Factor 30?
Tick. New cossie? Tick. Great books? Well, look no further because here – compiled by our critics and a host of well-read stars – is Event’s unputdownable guide to the 100 hottest holiday reads
POPULAR FICTION
Villa America
Liza Klaussmann
Picador £14.99
Do backdrops come any more seductive than the French Riviera?
Only if we’re talking the Jazz Age Riviera, which is where this mysterious romance unfolds, centring on Sara and Gerald Murphy, the real-life couple to whom F Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is The Night. With parties galore and cameos for everyone from Cole Porter to Picasso, it’s this summer’s classiest beach read.
The Improbability Of Love
Hannah Rothschild
Bloomsbury £14.99
Nazi-looted treasure and Russian oligarchs, murder and love – all feature in a richly satisfying caper that probes the true value of art.
Its heroine is aspiring chef Annie, and you’ll be rooting for her from the very start as she unwittingly discovers a 300-year-old lost masterpiece, only to tumble down a rabbit hole of art-world skulduggery from which there is no easy way out.
In The Unlikely Event
Judy Blume
Picador £16.99
At the start of 1952, three passenger jets crashed within eight weeks of each other over Elizabeth, New Jersey, leaving locals in a state of twitchy dread.
Much-loved YA author Judy Blume grew up there and, though she was only 14 at the time, her memories of that traumatic winter electrify this tale of love, loss and carrying on regardless.
We Are All Made Of Stars
Rowan Coleman
Ebury £12.99
During her night shifts, hospice nurse Stella helps her patients write letters to their loved ones, promising to post them after they pass away.
Some are passionate, others witty or practical, and a few are filled with regret. Then comes one that offers hope of redemption – if only Stella can deliver it before the agreed time. Bittersweet, breathless and ultimately life-affirming.
Piranha
Clive Cussler
Michael Joseph £18.99
The tenth Oregon Files novel finds Captain Juan Cabrillo on the trail of a mad scientist who’s determined to take over the world.
Steering his state-of-the-art battleship into the heart of a blockbuster plot, he’s soon contending with drones, missile shootouts and a ‘neutrino telescope’ with the power to see anything, anywhere on the planet. It’s an action-packed adventure with sci-fi props.
The Sunrise
Victoria Hislop
Headline Review £7.99
It’s 1972 and in Famagusta, Cyprus, entrepreneur Savvas Papacosta is full of plans to make his fortune.
But beneath the resort’s idyllic surface, tensions simmer: Savvas’s wife is falling for his unscrupulous right-hand man, and Turkish and Greek nationalists are at loggerheads over the island’s future. Deception, betrayal and ethnic hatred fuel a gripping tale of humanity under pressure.
Fresh Hell
Rachel Johnson
Penguin £7.99
The latest instalment of Johnson’s Notting Hell series sees Mimi and her family return to the land of ‘the haves and the have-yachts’.
Things have got so much worse while they were away, and new challenges include noisy basement digs and paparazzi thronging the prep-school gates. Then there’s Mimi’s steamy extramarital affair… Skewering the delusions of the super-rich has rarely been such delicious fun.
The Woman Who Stole My Life
Marian Keyes
Penguin £7.99
Chatty beautician Stella Sweeney has a middling marriage and two sulky teens.
But when a rare illness leaves her unable to move or speak for months, she finds herself drawn to her dishy neurologist. That’s just the beginning of a rollercoaster ride that sees her become a bestselling self-help author, go gallivanting round Manhattan, and land back in Dublin with a bump.
A big-hearted romp.
Techbitch
Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza
Penguin £7.99
Imogen Tate, fashion queen and editor-in-chief of Glossy, returns after an illness to find her once respected magazine has been turned into an app, with her 26-year-old former assistant at the helm.
But Imogen isn’t about to give up without a fight, even if she’s totally out of her depth in this brave new world of ‘gifs’ and ‘dongles’. Lethally funny with sass to spare.
Summer Secrets
Jane Green
Macmillan £12.99
Hard-partying Cat Coombs has a problem with booze, but it’s not until she wakes up beside Jason, an attractive TV director who’s three years sober, that she considers joining AA.
Fast-forward – via the discovery that her father isn’t her real father – and Cat has fallen off the wagon and been left by Jason, who’s taken their daughter with him. Green brings a light touch to weighty material.
