Leading authors Mark Haddon, Samantha Harvey, and Zadie Smith select their favourite summer reads from a diverse list of 70 brilliant books, including dynamite debuts, must-read memoirs, and magical children's fiction.
Fiction
Transcription
Ben Lerner
A middle-aged writer returns to his college town to record the final interview with his 90-year-old intellectual mentor. But he's broken his phone, and doesn't seem able to confess that it's not recording ... this anxiety dream of a beginning leads us into a series of sharp insights into family, memory, inheritance and storytelling – all that it means to be human, and how smartphones are changing our sense of the world at every level.
Land
Maggie O'Farrell
Following Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, O'Farrell's latest historical novel has a personal connection. Inspired by an Irish ancestor who drew up maps for the English in the aftermath of the great famine, it builds into a multigenerational tale of folklore, migration and the meaning of home.
Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke
A social media influencer pushing a confected olden-days lifestyle of babies, baking and prairie dresses wakes up in the actual olden days – to dirt, poverty and domestic abuse. Critics have argued about a lack of political depth in this buzzy tradwife debut, but there's no denying the power of the high-concept hook – or the furious energy of the voice.
John of John
Douglas Stuart
In the much-anticipated new novel from the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain author, young Cal returns from art school to his childhood home on the Hebridean island of Harris, and his fervently religious father, John. Both men are keeping secrets in a heartfelt and gorgeously wrought tapestry of faith, isolation, community and gay love.
The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley
Riley excels at dysfunctional family relationships, but is on gentler form here with the story of a long friendship between two prickly souls: Putnam, ageing out of relevance, and Laura, making her precarious way through midlife. It's a wry take on the comforts of comradeship and the frustrations of other people, with the prose – as ever – sharp as a knife.
The Infamous Gilberts
Angela Tomaski
An irresistible old-fashioned comfort read about the slow demise of an eccentric family trapped in a crumbling stately home, as seen through their possessions and mementoes when the house is sold off, ready to be turned into a hotel. Romantic misadventures, dastardly characters, lost boys and lashings of atmosphere: it's all here.
Honey
Imani Thompson
Thompson's buzzy debut follows Yrsa, a Black PhD student who embarks on a series of killings targeting men, each murder reminiscent of the violence more typically inflicted on women. A serial-killer thriller with a side of feminist theory, Thompson's alchemical fusion of racial politics and "weird girl" fiction feels genuinely fresh.
The Children
Melissa Albert
A bestselling children's author writes her own kids into her much-loved fantasy series – then dies in mysterious circumstances. As adults, Guin and Ennis must reconcile to confront their traumatic legacy. Set between an isolated house in the woods in 1990s Vermont and present-day New York, this slippery investigation into the price of creativity is a dark fairytale.
Villa Coco
Andrew Sean Greer
A sunny holiday read about a young American falling for the delights of Italy when he takes a job as assistant to a 92-year-old aristocrat at the eponymous mansion in the Tuscan hills. Full of eccentric characters, it's a love letter to friendship and discovery.
A Bad, Bad Place
Frances Crawford
This slow-burn crime debut set in 1979 Glasgow begins when 12-year-old Janey, walking her dog Sid Vicious, comes across a body. Told in alternating chapters from Janey and her Nana, it's a pitch-perfect depiction of time and place.
Prestige Drama
Seamus O'Reilly
A major new TV series about the Troubles is to be filmed in Derry – but its Hollywood star has gone missing. The first novel from the author of the tragicomic memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a sparkling ensemble portrait of a city still dealing with its difficult past.
Nonesuch
Francis Spufford
In a London on the brink of the second world war, an ambitious young woman working in the City stumbles into a magical realm of angels, time travel, possible worlds – and a fascist conspiracy to assassinate Winston Churchill and usher in a Nazi future for Britain. Packed with adventure and romance, this delightful fantasy has teeth – a very grown-up pleasure.
Black Bag
Luke Kennard
As part of a psychology experiment, a struggling actor agrees to appear in university lectures zipped into a large black leather bag with only his feet sticking out, and see how the students react. From this premise, Kennard spins a charming and comical discourse on the absurdity of modern life, riffing on everything from the perilous state of the arts to masculinity and the disappearing horizon of adulthood.
