Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures / Part six

Illustration by Leon Edler

Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part six

From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer

Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST

Patrick Gale

Anyone who endured their teens in the 1970s as I did will devour Nina Stibbe’s sequel to the equally delicious Man at the Helm. Funny, subversive and unexpectedly touching, Paradise Lodge (Penguin), just out in paperback, follows her heroine’s adventures when she bunks off school to work in an old people’s home ripe for Thatcherite reforms. I’m always banging on about the need to read more dead authors – they have nobody marketing their work and they’re cheap and usually brilliant. Please discover Sylvia Townsend Warner this summer. Her The Flint Anchor and The Corner That Held Them (Virago) are neglected comic masterpieces whose evocations of chilly East Anglian landscapes are the perfect balm for sunburn. I’ll get no holiday as I’ve a new novel out, but on my train journeys I’ll be reading Anne Enright in preparation for interviewing her at the North Cornwall book festival.

Geoff Dyer

I’ll be in Berlin for most of July, heading there via – or at least in the company of – Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking). Always worried that I have a book too few, I’ll also be lugging Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (Granta), Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo) and Iris Origo’s Tuscan diaries, War in Val D’Orcia (Pushkin). In the second world war, the Germans used 2.7m horses, of which 1.8m died. This is just one of many moving statistics in Ulrich Raulff’s unusual and stimulating history of – and elegy for – the last 100 years of our relationship with the equine world, Farewell to the Horse (Penguin, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp).

Curtis Sittenfeld

Who Is Rich? (Fourth Estate) by Matthew Klam is a terrific summer read – a cartoonist at an ocean-side artists’ conference ponders creativity, infidelity and his own existential purpose, and the results are hilarious and bracingly intelligent. A similarly artsy but more sober read is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner) by Alexander Chee. Chee’s insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new novel When Katie Met Cassidy (Piatkus) by Camille Perri. I’ve heard it’s sexy, entertaining and subversive, and doesn’t that sound like a magnificent combination? I plan to read it while visiting my sister in Providence, Rhode Island.

Kerry Hudson

This summer I’m fulfilling a long-held ambition to explore the mountains and cities of the Republic of Georgia by their marshrutka countrywide minibus network. On a trip that is mainly travel, I want books that will inspire me, that are humane and thought-provoking. After reading the first outstanding story, I’ve been impatiently hoarding Glen James Brown’s debut, Ironopolis (Parthian), a series of interconnected tales set on a dilapidated Middlesbrough council estate. Likewise, Mary O’Hara’s Austerity Bites (Policy Press), which reports on the frontline of austerity cuts, a book sadly as relevant today as when it was first published four years ago.

Ocean Vuong

The Wilderness (WW Norton) by Sandra Lim is a knife blade fashioned into a magnifying glass. Oscillating between bold declarations and restrained, seething fury, the poems slowly build to a storm in the psyche. The book is a masterclass in line-making and metaphor. It lifts me, like the best books, higher into myself. “When I come to the right place, I believe I’ll paint a door on it and / walk right through.” I’ve also been struck by Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (Tyrant). It is the epitome of autofiction – and advances the tradition to include images and photographs. But more than that, it is the first book I’ve read in a while that faithfully enacts Kafka’s truism that a book must be an axe that shatters the frozen seas inside us. Brutal and unforgiving, it explores a crumbling marriage and its ensuing existential crisis through the lens of the West Virginian working class. A classic of urgent, American storytelling.

Josie Rourke

Sally Rooney’s award-winning novel, Conversations With Friends (Faber), is one of the best debuts I’ve encountered. It’s a witty and entrancing read, perfect for a summer’s day spent doing nothing else. I’m hoping to visit friends in the Hudson Valley this summer; I first need to finish editing my film Mary Queen of Scots – which is based on John Guy’s biography of Mary Stuart, My Heart Is My Own (Harper). For my summer reading I will dive into Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (WW Norton). I love his mission to invigorate settled ideas, and it’s good preparation for the next play I’m directing, Measure for Measure at the Donmar, London.

