Raven Leilani
Winner of the Dylan Thomas prize for Luster (Picador)
Read Long Division by Kiese Laymon and immediately you feel the revelry in the prose. It’s folkloric, modern, rendered with warmth and humour, and always coming back to the subject of love – what we do for it, who we become for it. Sometimes anything, sometimes anyone. It poses questions about the distorting power of expectation, when there is too much, when there is none – and questions about our participation in that distortion. And then, more love, the gorgeous speculative corners of this book a testament to how the fabric of space and time even bend to that need. The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon is a taut study of doubleness and marital ruin that kept me up all night. Solomon is precise and tender, even as she deals with lurid, human sins and the terror of critical mass – that it is inevitable, and that despite our need to travel backward, it cannot be undone.
Winner of the Women’s prize for fiction and the British Book awards fiction book of the year for Hamnet (Tinder Press)
I have just finished Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of the Black Conch. It is a daring, mesmerising novel that continually unseats expectation – I was deliciously unsure, throughout, what would happen next. With her fierce and shapeshifting mermaid, Roffey has created a modern myth about belonging and the bonds humans form with each other and with their land, single-handedly bringing magic realism up to date. A recent bout of insomnia has been rendered much less dull by rereading Katherine Heiny’s short story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow. Heiney is hilarious, as anyone who has read her will know, and she can skewer a character with one succinct observation. Her description of a children’s birthday party, featuring a middle-aged magician who possibly steals the hostess’s bra and demands a hug on departure, actually made me guffaw in the middle of the night (and I never guffaw). She is also a generous and big-hearted writer, not afraid to dive into the intriguing, yawning gap between what people say and what they think.
Sudhir Hazareesingh
Winner of the Wolfson History prize for Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (Allen Lane)
Travelling far without moving much has been one of the challenges we have all faced over the past year, and my two recommendations of books to get lost in allow us to view our familiar landscapes in a new light. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland is an absorbing, sober and witty reflection on the ways in which its imperial past has shaped so much of modern British life – its politics, education, culture and language, and, of course, its ethnic composition. Meticulously researched, it is an indispensable book for confronting colonial amnesia and shallow post-imperial jingoism, and the racism which typically lurks beneath. I was also captivated by Isabelle Dupuy’s superb debut novel, Living the Dream which takes us into the affluent but fragile worlds of Naomi and Solange, two immigrant women from Colombia and Haiti living in London in the Brexit era. It is an engaging tale, all at once funny, raw and moving, and as the ironic title reveals, brutally honest about the elusiveness of happiness.
Winner of the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction for The Mirror And The Light (Fourth Estate)
Unfortunate title, but a work of classic quality: I don’t know why I’m only just reading James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, which seems to me to be exactly what a historical novel should be. Written in 1969, it focuses on the Irish labour movement through the years of unrest that led to the employers’ lockout of 1913, and it creates a panoramic social portrait while tracking individual lives and fates – priests, foundry workers, pawnbrokers, street children, even the destitute animals of Dublin. Its necessary horrors are lit by sardonic humour, and it is simply and gracefully written. Jumping a class chasm, I’m two volumes into Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve tried before, but now I’m allured by Arrow Books’ crisp new editions. Ten books to go, and I’m beginning to hear the tune.
Douglas Stuart
Winner of the Booker prize and and the British Book awards book of the year and fiction debut of the year for Shuggie Bain (Pan Macmillan)
I like to feel a little heartache in the summer. There’s something about the cruelty of love that keeps me returning to Mary Renault’s classic The Persian Boy. This is an imagining of the later years of Alexander the Great, told from the perspective of his young, gelded lover, the servant Bagoas. We see the great warrior through his lover’s adoring gaze, a lover who has been castrated and treated appallingly by the world, but who can’t help but worship Alexander. It has the sweep of all of Renault’s epics, but it is the intimacy, the longing, that I find truly moving. Few can write about the natural world in the way that Nan Shepherd can. In a year when we have all been stuck, I found The Living Mountain absolutely transporting. The audiobook, narrated by Tilda Swinton, has a powerful, meditative quality. No matter where you are, close your eyes, and be immersed in the pure loch water, and feel the cool wind on your back as you gaze out over the Cairngorms mountains.
