Andrew O’Hagan
Booker prize-nominated author of Caledonian Road and Mayflies
I always hope summer might break the rhythm of the news, replenishing the imagination with new elements. So I want to sit against a tree reading poetry, and I’m already deep into Adam, the first and final collection by Gboyega Odubanjo, who died last year at the age of 27. What a voice he has – fresh, worn, elegiac, present. If ever a volume offered a story about water, loss, migration and every last one of us, Adam does. “This is not a country it’s a burned CD and a tracklist we’ve written ourselves.” My old-school pick is the Collected Poetry & Prose of Wallace Stevens, whom Seamus Heaney once named “the tycoon of poetry”. Let your mind be a place of snows or mint juleps, a domain of childhood spirit and tigers in red weather. Stevens is the poet of everyday life, if life could be better. In that sense, he is our most modern romantic. “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right,” he said.
Tessa Hadley
Award-winning author of Late in the Day and After the Funeral
I have Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses ready to take to Pembrokeshire with me. I have loved his short stories – funny and lyrical and a bit savage – and this novel sounds like his home territory: a small town in Mayo, a kidnapping, a love story, vicious nastiness and decency muddling along side by side. And I’m rediscovering Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, whose novels I read in the 1990s, when they came out in English translation via Harvill Press. I’ve begun with The File on H, where two Irish-American scholars go to Albania in the 1930s to record the singers of its ancient epic tradition; the local authorities are convinced they’re spying. Kadare makes their story farcical and magnificent both at once.
Marian Keyes
Author of more than 20 novels and nonfiction books including her latest novel, My Favourite Mistake
Interesting, exciting novels about the interiority of middle-aged women are really thin on the ground. Lioness by Emily Perkins is one of the rare few. Protagonist Therese “has it all” – if “all” means a rich Viagra-taking husband and an “enviable” job in soft furnishings. After a chance encounter with another woman, Therese’s safe insular world begins to seem more like a prison. Intelligent, thoughtful and funny. Instead of a classic I would pack Francesca Segal’s new novel, Welcome to Glorious Tuga. There aren’t enough superlatives for this book. Englishwoman travels to a tiny, very remote (sadly, imaginary) island in the south Atlantic to study tortoises. The community waiting to welcome her would restore the worst cynic’s faith in human nature. Joyous, sexy, uplifting, funny, fascinating and more. The author herself says this book was written to provide joy and she succeeds. Also! It’s book one of a trilogy!
Louise Kennedy
Author of Trespasses, winner of last year’s debut of the year at the British book awards
Most of my reading these days comprises books by my countryfolk, and this year’s crop of novels by Irish writers is so far as exciting as last year’s. The Coast Road by Alan Murrin is set in a prosperous Donegal fishing port. State of the art boats leave the harbour every day, but we are in Ireland in 1994 and the women of the town are stuck where they are. Told from the point of view of three of these women, this is an assured, engrossing and enviably readable debut. Sinéad Gleeson’s first novel, Hagstone, is not a classic from back in the day but a modern one, set on a remote island. When Nell, a free-spirited artist, is commissioned to make a commemorative piece for the reclusive Inions, a chain of events is triggered that threatens everything Nell has worked so hard to keep together. Wild, elemental and wise.
VV Ganeshananthan
Author of Brotherless Night, winner of the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction
Habitations by Sheila Sundar is about a young Indian woman who loses her sister at a young age. A quiet grief accompanies her everywhere like a shadow, sometimes visible, sometimes not, but never entirely gone. She subsequently emigrates to the US, where she enters academia, marriage, and complex friendships with friends and lovers who are themselves scholars, immigrants, or both. Sundar portrays this intellectual and emotional terrain with extraordinary precision and elegance. It’s a fantastic depiction of communities that form despite and even because of the transience that can arise from both immigration and academic life. It reminded me of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart. A real achievement and an incredible joy to read. I recently returned to Annie John (1985) by Jamaica Kincaid and found its voice as singular as ever. The prose is exacting and Annie is obsessive in the best way. The power of her attention feels inescapable.
Roddy Doyle
Author of the Booker prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked into Doors
I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon, so I’m probably not the right person to ask for summer reading suggestions. Nevertheless, I’m demanding that you read Percival Everett’s novel James, in which Everett takes the camera from Twain’s Huck Finn and hands it to the slave, Jim. Truly extraordinary books are rare, and this is one of them. There were three nice, rain-free days in Ireland last summer and, while they lasted, I sat outside, took off one of my jumpers, and read The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. I was immediately engrossed – transported. I was beside the sea but ignored it as I read about Hardy’s wonderful characters misunderstanding one another in the depths of the forest.