The Daffodil Days
Helen Bain
A lyrical, impeccably researched reimagining of the final year in the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as seen by their friends and neighbours in the small Dartmoor town they escape to from London. With multiple narrators and a reverse chronology, it's an ambitious and impressively achieved debut, and a luminous portrait of the effect literature's most famous couple had on the people around them.
Good People
Patmeena Sabit
A family saga, a whodunnit and an investigation into assimilation in the US: this kaleidoscopic debut about the community response after an Afghan-American teenager is found drowned in a canal at the wheel of the family car keeps the reader guessing, with gossip, prejudice and contradictory accounts pulling in all directions.
Cast Away
Francesca de Tores
Alexander Selkirk, 18th-century privateer and the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, is marooned on an island in the South Pacific with only a Bible and a cask of booze for company. What follows is a fantastically fresh, gripping adventure story and psychological journey combined, as over the years he develops his survival skills and faces up to his isolation.
Lost Lambs
Madeline Cash
This exuberant comic saga about a dysfunctional American family features childish parents, precocious daughters, church shenanigans, conspiracy theories and a nefarious local billionaire. With snappy dialogue, absurd flights of fancy and a heartwarming centre, it's a feelgood treat for fans of The Bee Sting.
I Want You to Be Happy
Jem Calder
A romance for the doomscroll era, Calder's debut follows a poet-barista and a wannabe author, stumbling towards an intimacy that's almost wholly mediated by the digital world. All the textures of modern London life – expensive flatshares, overpriced coffees, emotional avoidance – are rendered with deadpan precision.
The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout
The author who brought us Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge introduces us to Artie Dam, a fiftysomething teacher struggling to make sense of his troubled marriage and a changing United States, in her wise and tender 11th novel.
Wimmy Road Boyz
Sufiyaan Salam
Set over one chaotic night on Manchester's Curry Mile, Salam's debut is a turbo-charged coming-of-age novel following three young British-Pakistani men hurtling towards trouble in a white BMW. Written in slangy, rhythmic prose that feels somewhere between Trainspotting, hip-hop and Shakespeare, it is volatile and completely alive – an adrenalised portrait of gen-Z masculinity.
Glyph
Ali Smith
Against a backdrop of political breakdown, Smith is an ever more essential voice: wise, playful, profound. This story of two estranged sisters finding their way back to each other explores childhood, family and our relationship to history, whether that's the first world war or contemporary Gaza, setting a spirit of resistance and the ways we comfort each other against apathy and state repression.
Jean
Madeleine Dunnigan
In the long hot summer of 1976, a troubled teenager at a progressive boarding school for boys begins a dangerous affair. This charged and unusual debut is a powerful excavation of shame, desire and pent-up emotion.
Natural Disaster
Lisa Owens
A frazzled mother of two little boys is determined that her last day of maternity leave with them will be fun, spontaneous, perfect - but things don't go to plan in this sharply observed and deeply relatable comedy of life with small children. Bring snacks.
The Ten Year Affair
Erin Somers
An adultery novel for millennials. Which is to say that the cheating occurs almost entirely inside the head of our heroine, Cora, a young mother who has fled New York with her husband Eliot for the Hudson Valley where, at a local playgroup, she meets the object of her lustful fantasies: fellow Brooklyn transplant Sam. A razor-sharp study of modern motherhood and marriage that skewers its cast of high-minded, downwardly mobile hipsters as they navigate middle age.
Kin
Tayari Jones
Set in the American south during the civil rights era, the new novel from the author of An American Marriage follows two motherless girls as they set out to find their way in the world. A richly imagined tale of female friendship and found families.
Fiction paperbacks
The Correspondent
Virginia Evans
This much-loved novel is made up of letters sent and received by Sybil Van Antwerp, a seventysomething retired lawyer living in Maryland, USA, whose spiky, often funny correspondence adds up to a moving, compelling reflection on a life.
Seascraper
Benjamin Wood
Longlisted for the Booker prize, this short, profound novel tells the story of Thomas, who trawls the seashore for shrimp with a horse and cart and dreams of more. A mysterious American could make his dreams a reality – but is the future he's offering too good to be true? An atmospheric dive into inner worlds and the transcendent possibilities of creativity.