Sebastian Faulks

I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic (Little, Brown), in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder. I have some misgivings about patient confidentiality and exaggeration and/or light fictionalisation in places (Tallis has form as a horror novelist), but this is undoubtedly riveting stuff.

Attica Locke

I’ve just put down The Kiss Quotient (Atlantic) by Helen Hoang and I loved it so much I want to hand it out to strangers on the street. It’s a beautiful love story and a peek inside the life and heart of a woman who has Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. I was mesmerised by this book, which manages to be steamy hot and sweet at the same time. An American Marriage (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones is another incredible love story, though fraught with greater challenges for the couple at the centre, which makes the story all the more moving. Jones’s prose is chock-full of lyricism, grace and wisdom. You will never forget the story of Celestial and Roy. Unfortunately, there are no grand travel plans for me this season. My summer “holiday” will be stolen moments in my favourite reading chair.

Sabrina Mahfouz

I read The One Who Wrote Destiny (Atlantic) by Nikesh Shukla, a beautiful, brilliant modern classic, cover to cover on one long-haul flight – take tissues! And Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton) by Bernardine Evaristo is the funniest book I’ve read this year, but also one of the saddest. Every character makes a perfect holiday companion. My summer travels are all work-related this year – Wales, Suffolk, Edinburgh and Cairo – so to see me through the trains, planes and buses, I’ll be packing When I Hit You (Atlantic) by Meena Kandasamy, Grime Kids (Orion) by DJ Target, Elsewhere, Home (Telegram) by Leila Aboulela and Things Bright and Beautiful (Penguin) by Anbara Salam.

Carol Morley

Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (Windmill), about Frankie, who retreats from urban life and connects with nature, really made an impression on me this year. A fun and breezy read was Charlotte Bingham’s memoir MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks (Bloomsbury), an account of her discovery that her father was a spy and of her own “inactive” service. Go Went Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky) by Jenny Erpenbeck, looking at the plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor, I found very moving. My dream holiday reads include The Overstory (William Heinemann) by Richard Powers, an eco epic, with trees at the heart of the storytelling, and Ling Ma’s Severance (Macmillan), a brilliant-sounding post-apocalyptic novel, centring on the end times of late capitalism. I’ve been learning to swim this year, and while I’m in Paxos practising my strokes, I’ve accumulated some books with swimmers on the covers, and top of the pile to read is Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes (Virago) by Jessica J Lee.

THE GUARDIAN

Best books of 2017 / Part six

 

Best books of 2017

Part six

From moving memoirs to far-reaching fiction, the wonders of science and the lessons of history, novelists, poets and critics pick their best reads of the year

Sat 26 Nov 2017

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Days Without End; Smile

Two brilliant Irish novels stood out, one lushly lyrical, one laconic, both so well written they make pain into literary delight. Days Without End (Faber), Sebastian Barry’s novel of war and defiant love, is as full of outrage and blood and grief as one of Kurosawa’s Shakespearean movies and it’s as gorgeously beautiful too. Roddy Doyle’s Smile (Jonathan Cape) is achingly sad and ruefully perceptive, exquisitely balancing anger with sympathy.

Kirsty Wark

Manhattan Beach; Days Without End; Appointment in Arezzo

One of the joys of my reading year was Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Little, Brown). She tells an intimate and unusual story set in Brooklyn in the second world war, centred around the flinty Anna Kerrigan who becomes the only woman training to be a diver in the Navy Yard, and whose difficult home life is drawn with great compassion. Egan captures marvellously the precarious heightened atmosphere of wartime New York. The savage beauty of Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber) is imprinted on my brain. The historical research in the story of Thomas McNulty, who left Ireland in the famine, is woven perfectly though this dark violent tale of Thomas and John Cole, lovers caught up in the Indian wars and the American civil war. Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo (Polygon), his account of his long friendship with Muriel Spark, about whom I am making a BBC documentary, is an insightful, fond and gossipy read, with a Sparkian title to boot.