Chetna Maroo
Author of Western Lane, shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize
The experience of reading Thomas Morris’s Open Up feels like an encounter with another soul. Its five stories take us into the inner lives of boys and men, on a holiday in Croatia, in Wales, and deep underwater. Funny, heartbreaking, unsettling, this is a very special book. Nobel prize-winner Halldór Laxness wrote his extraordinary Fish Can Sing in 1957 as an ode to hidden, “ordinary” people. It’s a portrait of the orphaned artist as a boy and the elderly couple who teach him how to live, remaining fiercely independent as the modern world knocks on their door. Full of offbeat humour and philosophical rabbit holes (the price of a song, the ethics of asking someone to cut your beard), it’s a book to sink into.
Charlotte Mendelson
Author of Almost English and The Exhibitionist
Summer is tough on indoor children; we must fight for our right to avoid Outside Fun. We have other ways to access sweat and skin. Great fiction reeks with it: take K Patrick’s Mrs S, whose butch Australian narrator, working uncomfortably in a school during a heatwave, falls urgently for the headmaster’s elegant wife. Compulsively readable, subtle, beautiful, brilliant on gender and queerness, girlhood, bodies, it’s also so wildly sexy you’ll hold your breath. Edna O’Brien’s stories [in the collection A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories], although half a century old, also throb with sex: straight but barely less shame-filled and forbidden. She’s a genius at women’s secret worlds of chaos, exposing, with violent casual-seeming phrases, the darkness of marriage, the agony of desire. Perfect for your summer holiday.
Matt Haig
Author of How to Stop Time and The Midnight Library
Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo is one of those big, grown-up existential novels about parenthood and marriage and teenagers and friendship and family life. It drew my attention because of the nod to Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime in the title, and a cover quote mentioning its similarities to Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler. They are apt writers to reference because, like their best works, Lombardo’s finds the vast and epic and universal via specific attention to family life. But there is also something new to it, something that is both easy reading and profound at the same time, specifically on feelings of failure and abandonment, all of it cleverly brushed with wit and humour. A strong recommend. I have loved Tove Jansson since I was about six or seven. But there is more to her than Moominvalley. The Summer Book is her semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1972, about an elderly artist and her young granddaughter who spend a summer together on a small Finnish island. It is one of my favourite books. The prose is sparse and simple and filled with meaning. Closer to a short story collection in some ways, but filled with gentle wisdom and a real sense of place. A summer classic.
Elizabeth Strout
Author of Olive Kitteridge, Anything Is Possible and Lucy By the Sea
Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is a brilliant novel that takes place 20 years after the events of his book Brooklyn, in which the young woman Eilis had married her Italian husband, Tony, in America, then visited Ireland briefly after and had a romance with Jim. She left Ireland without telling Jim that she was married. Now, Eilis discovers that Tony has impregnated a woman and is planning to raise the baby. And so Eilis goes back home to Ireland for the summer and meets Jim once again, who has thought of her for 20 years. I will not tell you how the book turns out, but it is beautifully crafted and makes for a riveting, wonderful read. (Her Irish mother is portrayed perfectly.) Summer, by Edith Wharton, is not as well known as Ethan Frome, but – to my way of thinking – just as wonderful. It revolves around the story of Charity Royall, a young woman who came from a wretched background in the mountains and was taken in by Lawyer Royall in the fictional town of North Dormer, Massachusetts. Lawyer Royall is successful and protective of Charity; he has indicated to her earlier that he is interested in her sexually. All she wants is to leave town. And when a young man arrives from out of town, an architect, she falls in love with him. The book has a devastating ending and one that feels very true to the time and place in which it was written.
Claire Kilroy
Author of Soldier Sailor
I read Werner, one of the first short stories in The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, and put the book right back down because here was something special. “Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick” was a lyric we scrawled on our schoolbags back in the day and I want to know how Beard delivered something so gripping, realistic and dynamic. I will find out this summer! Michael Frayn’s 1999 novel, Headlong, is an old friend at this stage – a heartily enjoyable combination of skewered pretensions, farcical interactions, disastrous plot twists, all underpinned by a deeply satisfying bedrock of meaning. How can something be so funny and so sad at the same time?
Michael Magee
Author of Close to Home, winner of this year’s Nero debut fiction award
There are whole sequences in The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo that I’m not likely to forget any time soon. The prose is poised, clean and considered, the images are gorgeously evoked, and the use of memory and its baleful imprint on the psyche moved me deeply and profoundly. For a classic read, I’m choosing Tolstoy. When asked to name the three greatest novels ever written, William Faulkner said: “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.” He wasn’t wrong.