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin
Kehlmann uses a fictionalised account of the life of 20th-century film director GW Pabst to explore questions of vanity, complicity and moral collapse in this brilliantly dark page-turner which was shortlisted for the International Booker. Returning from Hollywood to Austria to see his ailing mother, can the man who made Pandora's Box continue to make art under the Nazis, and at what cost?
Heart the Lover
Lily King
A 1980s campus love triangle deepens into a poignant story of friendship and loss in King's tear-jerking follow-up to Writers and Lovers.
Dominion
Addie E Citchens
In the fictional Mississippi town of Dominion, a charismatic preacher and his golden-boy son preside over a community thick with repression and simmering violence. Told from the perspectives of the long-suffering women around them, it's a rich, southern gothic exploring the excesses of unchecked male entitlement.
Nonfiction
Famesick
Lena Dunham
The creator of Girls reflects on her sudden fame after being hailed as the voice of a generation, and what happened next – namely chronic illness, addiction and heartbreak. The dark side of celebrity is laid bare in this compulsively readable memoir.
The Art Cure
Daisy Fancourt
Can Gauguin treat gout and Beethoven lower your blood pressure? Psychobiologist Fancourt sets out the very real physiological effects of art and culture in this inspiring call for us to lean into aesthetic experiences as a form of medicine.
This Dark Night
Deborah Lutz
Emerald Fennell's hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Brontë in one light; Lutz's painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius, Lutz's Brontë is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.
Enough Said
Alan Bennett
The latest instalment of the inimitable critic and playwright's diaries runs from 2016 to 2024, hardly a period of rest and relaxation. But ordinary life goes on as Bennett, now 92, reflects on Brexit, the pandemic and the distant past.
Super Nintendo
Keza MacDonald
An affectionate portrait of the people who bought us Super Mario and Animal Crossing combines deep research, extensive interviews and serious fun. MacDonald, the Guardian's video games editor, positions the Japanese company as a "toymaker" with very different priorities from the tech giants that dominate the rest of our digital lives.
A World Appears
Michael Pollan
After feeding our heads with a bestselling book about psychedelics, author and journalist Pollan returns with an exploration of consciousness itself. He asks who has it (plants? AI?), how it feels and what it actually consists of. He may not come up with definitive answers, but delivers mind-boggling insights along the way.
On Morrison
Namwali Serpell
Novelist and critic Serpell zooms in on the Beloved author's craft in this series of 12 essays, rich with material from the archives. Edits, hesitations and revisions tease out the humour and fallibility of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Ancient
Luke Barley
Forester and ranger Barley tells the beguiling story of Britain's mature woodlands – now reduced to fragments, but still more than capable of enchanting us – and how living alongside them shaped our culture and language.
A Hymn to Life
Gisèle Pelicot
Pelicot became an icon of courage and resilience during the trial of 51 men, including her husband, accused of extraordinary sexual crimes against her. This painful but riveting memoir tells the story of how her life as she knew it was shattered, and what it took to start building a new one.
The Last Kings of Hollywood
Paul Fischer
The golden era of late-20th century film-making is evoked in documentary detail by screenwriter and author Fischer as he tells the story of how three relative outsiders – Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg – came to dominate cinema as we know it.
The Dog's Gaze
Thomas W Laqueur
Can you spot the pooch in a Picasso? The canine in a Canaletto? In this deeply researched and beautifully illustrated book, art historian Laqueur argues that the presence of dogs in a series of canonical western paintings is no mere afterthought.
Monsters in the Archives
Caroline Bicks
Granted exclusive access to Stephen King's personal archive, literary academic Bicks sifts through annotated drafts, scrutinising revisions, comments and disagreements with editors. Her close reading reveals the master of horror's obsessions, his pedantry – and alternative versions of some of his most loved stories.
The Savage Landscape
Cal Flyn
The author of Islands of Abandonment returns with a vivid and visceral tour of Earth's wildest places, from the bottom of the ocean floor to lava-filled calderas. But this is an exploration of an intellectual territory too – namely, our idea of "wilderness", and the often destructive role that has played.