Louise Doughty

Ghachar Ghochar; Stay With Me; I Am, I Am, I Am

There have been a lot of bells and whistles in fiction in 2017 and, while it’s been a stellar year for inventiveness, I’ve also enjoyed two novels that utilised the underrated power of a simple story, well told. Ghachar Ghochar (Faber) by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, is a seemingly straightforward tale of a Bangalore family who come into wealth. Its gently comic tone belies a stunning satire, the full power of which is only apparent as the horror of the ending becomes clear. The Women’s prize-shortlisted Stay With Me (Canongate) by Ayòbámi Adébáyò had me hooked from the start with its portrait of marital disharmony in 1980s Nigeria. But if you want evidence that life can be just as dramatic as fiction, you couldn’t wish for better than Maggie O’Farrell’s stunning memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am (Headline).

Sarah Winman

The Boy Behind the Curtain; Reservoir 13

Tim Winton is a favourite novelist of mine. Always has been. So to read The Boy Behind the Curtain (Picador), his collection of autobiographical stories and essays, was a total joy. Here are the influences that shaped Cloudstreet, Breath, The Riders, et al. In one essay, he writes about the gut-churning process and despair of fiction writing. I felt sick. Wonderful. I was handed Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate) and told: “See what you think.” What I think is that it’s remarkable. Lyrical, restrained and structurally brilliant. I’ve never read anything quite like it. The book

Julian Baggini

Be Like the Fox; The Infidel and the Professor; The Enigma of Reason

Erica Benner’s Be Like the Fox (Allen Lane) challenged us to rethink Machiavelli, while Dennis C Rasmussen’s The Infidel and the Professor (University Press Group) shone a deserved spotlight on David Hume and Adam Smith. But the standout book of the year was The Enigma of Reason (Allen Lane) by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The idea that conscious, rational thought is largely window dressing has become the new common sense. Mercier and Sperber show that rationality is primarily social not solitary and has only been debunked because it has been misunderstood.

Sebastian Faulks

Enemies and Neighbours; The Novel of the Century

I am very much enjoying Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Allen Lane) by Ian Black. I also raced through The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables (Particular Books) by David Bellos.

SJ Watson

The Fact of a Body; Tin Man

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is an extraordinary book, weaving as it does the story of the author’s own childhood abuse at the hands of a grandfather into the (also true) story of a convicted child killer on death row in whose retrial she is involved. It’s a complex, difficult, essential read, as is Sarah Winman’s third novel, Tin Man, a beautiful book focusing on love, loss and sexual identity, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

Jenni Murray

Elmet; Be a Man

My favourite books of 2017 were, first, Elmet (JM Originals) by Fiona Mozley. It’s an amazingly brilliant debut novel which landed on the Booker shortlist and is a work of extraordinary Yorkshire grit. The landscape of my home county is evoked beautifully. The language is exquisite and the anger at the all-powerful wealthy landowner’s influence on the right to own one’s home leaps from the page. Second was Be a Man by Chris Hemmings (Biteback). A 30-year-old details the pressures of traditional masculinity on a growing boy, the lad phase and the maturing male’s need to comprehend and embrace the feminist project. Should be read by every parent, teacher, man and boy.

Chigozie Obioma

What Language Do I Dream In?; Lincoln in the Bardo; Days Without End

I enjoyed What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin (Virago). She creates an acute sense of tension, and the way she loops explosive events in her life – discovering that her father was not, in fact, her father – into the philosophy around art and language is skilful and riveting. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) is one of the books where the jacket description gets it right: they use the word “kaleidoscopic” to describe this ingenious, polyphonic structure that is at once as entrancing as it is beautiful. In Days Without End (Faber), Sebastian Barry employed a rich, flourishing cascade of 19th-century vocabulary to create an atmospheric novel of friendship, war, immigration and the fragilities of the human life. It’s a powerful book.

Amma Asante

The Good Daugher; Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter (HarperCollins) is genuinely disturbing and so skilfully crafted, you feel, taste and smell the world as you are sucked in by its unpredictable twists and turns. I found Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Bloomsbury) timely and resonant. The author’s passages on intersectionality are particularly poignant. It’s a powerful and important read, relevant and accessible whatever your race.

THE GUARDIAN