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ENTERTAINMENT & MUSIC
After The Dance
Jan Gaye
Amistad £18.99
As Janis Hunter, the author grew up in the late Sixties with a picture of Marvin Gaye tacked to the wall of her foster-home bedroom.
By the age of 17 her dream of meeting him had come true. Then came babies, marriage and a devastating shared drug habit with her idol, who’s brought chillingly to life here as a loving, cruel, and frankly mad musical genius.
There Was A Little Girl
Brooke Shields
Dutton £17.99
Modelling at 11 months old, star of the film Pretty Baby aged 12, Brooke Shields had a bizarre childhood.
Her manager was her mum, Teri, a raging alcoholic. Yet this honest memoir reads like a love letter to her.
Here Comes The Clown
Dom Joly
Simon & Schuster £18.99
Just how did Dom Joly, a boarding schooleducated diplomat and the scion of a distinguished expat family, transform himself into the master of the practical joke?
The story of his off-camera adventures turns out to be every bit as entertaining as his funniest pranks
Ray Davies: A Complicated Life
Johnny Rogan
Bodley Head £25
This intimate portrait reveals the legendary frontman of The Kinks to be one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most troubled and enigmatic musicians.
Spanning three decades from 1964, it chronicles the breakdowns, lawsuits and punch-ups – often with Dave, his brother and the band’s lead guitarist – that punctuated his classic songwriting.
LITERARY FICTION
Our Souls At Night
Kent Haruf
Picador £12.99
This tender, posthumously published novel opens as 70-year-old Addie visits Louis, a man whose late wife she was close to, with an intriguing proposition: she wants him to sleep with her.
Not like that. She’s looking for companionship and chat… but word gets out. Full of hope and the possibility of second chances, it brings Haruf’s cycle of books set in small-town Colorado to an eloquent end.
Hunters In The Dark
Lawrence Osborne
Hogarth £12.99
When he gets lucky in a casino in Cambodia, disaffected English teacher Robert Grieve decides to cash in his chips and stick around rather than head back home to Sussex.
But his fortune doesn’t last, and before long a former member of the Khmer Rouge is on his trail. A masterful tale of jinxed money, police corruption and a man ensnared in a sophisticated game of cat and mouse, it positively oozes menace.
Curtain Call
Anthony Quinn
Vintage £8.99
Thirties London springs to life in an elegant comedy of manners that opens with an attempted murder in a hotel room.
The would-be victim is saved by another woman, who’s come to the hotel to have an affair, but with the attacker still at large, both are at risk. Expect to meet genteel call-girls, waspish theatre critics and drag-ball-goers.
A God In Ruins
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday £20
In this companion to her hit novel Life After Life, Atkinson’s gentle hero is Teddy, a World War II bomber pilot who goes missing in action over Germany.
But what if he’d survived the war? Shifting from era to era, she explores the very different lives he might have led, writing as vividly about night raids as love.
THRILLERS
Finders Keepers
Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton £20
Bill Hodges, the retired detective from Mr Mercedes, returns to tackle a case turning on a vengeful reader.
In 1978, Morris Bellamy murdered his literary idol John Rothstein and stole more than 100 notebooks filled with unpublished writing, stashing them before he was jailed for another crime. Now he’s out, but the notebooks have fallen into someone else’s hands – a teenager who’s in urgent need of Hodges’ help.
Expect to be clinging to the edge of your sun lounger.
Blood On Snow
Jo Nesbø
Harvill Secker £12.99
Set in the Seventies, this lean serving of Nordic noir centres on a soft-hearted hit man whose job is about to go fatally wrong.
Dyslexic and unable to drive a getaway car or pull off a successful robbery, Olav Johansen’s one skill is killing. Which is why his heroin kingpin boss has asked him to ‘fix’ his trophy wife. Olav’s problems are only just beginning when he finds himself falling for her.
The Stranger
Harlan Coben
Orion £19.99
With two children and a wonderful wife, Adam Price seems to have it all.
Except that Corinne has been hiding a huge secret from him, and the more he learns, the darker his fears grow. Why would she have faked a pregnancy? How could she simply walk out on their life together? And what does it all have to do with a murder in distant Ohio?
The plot’s inarguable logic makes it all the more potent.
The Girl On The Train
Paula Hawkins
Doubleday £12.99
Agatha Christie meets Rear Window in this runaway bestseller.