Backtalker
Kimberlé Crenshaw
The legal trailblazer who developed the concept of intersectionality – the notion that discrimination on the basis of race, class and gender can intersect and compound – recounts her formative years in Ohio and subsequent career fighting injustice.
London Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe
Asked by grieving parents to investigate their vulnerable son's death, New Yorker journalist Radden Keefe uncovers a world of terrifying criminality and extraordinary police incompetence – or worse – lurking beneath London's gilded surface. A tour de force of contemporary storytelling.
Stephen Sondheim
Daniel Okrent
He may have transformed American musicals, but he didn't always have the easiest relationship with the people around him – or himself. From Oscar Hammerstein to Barbra Streisand and Lin‑Manuel Miranda, Sondheim mentored, collaborated and fell out spectacularly with all sorts of people, as Okrent shows in this definitive, gossipy biography.
Said the Dead
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
The acclaimed author of A Ghost in the Throat used the archives of Our Lady's Hospital, Cork – and her vivid imagination – to bring the experiences of long-forgotten psychiatric patients to life. The result is a book of "extraordinary formal and ethical force", according to our reviewer.
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea
Emily Wilson
The translator of the Odyssey and Iliad, whose unfussy, sometimes surprising choices have inspired both acclaim and disapproval, sets out her philosophy of translation in a series of fascinating essays.
Tonight the Music Seems So Loud
Sathnam Sanghera
What made one of the greatest pop stars of his generation tick? George Michael superfan Sanghera, best known for his books on the British empire, tries to get to the bottom of a man of contradictions: a supreme musical perfectionist who fired 12 saxophonists before he found the perfect rendition of the solo in Careless Whisper, Michael's personal life was anything but carefully orchestrated.
Leaving Home
Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident … author revisits his childhood and adolescence in Northampton. This work of personal archaeology unearths "a near-total absence of love or affection", and exposes the roots of his ongoing anxiety and self-harm. The extraordinary illustrations keep the reader alive to the absurdity and poignancy of it all.
Lady C
Guy Cuthbertson
In the autumn of 1960, a sensational trial provided ample material for both newspaper columns and what we might now call water-cooler conversations. Cuthbertson's book focuses less on the scandalising content of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and more on the case's reverberations across the wider culture – from comedy to music.
Iran and the Revolution
Homa Katouzian
The Islamic Republic and its politics can be hard for outsiders to parse, but an understanding of how the regime came into being is essential for anyone hoping to understand the current conflict. In the thoroughgoing history, Iranian historian Katouzian offers a much needed guide, "clear and free of preconceptions", according to our review.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
Belle Burden
This story of betrayal by an unfaithful husband and the subsequent destruction of a marriage was an instant bestseller when it was published in January. But the plot has thickened after reporting by the New Yorker suggested a more complicated emotional and financial picture. Burden says "I stand by everything I wrote," and so far the furore seems only to have added to the appeal of her can't-look-away book.
Why Populists Are Winning
Liam Byrne
What can a thoroughly conventional politician – a former New Labour minister, no less – tell us about how to defeat the insurgents promising radical change? Byrne, who remains an MP in a constituency where Reform is in the ascendant, manages to approach the subject with "rigour and originality", writes our reviewer.
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God
Peter Ormerod
Is listening to David Bowie a religious experience? That might explain the devotion he inspired among generations of fans. In this survey of how spirituality influenced the rock god's oeuvre, Ormerod argues that we've been missing a key part of his appeal.
Nonfiction paperbacks
A Mind of My Own
Kathy Burke
Actor and comedian Burke tells the story of her childhood, teenage years and the prejudice and kindnesses she experienced as she met with increasing acclaim. As our reviewer put it, this memoir "has its painful moments, but the joy radiating from it is palpable and invigorating".
The Age of Diagnosis
Suzanne O'Sullivan
Can diagnoses – from ADHD to chronic Lyme disease – sometimes do more harm than good? In this humane, well-informed book, neurologist O'Sullivan seeks not to dismiss suffering, but to understand the trade-offs that come when a medical label is applied to complex, distressing experiences.
