We asked our favourite London authors to reveal their quintessential summer book — the one they are longing to return to now that sunny days in parks, on beaches and in garden hammocks beckon.
Charlotte Mendelson
Anything can be the perfect summer read, from Lee Child to George Eliot. The idea of a single summer read is terrifying — I always panic the night before a holiday, then end up bringing a book a day, plus spares. But if I had to choose, it would be Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years — an underrated masterpiece of psychological insight, subtle observation and compelling storytelling: the utterly absorbing world of one complicated family, their secret fears and desires and ambitions. And if you love it, as you absolutely must, there are four sequels, just as good.
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson, Mantle £9.99 , buy here
Guy Gunaratne
It should be a long, dizzying thing, this quintessential summer read. So a giant book to beat back the oppressive heat: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. If there was a book for a season of infinite hours, this would be the one. It’s a deeply human story about repressive power and bracing freedom. Told in various styles, forms and voices, each building upon the other to create a novel so vivid, so rich in meaning, that I’ve never had an experience quite like it.
Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne, Tinder Press £20, buy here
Chetna Maroo
In The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki, four sisters — the daughters of a once-wealthy Osaka house — negotiate miscarriage, scandal, arranged marriage and work as the modern world stands on their doorstep. Seasons pass. The Second World War looms on the horizon. Over the course of a hazy August not quite free of the pandemic, I was left with the peculiar feeling that this was not a novel but a memory of something I had watched happening around me. The Makioka Sisters is intimate, tough, sensual, at times spectacular — a 600-page world in which to live.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, Picador £14.99 , buy here
Lisa Jewell
My all-time favourite summer read is Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant. Forty-year-old pathological misogynist, failed novelist and serial liar Paul Murray piggybacks onto a group holiday to a farmhouse in Pyros, Greece. He pretends to be pursuing recently widowed mother Alice, but really he’s just out for what he can get. The dynamics and ambience of a multi-family holiday on a scorching Greek island are painted so keenly that you feel that you are there with them, as Paul ’s lies unravel and he finds himself becoming the victim instead of the player.
The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell, Penguin £9.99, buy here
Michael Rosen
For people who live in families, I guess one kind of ideal summer read is one that can be shared. I realise this ignores the fun of going off on your own and immersing yourself in an adult read but bear with me. This leaves me with a choice of book that can be enjoyed by all ages — or nearly. I’m going for Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner, first published in Germany in 1929. It’s a book that involves imperfect adults, resourceful children in situations laced with risk, danger, plus some sharp, ironic asides and the occasional glimpse of a city full of jazzy excitement.
Getting Better by Michael Rosen, Ebury £16.99 , buy here
Diana Evans
Short stories are perfect for summer as they can be consumed between naps, on a coach, plane, in a glade, on a mountain summit, taking us into a full narrative coherence of human experience, but briefly. Some of my favourite collections are Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women and Jackie Kay’s Reality, Reality. More recently I’ve enjoyed Jonathan Escoffery’s brilliant If I Survive You and Huma Qureshi’s Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love — she has a wonderfully luminous, understated style of writing. I love a book that contains both light and dark so hope to read the remaining stories (the ones I’ve been saving) on a beach somewhere.
A House for Alice by Diana Evans, Chatto & Windus £18.99, buy here
Andy West
In When Light is Like Water by Molly McCloskey, an American woman Alice visits Dublin a decade after she used to live there, triggering memories of a summer spent in a trance of lust, having an illicit affair that would destroy her marriage. McCloskey knows how heatwaves have a particular way of evoking past sensations of passion and pain. Yet the nostalgia here is turned down and the intoxication is recalled lucidly. This is because Alice’s beloved mother has died in the weeks before Alice’s return to Ireland and this grief punctures the sentimentality she once felt for her previous loves and losses. An exquisitely humane novel.
The Life Inside by Andy West, Picador £9.99 , buy here
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
There is a love affair in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong that begins in the summer of 2003. Little Dog is working in the tobacco fields with a boy named Trevor. When Little Dog first sees Trevor glance at him, he thinks, “I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside.” Between them there is lust and sorrow and a rough tenderness. But Vuong’s writing throws me so deeply back into the feeling of being young, impossibly sad, and impossibly full of sun that whenever I think of this novel, I taste summer air.
The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Sceptre £16.99 , buy here
Caleb Azumah Nelson
My favourite summer read is Kayo Chingonyi’s first poetry collection, Kumukanda, a book I reread at least once a year, and always in the summer months. I first read the collection a few years back, on one of those bright and brilliant August days. I remember sitting in my parents’ garden and reading it cover to cover, before starting again. It’s a beautiful exploration of grief and boyhood, but also the possibilities that love and intimacy can create. Each poem is delivered with such precision and deftness and it made me long for the community I spend summers with.
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (left), Viking £14.99, buy here
Jessie Burton
When I think of Jane Austen’s Emma, I think of summer. Although the first two volumes of Emma — the last novel Austen saw published in her lifetime — take us from October to April, the point is this: the plot moves from the dark to the light. Tumbling into May Day, and culminating on old Midsummer Eve, it is a beautiful read, full of humour and folly and catastrophic group picnics. We need more time than life can give us, and so does our heroine. But it’s fun to solve the puzzle of Emma’s year, which is the novel itself, and to end up, as she does, drenched in sunlight.
The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton will be published in paperback by Picador on July 6, £9.99 , buy here