On her daily commute, alcoholic divorcee Rachel invents stories about the perfect couple she sees from her window when the train stops at a signal. She even gives them names, Jess and Jason. But then one day, she sees something shocking. It’s a taut psychological thriller that’s chockful of chilling twists.
World Gone By
Dennis Lehane
Little, Brown £16.99
He already has a string of blockbuster film adaptations to his name – Shutter Island, Mystic River et al – but Lehane just keeps getting better.
This one’s set in Forties Florida, a world of sharp suits and sharpshooters. Gangster Joe Coughlin seems untouchable, but with rival mob bosses jockeying for power, could it be that payback is imminent? Watch out for the movie.
SPORT
Federer And Me
William Skidelsky
Yellow Jersey £16.99
As well as being a Wimbledon winner, Roger Federer is an icon, and this book attempts to get to the bottom of his mystique.
One for the tennis nerds – look out for sections on his forehand grip and position on the court – there’s also plenty about the author himself, and the role that his obsession with the Swiss ace has played in his emotional life.
Speed Kings
Andy Bull
Bantam £17.99
Hollywood stars, royalty and gangsters – all play roles in this aptly pacey account of the bobsleigh team that won Olympic medals for the U.S.
in 1928 and 1932. The daredevil kings of its title are dashing Billy Fiske, who went on to become a Battle of Britain flying ace; Clifford Gray, a notorious playboy; roguish gambler Jay O’Brien; and Eddie Eagan, lko88 a heavyweight boxer and razor-sharp lawyer. Buckle up!
The Yellow Jersey Club
Edward Pickering
Bantam £20
There are just 26 living members of the Yellow Jersey Club, and Edward Pickering was determined to meet as many of them as he could.
His mission? To discover what it takes to make a Tour de France champ. Along the way, he picks the brains of some of cycling’s greatest legends of the past 40 years.
The Sure Thing
Nick Townsend
Arrow £8.99
Horse racing has its share of colourful characters, none more so than the fearless gambler Barney Curley, a name to make bookies quake.
In the summer of 1975, Curley won millions of pounds betting on a horse named Yellow Sun. Then, in May 2010, he pulled off a multi-million pound sequel. The story of how he masterminded it is as entertaining as it is informative.
Guy Martin
Guy Martin
Virgin £8.99
The maverick British motorcycle racer tells his own story, mapping a journey that begins with him helping his dad to prep bikes, and later finds him battling for a place on the podium.
Packed with thrills, he reveals what it feels like to survive a 170mph fireball and also to cope with fame. The ultimate white-knuckle ride for speed addicts.
HISTORY
Fashion On The Ration
Julie Summers
Profile £16.99
World War II changed everything fashion-wise, and this gloriously detailed survey describes the ingenious lengths to which people went in order to keep looking natty, whether it was making bras from old petticoats or spinning wool from salvaged dog fur.
But what was a bride to do? Cue romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, who bought up wedding dresses and persuaded the War Office to loan them to service brides.
Magna Carta
David Starkey
Hodder & Stoughton £18.99
Magna Carta, that much mythologised starting point in the story of English constitutionalism, celebrates its 800th anniversary this year.
Starkey’s soaring account describes how the charter came to be born, beginning with a messy feudal squabble and taking in war, treachery and idealism. It’s a document of transcendent importance in the English-speaking world and this galloping narrative does a great job of humanising it.
Our Land At War
Duff Hart-Davis
William Collins £20
The epitome of keep calm and carry on, this endlessly interesting account reveals World War II’s impact on Britain’s farms and villages.
Despite privations, it was a time when people pulled together, and for a boy like the author then was, growing up in the Chilterns, there were plenty of adventures to be had: cycling miles because of petrol rationing, falling out of trees collecting birds’ eggs and learning how to catch rabbits.
Ardennes 1944
Antony Beevor
Viking £25
All seemed quiet on the Western Front by December 1944 but before the year’s end, Hitler’s troops, in a final gamble, were to launch a massive assault on the most vulnerable part of the Allied front line.
The press dubbed the fighting that followed The Battle Of The Bulge, and it’s brought dramatically to life in this day-by-day account, complete with cameos for David Niven, JD Salinger and Ernest Hemingway.
Dead Wake
Erik Larson
Doubleday £20
The story of the luxury transatlantic liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915, is well known, but this gripping and superbly well-researched retelling is so tense that you’ll be hoping against the inevitable until the very last minute.
