywhere this summer because the rent on my one-bedroom flat is so high that I feel it would be economically irresponsible to leave it for more than a few minutes at a time, but the books I will take with me into the kitchen nook include October (Verso £18.99), China Miéville’s history of the Russian Revolution, and the recent reissue of Leonora Carrington’s stories, The Debutante and Other Stories, by the new feminist publisher Silver Press (£9.99).

Nicholas Hytner

Colm Tóibín’s House of Names (Viking £14.99) is a visceral reworking of the Oresteia, but love is one of its key notes: three boys, an old woman and a dog find it with each other before being swept back into the blood-soaked world. Violence also pulses through The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker £12.99) by Édouard Louis. Effeminate Eddy Bellegueule tries to be tough like the thugs who torment him, but being gay is his salvation. Late to the party, I read Elena Ferrante over Christmas and I’d happily read her again this summer, on the terrace of a farmhouse overlooking the foothills of the French Alps.

Ross Raisin

The two books that I would put forward are the two I am reading at the moment: Darke by Rick Gekoski (Canongate £16.99) is a craftily beguiling novel, whose narrator locks himself up â€" inside his home, his body, his mind â€" as the narrative, gradually revealing the fractured trauma of his past, pulls him apart. Dog Rounds (Blink £16.99) is a nonfiction account of death in the boxing ring. Spun around the affecting study of Nick Blackwell, a fighter brought back to life in an ambulance, journalist Elliot Worsell follows several boxers who have caused the death of another man, personal stories amplified by the author’s own â€" at once in love with the sport but conflicted by his attachment. On my own holiday â€" to the Edinburgh festival and then on a road trip in the Highlands, unless the combination of little children and midges doesn’t put paid to it â€" I will be taking Outline, by Rachel Cusk (Faber £16.99), and How to Be Human, by Paula Cocozza (Hutchinson £12.99).

Andrew Michael Hurley

I would recommend Missing Fay, by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape £16.99), in which a Lincoln schoolgirl’s disappearance touches the lives of a diverse cast of astutely observed characters. It’s a timely exploration of English identity and the fractures in our society. A novel that’s wry, visceral, angry and wise. Also brilliant is Beast by Paul Kingsnorth (Faber £12.99), where Edward Buckmaster, alone on the moors, faces the menacing otherness of the natural world. A superb study of fear and uncertainty. The books I’ll be taking with me to France in the summer are Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster £8.99), The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson (Faber £8.99), and Elmet by Fiona Mozley (John Murray, out in November).

Philippe Sands

On fiction, I’d move across time and place, starting with A Boy in Winter (Virago £14.99), Rachel Seiffert’s spellbinding evocation of fear and threat tinged with the possibility of hope and change, in wartime Ukraine. Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth (Bloomsbury £8.99) takes us west to Los Angeles, starting in the 1960s and forward over three generations, a set of interwoven tales that had me so gripped that I finished it in little more than a single reading and felt propelled to embrace the author with stunned thanks when I found myself unexpectedly sitting next to her. Mend the Living (Quercus £14.99), finely translated from Maylis de Kerangal’s spectacular French original, takes you to the heart of a world one can only begin to imagine, the anthropology of a single transplant that ends one life and allows another to continue. Books I am packing include Uki Goñi’s The Rea l Odessa (Granta £12, David Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Vintage), and Céleste Albaret’s Monsieur Proust (NYRB £19.95).

Tash Aw

I’d recommend The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker £12.99), Édouard Louis’s sensational autobiographical novel set in northern France, and Pachinko (Head of Zeus £8.99), Min Jin Lee’s sprawling epic of Korean immigrant life in Japan. If you want to keep up with global affairs while sun-tanning, try Howard W French’s lively and illuminating Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power.

I’m heading to the east coast of Malaysia and have packed Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile (£9.99), recently published in translation by NYRB Classics; Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time (Fitzcarraldo £14.99), and Zola’s L’Assommoir (Oxford World’s Classics £8.99).

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