Aube Rey Lescure
Author of River East, River West, shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction
I am half-French, half-Chinese and drawn to complicated families: Shanghailanders by Juli Min, is a multifaceted portrait of a privileged international household living in Shanghai. Told in reverse chronological order, this bold experiment with time pays off beautifully, completely unsettling the reader’s expectations. Min’s prose is elegant and crystalline as it refracts the family’s cruelties. I also recently discovered Claire Messud’s 1999 novel, The Last Life, set around a cliff-side hotel and doused by the harsh glare of the Mediterranean Sea. The teenage narrator, Sagesse, navigates adolescence as she makes sense of her family’s pied-noir history in Algeria. Taking us to Algiers, Boston and the French Riviera, this novel is breathtaking in its linguistic fluidity between francophone and anglophone sensibilities.
Donal Ryan
Author of The Spinning Heart and The Queen of Dirt Island
My summer read is Mary Costello’s new short story collection, Barcelona. Costello’s poised and beautiful debut collection, The China Factory, and both her novels, are object lessons in craft. Barcelona has the same elegance and thrilling lucidity, and a rare and devastating power to illuminate a clear line of sight into the core of our humanity. Everyone should read Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 novel, Johnny Got His Gun. A young man, trapped inside his limbless, faceless body in a military hospital, silently screams the eternal, unassailable truth that wealthy, powerful elites orchestrate and profit from wars, while “ordinary” working people fight and die in them. When instructed to take up arms against each other, we must always refuse.
Rebecca Watson
Author of Little Scratch and I Will Crash
Having begun my summer by finally reading Alan Hollinghurst, it seems only right to push The Line of Beauty on anyone who, like me, hadn’t got round to it yet. Infatuation is a compelling force in fiction but here it focuses into the kind of propulsion novelists dream of creating. A charming, sad novel with a delicious sideline in patriarch Gerald Fedden’s slobbery obsession with Margaret Thatcher. Then there’s Sheila Heti’s latest book, Alphabetical Diaries: a decade of diary entries, cut down and organised not by entry nor year but by alphabetised sentence. The result is magnetic and clarifying. It draws out what constant and patterned creatures we are – always at the mercy of desire and expression. The reading experience cannot be fully described but, once had, feels necessary.
Rumaan Alam
Author of Leave the World Behind
My family spends our holidays in a tiny cottage by the beach – four of us in three small rooms, which may be why I love spending my summers escaping into books about other people’s families. The six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, written between 2009 and 2011, aren’t most readers’ idea of beach fare, but his depictions of both the quotidian stuff (parenting, bickering with your spouse, fretting about money) and the big stuff (the long shadow of addiction, the end of a marriage) are enthralling. Family is fertile material for many writers, of course; one of the best of 2024’s novels on the subject is Essie Chambers’s Swift River, which shows how personal and historical forces shape the lives of a single family. It’s wonderful company no matter where you find yourself this summer.
Fern Brady
Author of Strong Female Character, winner of this year’s Nero prize for nonfiction
As someone who grew up Catholic in Scotland with great-grandparents from the north of Ireland, it is so refreshing and exciting to read Close to Home, Michael Magee’s novel about working-class life in Belfast. Because they don’t teach what happened in Northern Ireland in British schools, when you get to read a story like this it feels as though it is finally articulating so much that is unspoken in your subconscious, and addressing the fact that there’s a whole nation with collective PTSD. It reminded me of James Kelman’s A Disaffection in describing that post-university experience of being stuck between one class identity and another, and finding neither quite fits. My brother gave me On Killing by Dave Grossman 10 years ago, but it sat on my bookshelf unread and has only become relevant to me now because of what’s happening in Gaza. Written in 1996 by a former US army lieutenant colonel, using examples from the Vietnam war and conflicts involving the Israel Defense Forces, it’s about the myriad ways we manipulate soldiers into going against their nature in order to kill people, and how we persuade the public into thinking it’s normal and even praiseworthy.
Lauren Elkin
Author of Art Monsters and Scaffolding
This, I’ve decided, will be the Summer of Returning to First Principles and, with that in mind, I’m planning a reread of the work of Walter Benjamin, starting with the essays collected in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, which was absolutely foundational to me once upon a time but which I haven’t looked at closely for years. I’m also going to read the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings that came out about a decade ago. And as I go on a book tour this summer, I’ll be taking Hisham Matar’s new book, My Friends, with me – a novel about friendship, intimacy, and making new lives in cities – set in the context of geopolitics and exile, it is very much My Thing. And I think it will resonate wonderfully well with the Benjamin!
