Holiday hotlist: Our favourite writers nominate the perfect book for summer

Jonathan Trigell

I like roughing it, with Mr Greene. Last summer I backpacked the length of Vietnam with The Quiet American; just as I'd done round Cuba, with Our Man in Havana. This year I'm really slumming though – I'm staying at home – and I'll be reading Brighton Rock, to remind me that I'm not missing much: beach resorts are clearly grimy, lonely places, where you're liable to be slashed with cutthroat razors or, at the least, get eternally damned.

Jonathan Trigell's latest novel, 'Cham', is published by Serpent's Tail (£7.99)

Joanna Kavenna

Celine's Death on Credit is a wonderful book to spend time savouring. It's a relentlessly dark comedy, packed with poignant grotesques, brilliantly realised in Celine's cantering, prose. It depicts a childhood spent struggling with adults who've been rendered amoral and weird by the grinding awfulness of their lives. It will make even the most dysfunctional family holiday seem idyllic.

Joanna Kavenna's debut novel, 'Inglorious' (Faber £7.99), won the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers

Charles Spencer

In My Father's House (Pocket Books £7.99) is an agonising account of Miranda Seymour's relationship with her snobbish father, who loved his historic home more than ever he did his family. The book is all the more powerful because of its lack of self-pity, and because, somehow, the author avoids being vengeful or vindictive. Instead, she explores the past in a sensitive way, still trying to understand why her father could not give her his love.

Charles Spencer's biography of Prince Rupert, 'The Last Cavalier', is published by Phoenix at £10.99

Ronald Hutton

"For anybody lying in the baking summer sun, I recommend Piers Vitebsky's Reindeer People (Harper Perennial £9.99), which is guaranteed to cool you down because it is an account of nomads living in the coldest part of the Arctic. It is also a tender and beautifully written account, designed for any reader, of how these people, the Eveny of Siberia, cope with a world populated with spirits as well as by mighty natural forces; and with the impact of modernity.

Ronald Hutton's latest book, 'The Druids', is out in paperback (Continuum, £14.99)

Salley Vickers

Parade's End, by Ford Madox Ford, is the perfect serious holiday read. It is a tetralogy which spans the outbreak and aftermath of the First World War and is one of the finest literary accounts of the time. The principal character, Christopher Tietjens, is also a psychologically brilliant creation.

Salley Vickers's latest novel is 'Where Three Roads Meet' (Canongate £7.99)

Alan Hollinghurst

I was captivated by Duncan Fallowell's Going As Far As I Can (Profile £12.99), an account of three months in New Zealand that is both cracklingly personal and beautifully clear-eyed about its subject. A quick check of the blogs suggests that not everyone there has liked it, but it is an open-hearted book as well as a brilliantly perceptive one.

Alan Hollinghurst's novel 'The Line of Beauty' (Picador £7.99) won the 2004 Man Booker Prize

Rose Tremain

As the Bush presidency moves towards its inglorious end, try to start loving Americans again by reading three modern American classics: Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The scope, humour, intelligence and panache of these novels will remind you how startling can be America's genius – seemingly lost in recent times – for talking honestly about itself.

Rose Tremain's latest novel, 'The Road Home' (Vintage £7.99) won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008

Saul David

My choice for the perfect holiday book is A Good War by Patrick Bishop (Hodder £12.99). Best known for his fine histories of the RAF in the Second World War, Bishop proves equally adept at historical fiction with this well-crafted and beautifully written debut novel about a Polish airman's four-year struggle for love, redemption and ultimately survival. A compelling read.

Saul David's latest book is 'Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire' (Penguin £9.99)

Natasha Mostert

Angry White Pyjamas, by Robert Twigger (Phoenix £7.99), the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and chosen in 2007 by all 5,000 Waterstone's bookshop staff as the best sportsbook of the last 25 years, is a hilarious and brilliant account of Twigger's experiences as he trained alongside the Tokyo riot police on their year-long, brutally demanding course in Aikido. A rites-of-passage book, it also provides a fascinating insight into the enigmatic and sometimes bizarre nature of contemporary Japan. If you like your summer reading funny, clever and with an edge as sharp as a katana, this one's for you.

Natasha Mostert's novel 'Season of the Witch' is published by Bantam at £6.99

Andrew Motion

The poetry book of the spring, and one of the most impressive debuts for some time, is Adam Foulds's The Broken Word (Cape £9) – a long(ish) narrative which is set before, during and after the Mau-Mau uprising. It handles all its subjects, including excitement, fear, guilt and inarticulacy, in wonderfully weighted and articulate language. Really, a remarkable achievement.