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams
The book Meta were so keen you didn't read that they banned its author from doing any promotion. Wynn-Williams – a former senior adviser at Facebook – had a ringside seat during its transformation from a way to catch up with friends into a catalyst for revolutions, riots and political upheaval.
Proto
Laura Spinney
One tongue to rule them all? Not quite, but proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of English, Hindi, Irish and Greek, is the most extensively reconstructed language for which there are no written records. Spinney travels to its birthplace on the Asian steppe to tell a remarkable story of trade, migration and conquest.
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
The Booker prize-winning author's mother, Mary Roy, was famous long before her daughter was – as a women's rights activist and educational reformer. But there was a dark side to her, as told in this unsparing memoir of a relationship with someone the author describes as both "shelter and storm".
Children's and YA
We Were a Two
Eoin McLaughlin and Emma Chichester Clark
Eoin and his Nana spend every summer in their caravan by the sea, having wild adventures as a family of two. This joyous, riotous picture book celebrates intergenerational bonds and free-range seaside exploration.
Bone Head: Guardian of the Underworld
Jamie Gregory
Demise, AKA Bone Head, thinks he's the best skeleton guard in Hades' kingdom, even when he's demoted to taking care of Cerberus, the three-headed dog with a taste for bones … An anarchic diary-format series of misadventures for 7+, ideal for Loki fans.
Korobá: The Case of the Missing Kolo
Àlàbá Ònájìn
Korobá is looking forward to the festival, when children break open their kolo piggy banks – until her best friend's kolo is stolen, and Korobá must turn detective to track it down. Set in a small Nigerian fishing community, this instantly engaging, Tintinesque graphic novel for 7+ is full of summery colour, intricate detail and compelling characters.
The Children of Wolf Rock
Natasha Farrant
The students at Stormy Loch Academy revel in their freedom to explore the natural world – but when Minna, Kass and Tom stumble upon an older girl hiding out in a deserted bothy, they find themselves on a dangerous journey to discover the secrets of her past in this glorious, immersive 8+ adventure.
Crow: Thief of Magic
Fiona Dixon
An unexpected encounter, a heist gone wrong, and Crow, a 12-year-old thief, finds himself flung into a spectacular new life as a Dreamcatcher's apprentice – but is his magical master Viktor as benevolent as he seems? Absorbing, inventive and thrilling, this 9+ fantasy debut will delight Greenwild fans.
Like a Brother
Nathanael Lessore
Happy-go-lucky Londoner Owais enjoys his carefree life until his cousin Abass suddenly arrives, loud and unpredictable with a hair-trigger temper (and worst of all, he's a Tottenham fan). The cousins' antipathy gradually gives way to sympathy and understanding in this laugh-out-loud, sometimes gross-out story of teenage self-discovery.
The Victors
Wren James
Four years after defeating the Demon Overlord, youthful hero Dirk Earnest, now a second-year student at his war-damaged university, is horrified to meet his new roommate: Medusa de la Tempête, notorious war criminal and Dirk's former nemesis. This witty, stylishly drawn enemies-to-friends YA graphic novel elegantly subverts the "chosen one" trope, asking pointed questions about what happens after the final battle.
Breakout
Dhonielle Clayton, Angie Thomas and others
The bestselling Blackout crew return with a sweltering, atmospheric thriller, featuring six affluent teenagers trapped in a private island resort by a tropical storm. As the body count rises, each of them must face up to the secrets of their past in this page-turning six-author YA collaboration.
Tell Your Friends
Lauren Wilson
Trapped by the fame of her influencer parents, first-year student Crystal Shaw needs help to shatter her mother's perfect image and win her freedom – but she's unaware that Alyssa, her chosen confidante, is heavily invested in "At Home With the Shaws", seeing them as the ideal surrogate family. An enthralling YA cat-and-mouse thriller with a toxic female friendship and a steely twist.
To Steal a Throne
Gabi Burton
After helping her half-brother Luc take the throne of Virdei, Mira uses her secret lie-powered magic to keep him secure, blackmailing and intimidating any possible challengers – until upstart Kaidren Vale appears, his own magical gift threatening Mira with exposure. When Mira begins to warm to Kaidren, her ambition wars with her softer feelings in this gripping YA fantasy of intrigue, seduction and betrayal.