Bella Mackie
Author of How to Kill Your Family
I first read Wide Sargasso Sea at school but reread it last summer and was struck again by the ambition of the story, in both its themes and in the challenge of rebutting Brontë. The oppressive melancholy that abounds in Good Morning, Midnight is sharpened in this later novel, and the grief and rage emanate off the pages all these years later. In Long Island, Colm Tóibín has finally given us a follow-up to Brooklyn, which came out in 2009. We find Eilis Lacey no longer a young woman full of anticipation, but someone in midlife who’s forced to go down a path she didn’t expect. I read it in one sitting, thrilled to be back with the characters that captivated me last time. Perhaps the 15-year wait was helpful, since I’m now almost Eilis’s age and more able to understand the choices she makes. I might be wrong but I felt some suggestion that there could be a third instalment. Let’s hope so.
Kaliane Bradley
Author of The Ministry of Time
A wonderful thing to think about on the beach is: how many livable summers do we have left? To this end, I recommend Private Rites by Julia Armfield, a shattering and witty novel about three sisters living in a climate crisis Britain where the rain never stops, negotiating their father’s legacy, their mother’s disappearance and the awful, loving entanglement of family ties. When I’m tempted by nostalgia for the “better” past, I return to Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier – because the otherworldly estate that Meaulnes attempts to return to is lost for ever in a half-mythologised past, just like our adolescence or our innocence. Le Grand Meaulnes is a romance, yes, but it’s also a love song and a dirge for the world’s nostalgic dreamers.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Author of Open Water and Small Worlds
The short stories in Shani Akilah’s new collection, For Such a Time as This, centre on the Black diasporic experience, exploring the sparks of first encounters, the complexities that arise when you re-encounter old flames and the ways in which love and grief intersect with our relationships. Akilah’s voice is intimate, and each story is approached with care and compassion for her characters and their experiences. It’s the perfect book for a warm summer’s day. A Room With a View by EM Forster was perhaps the first love story I read in novel form: simplistic in narrative, beautifully told. Brimming with yearning and desire, the complexities of class, wealth and status and the constant feeling of uncertainty that accompanies being a young person – this is a novel I return to often.
Evie Wyld
Author of All the Birds, Singing and The Bass Rock
What better to read on the beach than a novel featuring one of the most infamous shark attacks of all time. Quint by Robert Lautner is whisky-soaked, guttural, stinking and funny. It takes on the grizzled sea captain’s backstory, his survival of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and his five-day battle with the sharks. A beautifully rendered story of how Sam Quint took on the shark at various points in his life and how he lost chunks of himself along the way. A book I’ll be rereading is In Search of the Missing Eyelash by Karen McLeod, first published in 2007. Lizzie misses Sally – her former lover – who has gone off with a man with a fat neck. A novel that is brilliantly funny and sad, and captures the slow unravelling of a life.
Irvine Welsh
Author of Trainspotting, Filth and The Long Knives
In our dystopian world, elite-owned technology runs rampant, determined to reduce us to barely sentient slaves as it harvests our life experiences for its exponential growth. It’s crucial that the true expressions of all that’s best in humanity – art and love – step up to the plate. An astonishingly moving and defiant memoir in defence of both comes to us courtesy of Knife, by Salman Rushdie. This is informed by the knowledge that the brutal attack on him could only come from a place where those were in short supply. John Burnside has left us. The tapestry of literature in Britain already seems a little more threadbare and shabbier as a result. If you don’t believe me, check out his amazing 2008 novel, Glister.
Ingrid Persaud
Author of Love After Love, winner of the Costa first novel award
Trinidadians have a saying that laugh and cry live in the same house and that’s how I felt reading Neel Mukherjee’s new novel, Choice. Three distinct yet linked narratives ask us to contemplate the power of our everyday choices while refusing to prescribe answers or demand action. Full of compassion, terror and humour, we follow the fates of a publisher in London, an academic who witnesses a hit-and-run accident and a poor family in rural India gifted a cow with disastrous consequences. A must-read. It’s time to dust off One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a classic that defines magic realism. Cousins marry, run away and found the utopia Macondo. What follows are generations of madness, impossible love, war and the curse of 100 years of solitude. Still one of my favourites and no better time to read it. A Netflix 16-episode TV adaptation is coming soon.
