Eleanor Catton
Author of Birnam Wood (Granta) and the Booker prize-winning The Luminaries (Granta). Named on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list
I love stories about couples on the run – nearly always an improvement on the classic “man on the run” genre – and James M Cain’s swaggering, sweltering Serenade (Orion) builds to an unforgettable finale; I couldn’t put it down. Citizen Vince by Jess Walter (HarperCollins) was a recent discovery: a former criminal, now in the witness protection programme, sees a familiar face and assumes his cover has been blown. Great hook! But my gold standard for holiday reading will always be Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (Sphere). Dusty libraries, disappearances, family secrets, and an escalating sense of dread … could one ask for anything more?
Louise Kennedy
Author of Trespasses (Bloomsbury), her first novel, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s prize for fiction
Tell Me What I Am (Faber) by Una Mannion is a novel set between the author’s native Philadelphia and rural Vermont. It is the story of a missing woman, her daughter, and the sister who never stops looking for them. The tone is elegiac, the pace thrilling and the evocation of time and place masterly. How to Build a Boat (Random House) is a heart-rending and delightful voyage in the company of 13-year-old Jamie O’Neill and his currach. The author Elaine Feeney has a poet’s way with words and uncanny understanding of human frailty. I Could Read the Sky (Unbound) has just been reissued. I urge you to behold the alchemy between Timothy O’Grady’s story and Steve Pyke’s photographs; no book on the Irish emigrant experience has moved me more.
Maggie Shipstead
Author of Great Circle (Doubleday), shortlisted for the 2021 Booker prize and the 2022 Women’s prize for fiction. Her latest short story collection is You Have a Friend in 10A (Penguin)
I recently spent an LA-to-New York flight reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy (Doubleday) on my phone, well past the point of eyestrain. The story/fantasy of a famous (and famously attractive) man falling for an ordinary woman might be familiar, but Sittenfeld’s version is so smart and well observed it feels not only deliciously bingeable but fresh. Summer also strikes me as an opportunity for tackling long and luxurious reading projects, and I’m currently in the middle of Marking Time (Pan Macmillan), the second book of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. My dream of perfect seasonal happiness would be to wallow in Howard’s family saga while holed up in a creaky coastal house somewhere.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Author of Small Worlds (Viking) and winner of the 2021 Costa first novel award for Open Water (Viking)
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Pushkin) by Deesha Philyaw is always a book I recommend. All the stories in the collection are told with real humour and tenderness and each reread feels like a gift. Intimacies (Vintage) by Katie Kitamura is another novel I remember devouring in the summer. Deft and sharply written, with a beautiful rhythm and clear voice, it’s one of my favourite novels of the past few years. Finally, a more recent novel: The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams, which tells the story of a married couple and the wife’s best friend (who happens to hate the husband). Not only did I find myself laughing, but also marvelling at the depictions of interiority.
Eliza Clark
Author of Penance (Faber) and Boy Parts (Faber), Blackwell’s Fiction Book of the Year in 2020. Named on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list
Yellowface (Harper Collins) by Rebecca F Kuang is already a lot of people’s book of the year, and rightly so. A literary plagiarism caper with sharp insight into the power dynamics of the publishing world, Yellowface is an extremely entertaining satire which I read in about two days. The Devil All the Time (Vintage Publishing) by Donald Ray Pollock should not be eclipsed by its mediocre Netflix adaptation. Sticky, violent and exhilarating – Pollock’s southern gothic tale of thrill killers, pervy preachers and vengeance is best read on a long road trip or at a seedy motel poolside. While The Name of the Rose (Everyman) by Umberto Eco may seem like an intimidating read, this historical murder mystery is often as charming and slapstick as it is thrilling and genuinely educational. A medieval Franciscan monk and his young Benedictine sidekick investigate a murder at a monastery – a must-read for fans of Sherlock Holmes, the video game Pentiment and the theoretical controversy over the absolute poverty of Christ of 1322.