Andrew Motion's memoir 'In the Blood' is published by Faber at £9.99

Frances Wilson

I have always enjoyed reading other people's post, and so this summer I will pack the Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber £30), and get the other side of the story we all know so well. Collections of letters are the perfect holiday books because they allow you to read lazily, to dip in and out as you like, to skip a few pages, or even to begin at the end. Also, because it's a stonking great hardback, no one will try to nick it when I'm not looking and stick it into their beach bag.

Frances Wilson's biography 'The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth' is published by Faber (£18.99)

Sebastian Horsley

Profundity, popularity and profitability are rare bedfellows in art. In Andy Warhol's From A to B and Back Again (Penguin £9.99), we have it all. This great book unbalances you. It disarms you and suggests ways of being and even aspects of behaviour. Warhol is like Shakespeare: all that weight written with a feather! He was super-plastic and profound. He was important for being trivial yet deep, and poppy yet interesting – all the things I have come to love in one person. What people want is both classics and trash. This is both: classic trash.

Sebastian Horsley's memoir, 'Dandy in the Underworld', was recently published in paperback by Sceptre at £8.99

Jessie Childs

I've just returned from a week in the sun when the pick of my holiday reads was C J Sansom's marvellous Dark Fire (Pan £7.99). It's a thrilling quest novel set in Tudor London and the second in Sansom's historical series starring the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake. If, as I've been told, the next two books (Sovereign, 2006, and Revelation, 2008) are even better, I have further treats in store.

Jessie Childs is the author of 'Henry VIII's Last Victim' (Vintage £9.99)

Nadeem Aslam

For me, ever since I can remember, newspapers have frequently made the most emotional reading of the day. So for holidays, when the hours stretch unbrokenly ahead, the following books will be ideal, as they they benefit from sustained attention.

Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (Allen Lane £25), carefully guides us through the uncertainty behind some of today's headlines. Albert Camus's Notebooks 1951 – 1959 is a valuable glimpse into the great writer's mind as he struggled with the absolutist tendencies of revolutionary movements.

Nadeem Aslam's novel about the 'war on terror', 'The Wasted Vigil', will be published by Faber in September

Giles Milton

If you like your summer fiction dark, disturbing and eccentric, then Mysteries by Knut Hamsun is the one to pack in your bag. It tells the story of an oddball outsider who arrives in a sleepy Norwegian coastal town and starts to have a deeply malevolent effect on the lives of all the inhabitants. The Nobel prize-winning Hamsun is not well known in the UK; his dubious political views harmed his reputation. But Penguin saw fit to rescue Mysteries from obscurity by reissuing it as a Twentieth Century Classic a few years ago.

Giles Milton's most recent book is 'Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, The destruction of Islam's city of tolerance' (Sceptre £20)

Marina Lewycka

If, like me, you enjoy walking on holiday, Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape (Profile £9.99) is an interesting companion – wonderful descriptions of landscape and flora with a very personal account of the history and politics of these disputed hills.

For the more sedentary, I can recommend Jane Rogers's The Voyage Home (Abacus £7.99), which everyone in my book group has really enjoyed. It's the sort of book you need time to lose yourself in – intelligent and expansive – a perfect summer read.

'Two Caravans', Marina Lewycka's follow up to 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian', is published by Penguin at £7.99

Alastair Campbell

My favourite ever book is Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Penguin £7.99). My favourite book this year was Bill Bryson's Shakespeare (Harper Perennial £7.99).

If you want a long, brilliantly researched, endlessly fascinating history book, my vote for best political book of all time is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It is the story of the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, how he lived, campaigned and governed. As well as giving real insights into his life and times, there are lessons in it for leaders and campaigners today. For poolside reading, it is a toss up between Anne Tyler and the Henning Mankell novels about detective Kurt Wallander. They are much more than Swedish detective thrillers. If I had to pick one, it would be The White Lioness (Vintage £6.99).

Alastair Campbell's debut novel, 'All in the Mind' will be published by Hutchinson in November, £17.99. His diary of 'The Blair Years' is published by Arrow at £9.99

Alexei Sayle

I don't know about anybody else but this summer I am going to reread Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. I read it every few years and constantly find new and wonderful things in it. Also I console myself with the thought that if I ever went on Celebrity Mastermind, my specialist subject would be Sword of Honour and I would get 42 per cent of the questions right.

'Mr Roberts' by Alexei Sayle will be published by Sceptre in November.

Julian Fellowes

If I were going on holiday this year I would take The Bolter by Frances Osborne (Virago £18.99), a fascinating study of a glamorous, wasted life in pre-war Kenya, or Julia Gregson's novel, East of the Sun (Orion £7.99) which charts the stories of three women finding themselves in 1920s India, in the last days of the Raj. And if there was any space left in my suitcase, I would tuck in a copy of Wuthering Heights (Penguin £5.99) because one cannot read it too many times.