The victims and survivors become living, breathing people, and every detail from what third-passengers ate to the décor in first-class is meticulously captured.
MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY
Universal Man
Richard Davenport-Hines
William Collins £18.99
He’s the economist whose ideas continue to influence global finance 70 years after his death, yet as this wildly entertaining biography reveals, Maynard Keynes was also a rule-breaker with a rapacious appetite for figures of an altogether more sensual nature (lists of his lovers average around 60 a year).
It may whizz past his faults but its gusto is irresistible.
The Shepherd’s Life
James Rebanks
Allen Lane £16.99
James Rebanks, the Herdwick Shepherd, farms in the Lake District, on the same patch his family has toiled in for six centuries; his year moves to a rhythm unchanged down the generations.
His dispatches describe a connection with the land most of us have lost, movingly evoking a way of life under threat.
One Of Us: The Story Of Anders Breivik
Asne Seierstad
Virago £16.99
In July 2011 Anders Breivik killed 77 people at a Norwegian summer camp.
Books about serial killers are often trashy, elevating the murderer to anti-hero while marginalising his victims. This is an exception – scrupulously researched and full of haunting detail, it even includes a passage about Breivik’s behaviour in the womb, when his mother believed he was kicking her on purpose.
Mr And Mrs Disraeli
Daisya
Chatto & Windus £20
He was a mediocre, debt-riddled novelist with outrageous dreams of becoming Prime Minister, she a chatterbox widow 12 years his senior.
And though drawn to her presumed wealth (he got that wrong), Benjamin Disraeli fell passionately in love with Mary Anne Lewis. As this intriguing portrait shows, theirs became one of the strongest and strangest marriages of Victorian Britain.
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Caitlin Doughty
Canongate £12.99
Doughty has always been fascinated by death.
Armed with a degree in medieval history – all those skeletons – she finally snagged her dream job: working at a San Francisco crematorium. She writes about her life with corpses with all the sassiness that other young women bring to penning romcoms.
RUBY WAX
Holiday classic I’ll never forget reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities, which reminds me of being a 13-year-old with time to kill during the school holidays in America.
I instantly fell in love with Sydney Carton – my first love and my first hero worship – and whenever I read it again I fall under his spell. Funnily enough, I had no idea of where England was in those days, let alone imagined I’d one day live there.
Recent tip Terry Hayes’ 2013 thriller I Am Pilgrim.
It’s got it all: a top secret agent, a jihadi antagonist and a brilliant plot. Unputdownable.
PIERS MORGAN
Holiday classic I first read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop as an 18-year-old journalism student living in a bedsit in Harlow, Essex.
It’s based on Waugh’s own experience as a war correspondent in Ethopia, where he reported for the Daily Mail on Mussolini’s 1935 invasion. Journalism is portrayed as a ego-driven, sneaky, ferociously competitive, slightly amoral, ruthless and duplicitous scoop-chasing business.
But one also full of fun, frivolity, humour and alcoholic nourishment. I knew I’d instantly made the right career choice.
Recent tip The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson is a fascinating, very entertaining new study of a brilliant, charismatic linguist with a gift of the gab and penchant for Latin who defied mockery to become one of Britain’s greatest ever leaders.
It’s not hard to imagine Boris occasionally straying into the mistaken thought process that he was writing his OWN autobiography.
DOM JOLY
Holiday classic The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. It’s perhaps the original ‘gonzo’ travel book and documents one of the first tourist cruises of the Med.
It’s funny, surprisingly modern and yet takes you back to a time when tourism was both more innocent and complicated. I’d have loved Twain as a travel companion.
Recent tip My favourite book this year has been Justin Marozzi’s Baghdad: City Of Peace, City Of Blood.
It’s a wonderful book that documents the history of an extraordinary city – reading it took me right back to the Middle East of my youth. I’ve yet to visit Baghdad but it’s on my to-go list.
ALAN JOHNSON
Holiday classic Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I borrowed from Ladbroke Grove Library.
Huck was about the age I was when I read the book and first became captivated by his exploits on the Mississippi River.
Recent tip Kate Atkinson’s A God In Ruins has all the Atkinson hallmarks; fine story-telling , beautifully written with an unrivalled eye for detail.
GYLES BRANDRETH
Holiday classic Part of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens is set in Broadstairs, where I went on holiday 60 years ago.