Nina Stibbe
Author of Love, Nina (Penguin), which was adapted for the BBC by Nick Hornby, and three novels, including Reasons to Be Cheerful (Penguin). Her latest book, Went to London, Took the Dog (Pan Macmillan), is out this autumn
The Dog of the North (HarperCollins) by Elizabeth McKenzie is a darkly comic novel that opens just as Penny Rush has quit her job and her marriage after confronting her husband, Sherman, thus: “I know all about Bebe Sinatra and the cocaine.” Then, hearing her grandmother has pulled a gun on the Meals on Wheels, she boards a train to Santa Barbara to investigate. She is picked up at the station by her grandmother’s accountant, Burt, who drives a battered Econoline (called the Dog of the North), shares a toupee with his brother, and has a pomeranian known as Kweecoats though his collar tag says “QUIXOTE”. Soon there’s a trip to Australia to search one last time for her mother and stepfather, who disappeared presumed dead five years previously. McKenzie is brilliant at spotlighting moments of love, romance and charming detail, in even the strangest, most difficult life. Windmill Hill (Quercus) by Lucy Atkins has it all: evocative setting, fabulous characters, precision plotting, poignancy, laughs, dogs and surprises. Astrid’s glittering stage career was wrecked by scandal when she was framed by her actor husband, Magnus. Now Magnus is writing a tell-all memoir from his deathbed in Scotland. The story begins as Astrid, now 82, sets off to stop him raking everything up again. Going through airport security she feels liverish, misses her dachshunds, and dwells on squabbles she’s had with Mrs Baker, her cleaner-cum-companion, who had been the “clingfilm over the madder notions” and the “paperweight on her fluttering mind”, but has now, like Astrid herself, become “slightly unhinged”. Strands of their backstory emerge – a 1960s scandal and the more recent “Awful Incident”.
Mark O’Connell
Author of To Be a Machine (Granta), which won the 2018 Wellcome Book prize, Notes from an Apocalypse (Granta), and, most recently, A Thread of Violence (Granta)
David Grann’s The Wager (Simon & Schuster) is the most relentlessly compelling book I’ve read in a very long time. Grann is a master storyteller, and he unfurls this tale of a disastrous sea voyage with almost unparalleled skill and subtlety. Paul Murray’s new novel, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), is funny, dark, moving and deeply humane. It’s also driven by an inexorable tragic force, and Murray’s intricate narrative dexterity makes it very easy to keep turning all those hundreds of pages. Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 novel The Transit of Venus (Little, Brown) is not a page-turner in the traditional sense, but her writing is so intoxicating, and her evocation of postwar England so rich, I was reluctant to tear myself away from it. A gorgeous, heartbreaking book.
Olivia Sudjic
Author of Sympathy (One) and Asylum Road (Bloomsbury), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2022 Encore award and is on the Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list
I first read The End of the Story (Penguin) by Lydia Davis the summer I tried to write my own first novel. It freed me from the preconceptions I had then about the way novels were supposed to work. Unputdownable because it reads as one long monologue without chapters, and because it deals with the heat and the thirst of infatuation, the desperation to find an end to the torment when a desired object won’t reciprocate. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin) is one for Serena Williams fans. This genre-bending book makes excellent use of the second-person voice to draw the reader into a gripping examination of racism. It has the momentum of a great tennis match, a feeling of accumulation that builds in the body and demands release.