'Past Imperfect' by Julian Fellowes will be published by Weidenfeld in October

Raffaella Barker

My holiday read nominations roll straight out from my head like a beach towel... First, Music and Silence by Rose Tremain, a book I picked up idly and was gripped by. It is the plangent story of Christian IV, the King of Denmark whose wife is adulterous, whose kingdom is crumbling and whose solace is the music he commands his orchestra to play from the freezing cellars beneath the castle of Rosenborg. His belief and prayer is that music will bring serenity to his kingdom, but Kirsten, his queen, loathes both calm and music, and is determined to make his life hell. Peter the lutist has the king's ear and his love for Emilia, the queen's lady in waiting, is at the heart of this wonderful, pitch-perfect novel.

My other choice is Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley: a good beach read that will tell you all that you never realised you wanted to know about American horse racing and the rise and fall of wealth, in a way that makes it truly fascinating. A fine central dog character too.

Raffaella Barker's new novel, 'Poppyland,' is published by Headline Review (£12.99)

Kate Mosse

I always have a mixed bag of ancient and modern for holiday reading, and usually a favourite old crime novel; this year, as well as the obligatory Agatha Christie or two, I'll revisit Sherlock Holmes . I have a very old Penguin edition of the Complete Stories and, over the course of the summer will work my way through it, pausing longer on favourites such as "The Speckled Band" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles", which remains one of the greatest detective stories ever written.

As for new novels, I have Victoria Hislop's The Return (Headline £17.99) which is set during the Spanish Civil War, and Sebastian Faulks's Ian Fleming tribute, Devil May Care (Penguin £18.99), which has been sitting on my shelf waiting to slip into my suitcase...

Kate Mosse's latest bestseller, 'Sepulchre', is published by Orion at £7.99

Sadie Jones

I'm nominating as my choice of recommended summer reading The Shadow of the Wind, the international bestseller by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Phoenix £7.99).

This gothic, historical, and at times quasi-supernatural romantic thriller needs to be taken away on holiday because its world demands a bigger imaginative commitment than can be given in half an hour of reading before bed.

Entertaining and clever, it is moving, too, and also has moments of very pleasing silliness. I remember loving it so much, that I was actually frightened that it would let me down at the end – it didn't.

Sadie Jones's first novel, 'The Outcast', was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, and is published by Vintage at £7.99

Matt Thorne

Keith Gessen's novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men (Heinemann £12.99), is the perfect beach read because it's a useful warning about how the slacker lifestyle can become too much like hard work if you're not too careful. His three main characters make doing nothing seem the hardest choice imaginable, never really getting time for a proper vacation. Read this, and be grateful you're not like them.

Matt Thorne is the author of six novels, including 'Tourist' and 'Eight Minutes Idle'

Leo Hollis

Cut down on your carbon footprint and travel the world in your back garden. The best book this year is The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the birth of an obsession by Andrea Wulf (Heinemann £18.99) that tells the story of the intrepid plant hunters of the 18th century and their extraordinary impact not just on horticulture but the whole of enlightenment culture. The English garden is in fact a treasure trove of global history as extraordinary as the whole British Museum and Wulf's book recounts the ideas as well as the extraordinary men who changed the way we saw nature.

Leo Hollis's new book, 'The Phoenix: St Paul's Cathedral and the men who made modern London' is published by Weidenfeld at £20

Kei Miller

The first time that I survived the winter here, as the days got bluer and hotter and more wonderful, I remember thinking giddily, "Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city." In those exact words, I thought it, as if they were my own, forgetting that I had read them in Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners. I'm thrilled Penguin has released it as a Modern Classic; it certainly is.

Kei Miller's edited first novel, 'The Same Earth', is published by Weidenfeld at £12.99

Meg Rosoff

My recommendation for a good summer read is Breath, by Tim Winton (Picador £14.99): I held my breath throughout this lyrical, exhilarating novel about surfing, coming of age, and the strange dark places that exist in the heartbeat gap between ecstasy and death. The book is a paean to youth's belief in immortality and its blithe addiction to sensation and speed; as the narrative slides into the blackest realms of sexual extremity, I sat on an empty train at Liverpool Street, oblivious to my surroundings. Read it on a beach for maximum impact.

The Carnegie Medal winner Meg Rosoff's latest book is for younger readers is 'What I Was' (Puffin £6.99)

Paperbacks

The Separate Heart by Simon Robson, Vintage £8.99

If lying on a beach or travelling shortens your attention span, then try these virtuosic stories. 'Mountains' is a novel in miniature, dealing with the broken friendship of two schoolgirls who only meet again in their eighties. 'The Chariot Race', about a retired couple adrift in America, ends with a terrific jolt. And 'The Fat Girl' and 'The Observatory by Daylight' brilliantly evoke childhood in contrasting ways.