At our B&B there my father read David Copperfield to us and that gave me my love of words.
Recent tip For the past few years I’ve been writing Victorian murder mysteries with Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Dyle as my detectives in the 1880s and 1890s, a period that has been brought brilliantly to life in The Street Of Wonderful Possibilities by Devon Cox.
CHARLIE HIGSON
Holiday classic It was the early Eighties and I was touring America with my band, the Higsons, and working though a pile of crime novels.
Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me starts in darkly comic fashion as a small-town sheriff tries to bore people to death with clichéd homilies, but it quickly descends into horror and sadistic violence.
Recent tip Nick’s Hornby’s Funny Girl, about a young girl in the Sixties who comes to London and ends up as a TV star.
It’s funny, light, charming and a pleasure to read. Hornby’s world view is refreshingly optimistic.
JENNY AGUTTER
Holiday classic I’ll never forget reading Italo Calvino’s classic Baron In The Trees.
I was 21 and appearing as Miranda in The Tempest at the National. I’d relax by reading the novel on my days off – it’s an extraordinary work of imagination that almost has the feel of a fairy-tale about it. Just a few weeks after that, I went off to live in America, and that’s where I spent the next 18 years.
Recent tip I’ve just read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention Of Wings, which is based on the life of the Grimké sisters, who were 19th-century abolitionists despite having been born into a Southern family.
It’s a brilliant reimagining of the past – utterly compelling.
ANDREW MARR
Holiday classic I always go back to Marcel Proust’s century-old novel In Search Of Lost Time.
I first read it in France back when I was newly married with children on the way. It was a busy, intense time for me – but reading it took me away to somewhere completely different: an increasingly dark but originally sun-dappled French idyll.
Recent tip The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan, a political novel in the very highest sense, dealing with Scotland, families, and the Afghan war in ways and with language not seen it in any other British book.
A remarkable achievement.
DAVID NICHOLLS
Holiday classic A bittersweet love story I return to again and again is Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night, which provided some inspiration for my novel Us.
It charts the decline of a ‘perfect’ marriage on a journey across Europe in the Twenties.
Recent tip Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls At Night, is a love story about a couple who bond late in life and struggle against the prejudices of their neighbours.
Beautifully written, spare, simple and very touching. You could read it in an hour, but you’ll find yourself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.
CRAIG BROWN
Holiday classic I first read Charles Portis’s True Grit on holiday aged 12.
Last year, a friend whose judgment I trust told me it was well worth reading again. I did, and relished every sentence. A gripping tale of vengeance, seen through the innocent but undeceived eyes of 14-year-old Mattie Ross. Funny and moving.
Recent tip Anne Tyler’s latest novel, A Spool Of Blue Thread, is also said to be her last.
It may well be her masterpiece, but, unlike many masterpieces, it is a pleasure to read – a family saga, simply told.
DAVID MITCHELL
Holiday classic Craske was championed by Sylvia Townshend Warner, whose Lolly Willowes I read during my lunch hours working as a clueless post-room temp during the summer of 1989 at a mining equipment factory in Worcester.
In Townshend’s proto-feminist tale, a respectable spinster becomes a witch in 1920s England. The factory shut down in the Nineties.
Recent tip The Norfolk coast won’t be the most exotic location listed on this page, but Julia Blackburn’s recent magpie-mindedThreads: The Delicate Life of John Craske illuminates the place, its past and its people with a strange and beautiful light.
As she hunts for clues about a long-forgotten fisherman-artist-embroiderer-invalid who died in 1942, Blackburn crafts a meditative, singular and atmospheric artwork of her own.
RACHEL JOHNSON
Holiday classic Scoop by Evelyn Waugh remains the best novel about absurdity and eccentricity of newspapers and their owners that makes me howl with laughter and want to head off to Ishmaelia for the summer, with a handful of cleft sticks for the sending of my fictitious despatches from the front.
Recent tip Hannah Rothschild’s debut novel The Impossibility of Love is a passport into the secret, cut-throat, criminal world of the trade in Old Masters, the super-rich, Russian oligarchs, tastemakers, dealers, auctioneers and the London art market – utterly addictive and entertaining.
ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
Holiday classic Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a haunting historical novel that I first read when I visited Italy in my twenties.
Recent tip I shall be in Italy this summer for a brief stay.