Derek Owusu
Author of That Reminds Me (Merky), winner of the Desmond Elliott prize. He is on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list
Michael Magee is a born storyteller. In Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton), he is easily able to bring you into the milieu of Belfast, creating a sense of affinity with any character he chooses to present to you. By the end of the novel I wanted to book a flight to Ireland just to walk around and imagine who was where. Reading the book, it feels as though you’re surrounded by protagonists, each person worthy of a novel all their own. I read this in two or three sittings only because I wanted to slow down and spend more time with Magee’s considered and companionate writing. I finished it only last month, but plan to take it with me abroad to enjoy it once more. Sometimes I get a sudden impulse to read an author I’ve heard mentioned a lot, seen on tables in bookstores or on prize lists. It was an impulse like this that led me to Elizabeth Strout (yes, very late to the party). I decided I would read a few pages of My Name is Lucy Barton (Penguin) before bed and was halfway through a while later, no longer tired, only wondering how Lucy was doing and saying to myself, OK, 10 more pages then bed. The voice was so strong and the story so heartwarming, the next day I walked into my local bookstore and bought more of her books than I could afford.
Nicole Flattery
Author of the short story collection Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury) and the novel Nothing Special (Bloomsbury)
Emma Cline’s The Guest (Chatto & Windus) is a panic-inducing beach read that could be directed by the Safdie brothers. Alex has carved out a living by being a discreet companion to wealthy older men. When she’s kicked out by her boyfriend after misbehaving, she must fend for herself, moving through summer home after summer home. The pace at which you read The Guest belies its style and control. Cline, while resistant to more ostentatious depictions of the rich, still capably depicts their complicity and general cluelessness. The Guest is everything I look for in a novel: cool, subtle, clinical. I love Lorrie Moore’s work. I often wonder what it’s like to be her, to give public readings, and to see lots of women like me devotedly staring back demanding to know all her secrets, and also the secrets of the universe. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Faber) is about the secrets of the universe – love, grief, death, decay, ghosts, loneliness. It’s a road trip that goes to unexpected places. If it’s not her best, it’s only because she has set the bar too high for herself. I’d rather spend time with her than anyone else on Earth. Welsh writer Thomas Morris recently appeared on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list, and his story collection Open Up (Faber) – out next month – proves he has earned his place. They are sharp, strange, exact. Morris is a very thoughtful writer, and each of these stories packs an emotional punch. Aberkariad might just be the finest story I’ve ever read about seahorses.
Rebecca Watson
Author of Little Scratch (Faber), which was adapted for the stage in 2021
I tore through Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (Little, Brown). A novel about two Australian sisters who move to postwar England, Hazzard writes these compacted, jagged descriptions that are exhilarating. She gives me the same feeling as when a mate pinpoints a detail about someone and it’s so accurate you can only laugh. Precision holds a strange comedy. At the moment I’m reading Anne Carson’s Nox (New Directions), which doubles the meaning of an unputdownable book: the pages unfold like a concertina. Carson wrote it after the death of her brother and it is a piecemeal accumulation that questions how to record the past (or a person), with scanned scraps of notes and photos. It’s porous, philosophical and surprising.
Guy Gunaratne
Author of Mister, Mister (Tinder) and In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder), which won the 2019 Dylan Thomas prize and the Jhalak prize
Ordinary Notes (Daunt) by Christina Sharpe is both formally daring and manages to be profoundly courageous in the tradition of Dionne Brand and Margo Jefferson. Kairos (Granta) by the great Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by equally brilliant Michael Hofmann, is an intimate story of beginnings and endings, set before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have also fallen in love again with Derek Jarman, both his films and prose, so was hugely excited by the release of Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping (Prototype), his only long-form narrative fiction.
Marian Keyes
Author of numerous novels, including Watermelon (Penguin), Rachel’s Holiday (Penguin), and Again, Rachel (Michael Joseph) and many nonfiction books. She won the Author of the Year award at the 2022 British Book awards
The elevator pitch for Strange Sally Diamond (Penguin Sandycove) by Liz Nugent could go: Room meets Eleanor Oliphant, but this dark gem of a novel is so much more. Sally Diamond is quite strange; she’s also funny and touching. Marketed as “crime”, this edge-of-your-seat read transcends genre. Demon Copperhead (Faber) by Barbara Kingsolver is a modern-day retelling of David Copperfield, a glorious epic that is political and righteously angry, but thanks to the exquisitely rendered narrative voice, always engaging. A phenomenal book. Between Us (HarperCollins) by Mhairi McFarlane is her latest and her best. Roisin’s partner Joe is a screen writer. When his new series depicts loosely fictionalised secrets about Roisin’s family, Roisin’s life begins to unravel. Thoughtful, sweet, dark and romantic, I loved it.