The Matchmaker of Périgord by Julia Stewart, Black Swan £7.99

Amour-sur-Belle is a profoundly ugly French village which suffers from high winds and an eccentric populace whose lives are taken up with arguing over cassoulet recipes and gardening one-upmanship. No wonder there aren't any tourists. Nothing has changed for years, until Guillaume opens his matchmaker's business and nervously waits for clients. A witty, magic-realist take on the 'Toujours Provence' genre, this is funny, charming and steeped in the scents and tastes of rural France.

The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi, Bloomsbury £7.99

A young wife dies on a Greek island and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Can the dapper fat man, a mysterious visitor from Athens, break the islanders' code of silence and bring the guilty to justice? A horribly gripping tale of malice and misogyny is rendered bearable by Hermes, the wise avenger whose occult powers of deduction hint at a supernatural origin.

Venetian Masters by Bidisha, Summersdale £7.99

Seeking inspiration to finish her third novel, Bidisha went to stay with friends in Venice in a Grand Canal palazzo. The novel was forgotten as she became absorbed into the intrigues and rituals of this notoriously secret city, learning to live, eat and socialise like the Venetians. But while she became beguiled by their charm and elegance, she was repelled by the snobbery and casual racism she saw almost everywhere. A fascinating insider's glimpse into a closed world.

Crime novels

A Killing Frost by R D Wingfield, Bantam £14.99

The late R D Wingfield's bad mannered DI Frost is back, sadly for the last time. He is one of British crime's great characters, and will be sorely missed. Several macabre cases, involving stray body parts, missing girls and a man who confesses to killing his wife but has mislaid her body, have him in a spin. With more luck than judgement, he manages to solve them all and still have time for bacon sandwiches.

The Reapers by John Connolly, Hodder £14.99

John Connolly's serial hero PI Charlie Parker plays a supporting role in this one, and his two associates Louis and Angel take centre stage. Hunted by a terrifying assassin and sure that they've met their match, the pair head to a town so remote that it hardly exists. Parker is not far behind with reinforcements, but will he get there in time and who will survive? All is revealed in an absolute slam-bang finale. Tremendous stuff, as Connolly's novels always are.

Stranger in Paradise by Robert B Parker, Quercus £16.99

An old favourite, Robert B Parker, is back and right on form with his latest Jesse Stone mystery. Our alcoholic sheriff hero is still trying to control his drinking, and still in love with his ex-wife, when once again he meets Crow, the Apache hit man from a previous novel, 'Trouble In Paradise'. This time, though, they are on the same side as they try to save the soul of a young woman. Short, sweet, and full of delicious skulduggery.

City of the Sun by David Levien, Bantam £10

Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel disappears in Indianapolis while on his morning paper round, and the local police seem clueless. A year passes, and there is still no sign. It has almost wrecked the marriage of his parents, but they've stayed together for cold comfort. Enter PI Frank Behr, an ex-cop prepared to go to any lengths to help the family get justice. Behr is a monstrous creation, who takes violence to extremes to solve cases, yet still captures the readers' sympathy. An excellent debut and I can't wait for more.

Mark Timlin

Hardbacks

The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe, Cape £16.99

The Mallinson family move to France for a six-month sabbatical in a seemingly idyllic farmhouse. But their Eden is tainted; boars rampage through the garden, the increasingly psychotic gardener is a menacing presence and there are persistent rumours that a tragedy was enacted there during the war. A clever subversion of middle-class mores and a neat demonstration that no one is innocent.

Sunshine by Robert Mighall, John Murray £16.99

If you've given up on the British summer this year and are off to 'fly, flop and fry', what better book to take to the beach than this cultural history of sun-worship? In this unashamedly personal account, Mighall wittily takes in Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, the heliotherapists of the early 20th century, nudism, and the connection between sunshine and love in pop music and literature along the way.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, Heinemann £17.99

This tale of rogue truckers and a pipeline across a post-apocalyptic world is all over the place but dazzling nonetheless. The plot might be a bit threadbare behind the big bangs, but when was the last time someone new came along with quite such a joyous display of styles and influences packed into a single SF novel? A hoot; like China Miéville channelling Monty Python.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, Heinemann £12.99

Willie Cooper returns to Templeton, a quirky little town in New York state, in disgrace after her affair with her history professor is exposed. She's on a mission to discover who her real father is, following her mother's cryptic clues. Her search for identity takes her through centuries of Templeton history as she works through her family tree to the ancestor she and her father share. Slaves, masters, hysterics, lovers, criminals and brothel-keepers people this sparkling tale.