Features

Martina Cole
I have a wonderful caravan in Eastbourne and that’s where I spend my summers. It’s so beautiful and tranquil, I have the sea on my doorstep, and my children around me (plus two grandchildren!). We’re all bookworms and read into the night, and I’ll be revisiting old favourites like Dubliners by James Joyce, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene and Hatter’s Castle by AJ Cronin, and catching up with the latest books from Val McDermid and Ian Rankin.
Faceless is published by Headline

Lucy Mangan
The car boot gets stuffed with books before we head off to a cottage in Norfolk every year. This time it will include JG Ballard’s Miracles of Life, Jenna Bailey’s Can Any Mother Help Me?, Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!) and Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist. And lots of easy re-reads – Miss Read, Wodehouse and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I call my selection eclectic, my boyfriend calls it the sign of a laughably untrained mind.
Hopscotch and Handbags is published by Headline

Patrick Bishop
This year we are going to Felpham, an old-fashioned resort next to Bognor Regis with great beaches, pubs and fish and chip shops. We live in Rome now so the south coast makes a nice change and seems almost exotic. I will be taking Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost about the tragic destruction of Smyrna in 1922. Also Charlotte Eagar’s The Girl in the Film, her debut novel set in Bosnia during the civil war and its aftermath. It promises to be a great read.
3Para is published by HarperCollins

Irvine Welsh
I’m going to Argentina this summer, largely because I’ve never been there before. I have a boyhood friend who went there for the World Cup in 1978 and never returned. He was only 17 at the time, so it would be cool to see him again 30 years down the line. As for books, I’ll be reading the great Argentinian writer Griselda Gambaro’s Earning Death, which was banned by the ruling junta of the 1970s, when Gambaro herself was forced from the country into Spanish exile.
If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape.

Jenny Colgan
I cannot wait for my holiday this year. Some friends have taken a villa in the Dordogne, with a pool, plenty of wine and hopefully lots of scrabble. To read I’ll be taking Wife in the North by Judith O’Reilly, anything I haven’t yet devoured by Liz Jensen, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher and finally, finally I’ve promised myself I’ll read Anna Karenina. I’d always held off reading Tolstoy in case I somehow got wrongly imprisoned and needed to pass the time, but I’m thinking at this point in my life I should probably just go for it.
Operation Sunshine is published by Little, Brown

Lloyd Jones
I’m planning a canoe trip around a Swedish island – my favourite holiday destinations tend to be places where there is no one else around. On the pile to read, I have Heat by Bill Buford, The Spare Room by Helen Garner, and Wildwood by Roger Deakin. I snapped it up just as I was finishing his wonderful Waterlog. I’m looking forward to reading Iain Sinclair’s Edge of Orison and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies comes highly recommended. With the same very high recommendation comes Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova.
The Book of Fame is published by John Murray

Lynda La Plante
I will spend the summer in the Hamptons where I have a house. Reading matter is partly work, partly enjoyment. I am sent many new novels by young first-time authors. This summer I have six and I am presently reading Criminal by Caspar Walsh, which is excellent. I have such admiration for the young writer who has turned his life around to not only write his memoirs, but work with prisoner rehabilitation programs.
Clean Cut is published by Simon & Schuster

Helen Oyeyemi
I’m spending the summer in Toronto and will be taking books for train rides and for reading somewhere shady on Centre Island, but I’m most looking forward to James Hogg’s 1824 classic The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It’s about a young Calvinist who encounters a shape-shifting demon called Gil-Martin who persuades him that in some cases murder is fine. I can’t wait.
The Opposite House is published by Bloomsbury

Sarah Gristwood
I’m going to Moscow, where my husband is on the Film Festival jury, taking A Daughter’s Love, John Guy’s biography of Thomas and Margaret More, and Rita Carter’s Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, which sounds like an interesting theory for a biographer. Also Margery Allingham’s 1938 detective story The Fashion in Shrouds, to get me in the mood for my September fashion book, Fabulous Frocks!
Elizabeth & Leicester is published by Transworld

Polly Williams
We will drive down to Ile De Ré this summer, a little island off France’s Atlantic coast: think chic Parisians on bicycles, sand dunes and amazing sea food. My holiday book pile will include my friend Tasmina Perry’s new book, Guilty Pleasures, a treat for the beach; Patrick Gale’s Notes From an Exhibition; Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs; and Tolstoy’s masterly Anna Karenina – I’ve been wanting to reread it for years. The sun lounger and chilled rosé calls...
A Good Girl Comes Undone is published by Little, Brown

Danny Wallace
This summer I intend to go somewhere like Dubai, utterly devoid of things to do or sights to see, simply so I can do nothing but eat, sleep and read. Well, maybe drink, too. While there, I’ll be enjoying The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs, the first few pages of which read beautifully. I’ll also read the new Nick Hornby novel, because that is The Law, and I’ll be taking the new Mike Gayle, too, as I believe that is soon to become The Law.
Friends Like These is published by Ebury in July

Graham Robb
This summer, I’ll be taking a TGV to Besançon in Franche-Comté and cycling over the Jura mountains and the Alps, then coming down along the Mediterranean coast. Before, during and after, odd as it might sound, I’ll be reading maps – mostly the Michelin Local and IGN Top 25 series. Apart from their obvious purpose, they whet the appetite and, long after the trip is over, they remain impregnated with memories of every corner and climb.
The Discovery of France is published by Picador

Ann Patchett
I’m planning a trip down the Amazon but I’m having all sorts of trouble getting the thing booked. In the meantime I’m reading so many books about the place I practically feel like I’m there. I loved Redmond O’Hanlon’s book In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon, and, of course, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Wade Davis’s One River is excellent but it does fill one with the desire to try hallucinogens.
Run is published by Bloomsbury

Edward Docx
It seems a shame to miss England when it is at its best-looking, so, in recent years, I haven’t taken a summer holiday. Instead, I usually go to Rome in the autumn to avoid the creeping depression that can set in on the return of Parliament. This year I plan to read The Devils by Dostoyevsky, which I have never finished, and Nostromo, by Conrad, which I have never started. Plus, probably, The Gathering, by Anne Enright, seeing as that won the Man Booker.
Self Help is published by Picador

Steven Saylor
Vacation for me doesn’t mean Rome; Rome is my work! I go to my place in Austin, Texas, to swim, run, jet-ski, eat Tex-Mex and drink a few cervezas. But part of my head will be in ancient Rome: I’m curious to read Helen Dunmore’s Counting the Stars, a novel about the ribald poet Catullus. I’ll also be visiting Georgian England when I catch up with the latest Deryn Lake mystery in her rollicking John Rawlings series, Death in Hellfire.
The Triumph of Caesar is published by Constable & Robinson