Megan Nolan
Author of Acts of Desperation (Jonathan Cape) and Ordinary Human Failings (Vintage)
The Guest (Chatto & Windus), Emma Cline’s second novel, is the ideal mix of hazy summer glamour and simmering threat for compulsive beach reading. Cline’s narrator Alex is a resourceful young sex worker coming to the end of her ability to convincingly sell her performance as a confident and together woman, worn down by the precarity she dwells in. A gripping, almost ghastly book which brings to mind The Talented Mr Ripley (Penguin Random House).
Big Swiss (Faber) by Jen Beagin has an irresistibly juicy premise: a transcriptionist working for a sex therapist in cosy, smug Hudson Valley becomes fixated on one of the voices she hears over tapes. When she recognises it out in the wild, she begins an intoxicating affair without revealing her deception. Hilarious and consistently surprising about trauma, sex and friendship, I took it with me on a solo holiday and finished it before leaving the house on the first day.
Paul Murray
Author of The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton) and three other novels. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize in 2016 for The Mark and the Void (Penguin).
A biography of a 17th-century metaphysical poet may not sound like the ideal beach read, but Super-Infinite (Faber) is absolutely compulsive. Boasting pirates, plague, numerous executions, doomed love and some of the greatest poetry ever written, Katherine Rundell’s life of John Donne revels in the man’s many paradoxes and is a joy to read.
As a Warhol sceptic, I was initially wary of Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special (Bloomsbury), set in the artist’s Factory in 1960s New York. I needn’t have worried: revolving around two girls who find themselves employed to type up Warhol’s experimental novel, it’s an exquisite portrait of the torturous years of the late teens and the intense friendships that pull us through them, delivered in Flattery’s deadpan, darkly ironic prose.
It may be a reaction to the good weather, but every summer I find myself itching to reread Emmanuel Carrère’s pitch-dark The Adversary (Vintage). Usually found in the true crime section, it’s a jaw-dropping tale of murder and deception that goes right to the heart of what it means to be human. Reading it feels, in the best possible way, like being trapped in a lift in freefall through a deserted skyscraper. The perfect antidote to an excess of sunshine.
Sophie Mackintosh
Author of Cursed Bread, Blue Ticket and The Water Cure (all Hamish Hamilton), which was longlisted for the 2018 Booker prize. She is named on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list
Recently I was completely gripped by Claire Kilroy’s blistering Soldier Sailor (Faber) – an often terrifying (and sometimes blackly funny) look at the intensity of early motherhood. Another of my standouts has been Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s affecting third novel, The Sleep Watcher (Sceptre), a portrayal of the fragile dynamics of a family that manages to be both tense and tender. When it comes to nonfiction I’ve been finding myself returning again and again to Amina Cain’s recent A Horse at Night (Daunt), finding wisdom, beauty and recognition in her distilled observations on writing and making art.
Sheena Patel
Author of I’m a Fan (Granta), longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction
Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (Penguin) is not so much a summer read, but it is desperately important and impossible to put down. A cacophony of voices is assembled to speak to the deep trauma of the explosion. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. It is not the same, of course, but the chorus of pain reminded me of the anguish in people’s voices talking of what they sacrificed during the pandemic. Chernobyl is its own particular devastation, unique on the planet, but what shines clear from the testimonies is love – love which can make you do the most spectacular things.
I’ve only started Penance (Faber) by Eliza Clark but it is gripping. It is a story about the latent violence of burgeoning teenage womanhood and the games girls play, which can look childish but come with serrated edges. Clark writes about the murder of a girl in Crow-on-Sea, a fictional seaside town, through the voice of an investigator, and through it explores class privilege, fact as fiction and fiction as fact. A seaside Happy Valley.