I shall have at my side Robert Macfarlane’s magnificent Landmarks, which is all about place names and the relationship of language and the landscape. Macfarlane writes beautifully about the land.
TIM FARRON
Holiday classic I’ll never forget reading John Wyndham’s terrifying post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic Day of the Triffids – about the rise of a deadly plant species – as a child on holiday in Singapore and terrifying my sister with stories about it!
Recent tip I read Swedish crime writer Camilla Lackberg’s excellent 2014 psychological thriller Buried Angels, featuring police detective Patrik Hedstrom.
I love her stories – Scandi-fiction at its best.
CHRIS PACKHAM
Holiday classic My favourite novel is the 1932 futuristic classic, Brave New World.
I first read it when I was 14 or 15. We should have been studying The Silver Sword for our exams but I was secretly reading Aldous Huxley under the classroom desk. It was my first foray into adult fiction – and a fascinating insight into the human psyche.
Reading that rather than my set text might explain why I didn’t do as well as I should have done in my English O-level!
Recent tip The last book I read was The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against as Epidemic, by Gay and Laney Salisbury – the riveting real-life story of how dogs and men saved the day following a diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska in the 1920s.
The port was icebound, and the planes too primitive to brave the blizzard conditions – so it was down to dog teams to make the 1,000-mile wilderness dash with a batch of life-saving serum. If you’re a dog-lover like me, this is a must-read.
EDWINA CURRIE
Holiday classic I read Louisa May Alcott’s timeless story about four sisters, Little Women, aged about eight while on holiday at my Auntie Zena’s in Bournemouth in the summer of 1954.
She was a deputy headmistress – and I had to read it because she gave it to me, and then quizzed me about the book afterwards. You didn’t mess with Auntie Zena!
Recent tip The last thing I read that grabbed me was The Circle by Dave Eggar, an American writer who looks at the near future and what might happen if Twitter or Facebook takes over the world – it’s chilling stuff, and got me off social media for a week.
JEFFREY ARCHER
Holiday classic I grew up very poor and we never went any further than Torquay for our holidays when I was a boy.
One day, I picked up Ian Fleming’s Dr No in a second-hand bookshop there for ten pence when I was about 16. I read the entire book in one sitting – it was so good that I literally read it in four hours. I’d read every Bond book he’d written by the end of the summer!
Recent tip Most recently, I read Stephan Zweig’s remarkable masterpiece Beware of Pity.
First published in 1939, the author committed suicide three years later and the book fell out of print. But two years ago, the Pushkin Press published a new edition – and you only have to read the first page to know you’re in the hands of a genius.
LORRAINE KELLY
Holiday classic Greenvoe by George McKay Brown I read this when I went with friends on a cheap two week package deal to Greece in 1977.
I lay sweltering on the beach in the blazing sunshine reading about the fictional crisp, cold island of Hellya and wishing that I was there with the wind in my hair. McKay Brown writes like a poet and you are transported backwards and forward in time to a place where everything on the island is under threat.
Orkney is one of my favourite places in the world. The light is so beautiful and the sense of history palatable. This is where you can see Skara Brae, a community that were living, laughing and loving together before the ancient pyramids of Egypt were built. Greenvoe is one of several much loved books I have by my bedside and I dip into it often to enjoy the quality of writing.
Recent tip As always with Marian Keyes’s books I couldn’t put The Woman Who Stole My life down. She is brilliant story teller and I just had to keep turning those pages into the wee small hours even though I was getting up for work before 5am.
It’s the story of a woman who writes a self help book, becomes famous, and then loses everything, but the ending will surprise you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
JULIA BRADBURY
Holiday classic The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.
Not so much a ‘read’ more a flick-through. I love this tome of a book which reminds me of the first flat I bought in London a hundred years ago (well, 20). It was a tiny basement flat that was always streaming with people and parties. It was number 15 on the street and at one stage there were so many people coming and going the local taxi firm thought there was a club in the basement, so it became known as Club 15!
The Art of Looking Sideways is a brilliantly curated book of ideas, art, social history, quotes and literature. There are diverse photographs, text and sketches to inspire and entertain.
Recent tip We’re all very occupied, getting on with our busy, privileged lives, mainly oblivious to the fact that it is estimated that more than 28 million people are trafficked as slaves (forced labour and sex slaves).