John Boyne
Author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies and All the Broken Places
In 2012, I read Donal Ryan’s debut, The Spinning Heart, and, to this day, I consider it one of the finest novels of the 21st century. A sequel to be published in August, Heart, Be at Peace, builds on the original, deepening our connection to those characters and their struggles. Ryan’s ability to embody multiple voices, making each distinctive, is a rare skill. I’m not a big rereader, but I plan on working my way through Anne Tyler’s novels again over the next year. She’s just great; it’s that simple. My favourite is Saint Maybe. If you want a book that will make you want to dive into everything a writer has ever published, this is the one.
Jo Hamya
Author of The Hypocrite
The best thing a summer can be is languid and, for that reason, I’m sure I’ll be returning to Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours, which pays a considered, domestic kind of attention to the “fallow periods” of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf’s lives. I’m currently writing a novel about a woman who employs someone to live with and take care of her, so I’ll also be spending time with Magda Szabó’s darkly impressionistic The Door, a book from 1987 about the relationship between a writer and her mercurial housekeeper. It’s translated by Len Rix, whose work on the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb I adore.
Tiya Miles
Author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
In Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”, Emily Raboteau, a writer, photographer and mother, explores the challenges of parenting through an ecological crisis. It is a collection of personal essays, mainly rooted in New York and accompanied by her photographs of the city, in which she insists that we can sustain our children’s spirits and our own by acknowledging worry, accepting loss, tending relationships and “scavenging” for hope: a graceful testament to the unfolding tragedy of our moment. The Trees by Percival Everett is a genre-bending modern classic that explores racial tragedy and collective memory in the US. It is set in modern Mississippi where strange, gruesome murders occur and a quick-witted team of Black investigators confronts the possibilities of supernatural influences in what appear to be racially motivated attacks. This is an irresistibly fast-paced read, even as the serious exploration of avenging historical wrongs provokes deep thought and leaves an impression.
Jojo Moyes
Award-winning author of 16 novels, including Me Before You and Someone Else’s Shoes
Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her (out 1 August) is an almost dreamlike story of a young woman felled by an unnamed illness, and the shrunken world of neighbours and relationships around her. It was inspired by the author’s spell with long Covid, but that implies the novel is less original and arresting than it is – not many books about illness contain a comedic hallucinatory 16th-century medieval knight called Luigi. Her observations about relationships are forensic and quietly devastating. This summer I’m going to reread Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny. In a year of so many seismic geopolitical events, I want to retreat into a comedic world for a day or two. It’s about Audra and Graham and their amusingly dysfunctional marriage, and their son who only really likes origami. Heiny can write people in a way that leaves you convinced that either you know them in real life or, worse, she knows you.
Nonfiction: five of the year’s best summer reads
Chosen by Rose Cole, general manager of Daunt Books
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
The winner of the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction. Mistaken identity leads Klein to delve into a murky world of conspiracy theories and beliefs that often seem too ridiculous to take seriously. A sinister and compelling read with flashes of dark comedy.
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham
A fascinating and superbly researched account of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger soon after take off. A masterly blend of human drama, science and political infighting.
An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi
Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.
Broken Threads by Mishal Husain
A memoir, and historical account, that traces the upheaval of independence and partition through the lives and journeys of Husain’s own family.
Cold Kitchen by Caroline Eden
Eden takes us on a journey from her Edinburgh kitchen. A travelogue through food and cooking, we are introduced to the places she has been and people she met along the way. Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world.
Fiction: five of the year’s best summer reads
Chosen by Alex Preston, author and Observer critic
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
The debut of the year by a distance, Bradley’s propulsive and exhilarating speculative novel is an unlikely, time-travelling love story set in a bleak near-future London.
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Dickensian in its scope and ambition, but above all in its broad cast of characters, this is the best state-of-the-nation novel since John Lanchester’s Capital.
James by Percival Everett
The author of Erasure, adapted into the film American Fiction, is on a roll. The Trees (2021) was a masterpiece, Dr No (2022) a blast and this, his latest, is a brilliant and very moving retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the freed slave.
All Fours by Miranda July
A future classic about motherhood and mid-life sex for fans of Lorrie Moore and Sheila Heti. July – a celebrated film-maker – has written a novel that thrills at the level of the sentence and in its riot of ideas.
You Are Here by David Nicholls
This follows hot on the heels of the Netflix adaptation of One Day and is like a grown-up version of that novel, tracing a will-they-won’t-they relationship though the hills and dales.
To explore all the books in the Observer’s summer reading list visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