Monica Heisey
Screenwriter and author of Really Good, Actually (HarperCollins)
The only thing I want to read about is relationships. How people find each other, torture each other, flirt with each other, get together, break up, get back together against the wishes of all their friends and family etc etc. I recently read Getting Lost (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Annie Ernaux and found it totally engrossing. Her novel Simple Passion (Fitzcarraldo Editions), about an affair with a younger married man in her 40s, is a favourite of mine, but this diary, written during the time the affair took place, is even more immediate, devastating and frank. I read The Happy Couple (Orion) by Naoise Dolan on a train and stopped at the station to finish it on a bench when I reached my destination. It’s a concise relationship novel that reads like a mystery, except the mystery is what is wrong with everyone. It’s also funny, which is important in any season but particularly in summer. Lorrie Moore having a new book out is always exciting to me; there is no one who sees small moments between people more clearly. I spent four lovely hours on a patio with a glass of wine, some little bits, and I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (Faber) a few weeks ago.
Jennifer Egan
Author of six novels, including the 2011 Pulitzer prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (Little, Brown). Her latest novel is The Candy House (Corsair)
The Woman in White (Vintage) by Wilkie Collins is a stay-up-all-night page-turner from 1859 that rivals any thriller written since: heavy on brooding gothic atmosphere, rife with plot twists, and featuring one of the great literary villains. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (HarperCollins) is Agatha Christie’s flat-out best: an investigation narrated by Hercule Poirot’s uptight nextdoor neighbour, a doctor who lives with his snooping, busybody sister (for audio lovers, Hugh Fraser does an exquisite job with this). And The Maid (HarperCollins) by Nita Prose is a comic whodunnit featuring a narrator who knows far more than she – or anyone around her – thinks that she knows: a satisfying tale of the triumphant underdog sleuth.
Rebecca F Kuang
Author of Babel, The Poppy War trilogy and Yellowface (all HarperCollins)
I’ve been sitting on a lot of long flights for work, and if a book can keep me enraptured for the whole journey I count that as pretty unputdownable. Mieko Kawakami’s novel All the Lovers in the Night (Picador) is a brief, compelling study of alienation and friendship; I binge-read it in a single sitting. Mark Haber’s novella Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (Coffee House), a vicious and ridiculous satire about art criticism and academics, had me giggling in my seat. And I’m now adoring The Short stories of Jorge Luis Borges translated by Andrew Hurley – they are such fun little philosophical puzzle boxes that keep me thinking long after I’ve closed the book.
Sean Thor Conroe
Author of Fuccboi (Wildfire)
Acts of Desperation(Vintage), Megan Nolan’s first novel, dives unflinching into a volatile relationship between a young, semi-alcoholic woman and a beautiful, moody man who’s still in love with his ex. Like most books of this genre, it’s unclear whether it operates as a cautionary tale or further romanticises this type of relationship. My Life as a Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrère (Vintage) operates similarly, charting a recently divorced man’s volatile relationship with a younger woman, as he publishes an unhinged erotic story about her, investigates his relationship with his mother, and her relationship with her father. This one’s marginally more terrifying than Nolan’s, if only in that it’s presented as memoir, and romanticises such relationships slightly less. I tore through both.