Lawyer and human rights activist Corban Addison tackles this deeply personal subject in A Walk Across The Sun, merging fact with fiction in this story of two sisters, Ahalva and Sita, who are torn from their family in the aftermath of a tsunami in India.
Alone and vulnerable, they are sold as sex slaves in Bombay. It’s a passionate and disturbing read.
DAN SNOW
Holiday classic I love The Moor’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie.
I first read it when I was 18, out of school, away from home, free as a bird. I was in Zanzibar, where I found a chewed up copy – and within a few pages I felt like one of the characters. It was all about a spice trader who lived a magical existence across the Arabian Sea.
While reading it, I lied about my age and had a passionate fling with a much older American woman – but that’s another story!
Recent tip I read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel earlier this year as the TV series was on. Mantel made the past real.
I’m sure there are lots of inaccuracies, but I don’t care. It could be a fantasy novel and it would still be brilliant writing. Cromwell’s dependence on the king is a study in dictatorship.
WENDY COPE
Holiday classic When I moved to Ely four years ago a friend sent me a copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, saying I must read it because part of it happens here.
It was a very good read, made even better by my excitement about discovering my new city.
Recent tip I love the Suffolk coast and enjoyed Blake Morrison’s new poetry collection, Shingle Street, which includes a number of evocative poems about that part of the world.
Morrison is better known these days for his prose writing but he is a very good poet.
SUZI PERRY
Holiday classic I read Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell on holiday back in 1994, I was at my (ex) boyfriend’s villa in the South of Spain and I spent much of the read in floods of tears with a pain of sheer disbelief in my throat.
The bravery and drive of both authors has stayed with me throughout my life. When John was held hostage by Islamic Jihad terrorists in Lebanon for five and a half years in the mid 1980s I remember being fascinated by the situation. After his release, I once saw him in London. He walked past me in Soho and I stopped to grab my breath.
It’s the only time I have ever been awestruck. The book lays open pure emotion and, of course, the horrific story that dominated the headlines at that time. Despite partying a lot around the pool I did have a wonderful holiday and possibly appreciated it all the more because of the book.
Recent tip I have been a fan of Jo Nesbo since he wrote Headhunters.
I’m also an uber fan of Nordic Noir so becauseThe Son is set in Oslo it was always going to find it’s way into my palms! This is a stand alone gripping crime thriller that you can tear through whilst soaking up the rays on holiday.
I couldn’t put it down.The main character, Sonny, is a flawed anti-hero and because of the way Nesbo writes I was behind him all the way. The plot is complex but not overly so and there is a great twist to close. It flicks back and forth as the layers unfold, beautifully crafted and rather addictive.
SADIE JONES
Holiday classic I love the luxury of re-reading but rarely have the chance.
This summer I’ll revisit Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, first read whilst stranded in Merida, in Mexico in 1989 after everything I owned had been stolen from a beach. No money or passport, but a great book. Happiness.
Recent tip When Adam, an unmanageable seventeen-year-old, is sent to stay on his reprobate Uncle’s ramshackle houseboat in Somerset, he takes rock’n’roll with him on vinyl but discovers the sex’n’drugs to go with them over a long, hot,’70s summer.
The Last Summer of the Water Strider by Tim Lott is the perfect holiday book; funny and moving.
GIZZI ERSKINE
Holiday classic Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls when I was 19 and on my first big girlie summer holiday to The Algarve.
The book was written in 1966 so it’s your typical 60s sex, drugs and rock and roll story. It’s about a group of three women who become friends and end up getting sucked into a life of drugs and drink. They’re young, beautiful and wild with a passion for hedonism and partying, which is quite tantalising when you’re young.
But then it all goes belly up. I thought it was a fairly apt read for going away for the first time without my family. It replicated my feeling of newfound freedom but came with a sting that kept me grounded. I got completely sucked into the plot that summer and when I read it again when I was 25 it took me back to that holiday.
Then I felt older and wiser but I still think it’s a great book.
Recent tip I read a lot of trashy horror. Along with music and food it’s my other obsession, an escapism into a crazy different world. Eeny Meany by M.
J. Arlidge, the debut of television producer Matthew Arlidge, is about a sadist who keeps abducting two people at a time, each time leaving them with a gun and an impossibly horrendous decision. Only one can escape – by killing the other. The story is set in the UK and it’s very cleverly written. I get a buzz out of being scared.
