Best books for a summer beach holiday

10 April 2012

It's clear which books are actually selling well this summer and they're not the ones most review pages bother with. Top of the list at the moment is the offcut from Stephenie Meyer's vampire saga, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which has sold over 300,000 copies since publication three weeks ago.

But still doing best business overall is the late Stieg Larsson. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has sold more than 930,000 copies, The Girl Who Played With Fire 740,000, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest 450,000.

These are the books that will be scattered round the beaches this summer — to be joined, no doubt, by Dan Brown, as soon as The Lost Symbol comes out in paperback (July 22, Corgi, £7.99), though the book is an absolute dud, even by his own lamentable standards.

Vying to join them and cash in on the vampire craze is Justin Cronin, a professor of English in Texas who has previously won prizes for his literary novels but has now attempted a pulpy bestseller. The Passage (Orion, £20) is a vast (766-page) apocalyptic saga in which military researchers inadvertently unleash deadly vampires onto the world in an exciting first section, then, for hundreds of much less eventful pages, the few survivors of the disaster, a century later, try to fend them off, using crossbows mostly. Only a mystical, ageless little girl, Amy, a bit vampy herself, offers a chance of salvation.

Cronin is aiming to appeal to Stephen King readers and has a fair chance of doing so, for King's own new novel, Under The Dome (Hodder, £7.99), is not his most compelling. But Cronin will never be a match for mid-season King, still the best bet for an emergency buy from that ropey beachside stall.

Books, unlike fish, don't go off. The freshest ain't necessarily the best. Sometimes the right thing to do on holiday is to forget the present and plunge into the past. Here, though, are this year's top picks for holiday reading — a short list, not shunning the obvious, obviously.

FICTION

Solar
by Ian McEwan (Cape, £18.99)

A greedy scientist steals a junior colleague's idea for an alternative energy source and comes to grief. Episodic and, as ever with McEwan, a bit over-constructed at times — watch out for polar bears and head injuries — but still a highly enjoyable read that others will be waiting to grab off you.

Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, £8.99)

This Man Booker winner, about the early career of Thomas Cromwell, completely reinvents the historical novel and is gripping all the way, despite its length. No other recent historical novel can hold a candle to it — certainly not the book the Orange Prize judges chose over it, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, a studious effort about a chap meeting Trotsky, Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Summertime
by JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker, £17.99)

Although published in hardback last August, Summertime isn't going to be out in paperback until September, annoyingly. This doesn't alter the fact that this is the real thing, from a master — a wonderfully distanced and ironised account of Coetzee's early years as a writer. One of his most enjoyable books, as well as one that anybody interested in what can still be done with the novel must read.

Alone in Berlin
by Hans Fallada (Penguin, £9.99)

Fallada, a successful novelist in the Thirties, survived the war in Germany and in 1946 began this great novel. Based on the case of a middle-aged couple who, after the wife's brother had been killed in the invasion of France, secretly distributed anti-Nazi notes around Berlin, a futile form of resistance that resulted in their execution. It's as direct and tense as any thriller, and gives by far the best picture of how wretched life was for many Germans in these years. Fallada died in 1947, shortly after completing the book. He has been brilliantly translated anew by the poet Michael Hofmann.

The Slap
by Christos Tsiolkas (Tuskar Rock Press, £12.99)

At a Melbourne family barbie, a man loses his temper and slaps a three-year-old boy who won't admit he's out, lbw, in a cricket game. The boy is not his son. Tsiolkas follows the reverberations of the incident through the extended family, discovering what family still means, in an intense, realistic narrative. A little reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but wholly grounded in its own locale. Utterly absorbing.

One Day
by David Nicholls (Hodder, £7.99)

On July 15, 1988, two graduating students, posh Dexter and earnest Emma, have a one-night stand, or so it seems. One Day traces what they continue to mean to each other, on that same day, for the next 16 years, sometimes more, sometimes less, until they find fulfilment, for a while. It's great chicklit, written by a man, a classic tear-jerker in the end.

Tony & Susan
by Austin M Wright (Atlantic, £14.99)

First published in 1993, this is a great revival. It's a dual narrative in which, over three evenings, a woman reads a brutal thriller written by her former husband, as do we, and describes how it shakes her sense of what their marriage was. Not just gripping, it's truly unsettling.

In Office Hours
by Lucy Kellaway (Fig Tree, £12.99)

A pair of office affairs, unblushingly recounted. Some of the exploits seem barely credible.

THRILLERS

Caught
by Harlan Coben (Orion, £18.99)

Nobody does multiple twists better than Harlan Coben, as the stylish French film of Tell No One memorably demonstrated. Caught, which combines the stories of a missing girl, a female investigative reporter, and a man accused of paedophilia and murder, is a cracker, one of his best. You won't want the flight to end.

Hollywood Moon
by Joseph Wambaugh (Quercus, £18.99)

You don't read Wambaugh for the plot but for the wacko characters, infectious language and hilarious setpieces. It's off the wall, yet, thanks to Wambaugh's own LAPD background, oddly persuasive. Here are Flotsam and Jetsam, Hollywood Nate and the Oracle once again — one of the great ongoing crime series.

61 Hours
by Lee Child (Bantam, £18.99)

Again, Lee Child is pretty consistent, so if you haven't yet encountered that great brute Jack Reacher, you might as well start earlier in the sequence, with a paperback. But 61 Hours, set in a frozen South Dakota, is a stormer. There's a sequel in September.

NON-FICTION

How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
by Sarah Bakewell (Chatto, £16.99)

A lovely book, quite captivating, by far the best introduction to this endlessly companionable, inspiriting writer. Bakewell, plus a copy of Montaigne's Essays, preferably in the Donald Frame translation published by Everyman, makes the perfect package.

Moral Combat:
A History of World War II

by Michael Burleigh (HarperPress, £30)
A masterful revisionary history of the entire war, examining the moral sentiments of countries and their leaders as they came into conflict. The best study of the period for years.

Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History
by Rachel Polonksy (Faber, £20)

An astonishingly original, catching book about Russia, now and in the past, traced through its writers and their tormentors. Wholly personal, yet profoundly scholarly.

Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester (Allen Lane, £20)

So engagingly written, the best head-shaking primer about the mess we're in.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane, £25)

The great chronicler of Wall Street tells the story of the men who bet correctly on the meltdown and made fortunes from everyone else's disaster.

Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin, £10.99)

Based on countless interviews, this is what happened to those at the top of the banks and in government in the Panic of 2008 from sweatily close up.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
by Edmund de Waal (Chatto, £16.99)

A beautifully written memoir of a historical quest in which, prompted by the inheritance of a collection of netsuke, de Waal traces his forebears, the Ephrussi family, from Odessa to Paris, Vienna and Japan. Perfect pitch throughout.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
by Richard Wrangham (Profile, £8.99)

A completely new theory about how we got where we are. Vindicates cuisine as never before — and will put you off raw food diets for ever.

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
by Graham Robb (Picador, £18.99) and The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador, £9.99)

If you haven't read it yet, start with the paperback — an astonishing compendium of forgotten facts about deep France of old. If you have, you'll know how much pleasure to expect from Parisians.

Nothing to Envy
Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. (Granta, £14.99)

Improbable as it may seem as a holiday read, this report on the lives of six of the citizens of totalitarian penal colony is unputdownable and deeply affecting, a worthy winner this week of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in