Virginia Feito
Author of Mrs March (4th Estate)
Horses! Worms! Magic! Entering Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Oneworld) is an experience akin to none. You’ll want to “solve” this book, and rejoice in the multiple terrors that it involves. Although the reader knows Maggie O’Farrell must have survived all her brushes with death in order to write her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am (Headline), the stakes are no lower for it and the harrowing tension unfolding in its passages makes for a spectacular read, as compelling as any great thriller. Maggie, I am so sorry all this happened to you. Set in the Hamptons as it counts down an increasingly tense seven days, Emma Cline’s The Guest (Chatto & Windus) is a thrilling dissection of survival and how far its protagonist will (or can) go to achieve it.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Author of The Sleep Watcher, Starling Days and Harmless Like You (all Hodder & Stoughton), which won a Betty Trask award in 2017
Penance (Faber) by Eliza Clark is a mystery that pulled me back into the muddy rage of girlhood. Each of Clark’s characters seems so distinctly possible that part of me can’t believe they weren’t people I knew in my own long ago teen life. Assembly (Hamish Hamilton) by Natasha Brown was one of the best books I read last summer and one I hope to reread. Her work is like that of an excellent photographer – you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising. Lastly, I gulped down the short story “How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alexander Whelan” from Yan Ge’s collection Elsewhere (Faber), and I’m looking forward to the rest.
Melissa Broder
Poet and novelist, whose books include Death Valley and Milk Fed (both Bloomsbury)
My definition of an unputdownable book is one that is funny, full of longing, and a bit fantastical. If a novel is all three, I’m sold. Open Throat (Pan Macmillan) by Henry Hoke is, for me, a Rosetta Stone of unputdownability: an allegorical tale of a queer mountain lion fighting for survival (and love) in the hills of Los Angeles. Another book that hits all three of these notes is Y/N (Europa) by Esther Yi: a witty, astute, and self-aware (but not so self-aware as to be able to shake romantic obsession) tale of a woman’s infatuation with a younger man in a K-pop band, and the strange journey on which this infatuation takes her.
Jenn Ashworth
Writer of short stories and novels, whose latest book is Ghosted: A Love Story (Sceptre)
In The Gospel of Orla (Seven Stories Press) by Eoghan Walls, an angry and grieving teenage girl meets Jesus on the Lancaster canal towpath. High jinks ensue. A story full of wit, kindness, care and fury, it’s the most original novel I’ve read in a long time. Okechukwu Nzelu’s Here Again Now (Dialogue) is an astonishingly delicate, keenly felt and lyrical exploration of love, tenderness, family and loss. I felt quite changed by this, and carry lines from it around in my heart. A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton) by Noreen Masud is worth the cover price alone for the description of Morecambe Bay as “a dreamy amphibian” – stark, careful, enlightening.
Jenny Offill
Author of Dept. of Speculation and, most recently, Weather (both Granta)
The subtitle of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday) is “technology, metaphor and the search for meaning”, but this barely hints at the wonders it contains. It uses ideas about artificial intelligence as a starting point to talk about all the ways humans have enchanted and disenchanted the world. Ten Planets (And Other Stories) by Yuri Herrera, is a book of startling, minimalist short stories that read like philosophical fables and stayed with me long after I finished them. Finally, in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Hodder & Stoughton), Claire Dederer explores with bracing honesty what it means to admire art made by artists she finds morally reprehensible. Spoiler alert: no easy answers here.
Tess Gunty
Author of The Rabbit Hutch (Oneworld), winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction and the Waterstones Debut Fiction prize
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (Graywolf), by Noor Naga, is about a passion that drives its protagonists – referred to as the American girl and the boy from Shobrakheit – to cross minefields of socioeconomic differences to reach each other. The prose is blazing, the politics nuanced, and the honesty unflinching. Assembly (Hamish Hamilton) by Natasha Brown is a masterwork. The book is 100 pages, but it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon’s control and a musician’s sensitivity to sound. A perfect title for the reader’s experience of this novella, Fever Dream (Oneworld) by Samanta Schweblin is a bewitching tale of environmental horror that will leave you breathless.
Explore all the books in the Guardian and Observer’s summer reading lists and save up to 15% on RRP. Visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• This article was amended on 3 July 2023. An earlier version said Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke’s book I Could Read the Sky was published by Vintage; the reissue is in fact published by Unbound, and the Guardian Bookshop link has been updated to reflect this.