Irenosen Okojie
Winner of the Caine prize for African literature for her short story Grace Jones from her short story collection, Nudibranch (Dialogue)
Leone Ross’s marvellous new novel, This One Sky Day, is a wondrous, lush offering charting the adventures of two star-crossed lovers making their way back to each other over a single day. In the fictional archipelago of Popisho, a host of colourful characters’ daily rhythms make the island hum with strange mysteries. As ever from Ross, the prose is robustly sensual. She writes about women, bodies, food and odd spaces in weird ways that delight while skewering post-colonial society. It’s an outstanding achievement from a fierce, luminous voice. Ben Pester’s fantastic debut collection, Am I in the Right Place?, is so hypnotically subversive, so deliciously twisted, one wonders how it’s possible to be absorbed so easily into the narrative portals he creates with such subtle confidence. Here, seemingly banal, everyday situations transform; office life becomes frightening, an imaginary being is worshipped. These addictive tales demand multiple readings.
Lucy Ellmann
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial prize for fiction for Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar)
I recommend any or all of Jane Austen; you could get lost for weeks. Captain Wentworth is awful to Anne, but, for Persuasion to work, the reader has to forgive him. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes he seems an irredeemable jerk, what with the cold looks and dalliances, and all the dancing while Anne plays country tunes on the damn piano. In Emma, one cringes for Emma’s faux-pas, and the way she takes over Harriet’s life is reckless. She insults poor dull Miss Bates too, and has to say sorry. But Emma’s diplomacy on her father’s behalf makes up for all her other errors of judgment. Pride and Prejudice dispenses with blame, since everybody’s prideful and prejudiced. This is Austen at her liveliest and most tolerant. One worries a little for Charlotte Lucas – marrying Mr Collins is one hell of a fate. Let’s hope that after a few failed attempts at deflowerment, Charlotte would take charge (a country girl, after all) and suggest to Mr Collins that it’s not the navel he needs to address.
Carmen Maria Machado
Winner of the Rathbones Folio prize for In The Dream House (Serpent’s Tail)
I love getting completely lost when I’m reading, but it is a specific experience that only certain books give you. One such is The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. It reminded me, when I first read it, of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It has a very expansive, maximalist sensibility and the author seems completely in control as she conjures this big, sprawling world. It’s a tremendous novel, completely hypnotising. Another is Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. It is a historical novel set at the turn of the 20th century, very sweeping and Dickensian, peopled by a hugely interesting cast of characters: the sex worker who is trying to bring herself up in the world; her lover who is a perfume magnate; his wife who is very fragile. It is very rich and luscious and has a surprisingly fresh, feminist perspective for such a big, wide-ranging novel. Every time I read it I fall in love with it again – I turn to it to be comforted.
Okechukwu Nzelu
Betty Trask award winner 2020 for The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney (Dialogue Books)
My immersive reads are both set outside the UK, which probably tells you how much I need a holiday. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones, set in Barbados, is a dark tale in many ways, involving violence and trauma throughout. But if you’re looking for a beautifully written, empathetic read that you can’t put down, this is the book for you. It’s brilliant. Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden is set in an unnamed Italian city, and gifts us with the fruits of Italian culture: its lavish descriptions of food will nourish you almost as much as the real thing. But more than this, it is about love, and art (and love of art); about what these things give us, and what they cost us. It’s perfect for anyone who (like me) just wants to disappear into the Mediterranean, into a film, into a story.
Craig Brown
Winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time (Fourth Estate)
Now aged 89, the great American journalist Gay Talese has had a hard time of it in the last few years, having been chastised for springing to the defence of Kevin Spacey, for relying on a dodgy source for his last book, The Voyeur’s Motel, and for his inability to name any woman writer who had inspired him. But his work remains as zippy as ever, particularly Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his beautifully constructed, darkly jaunty tour of the sexual revolution in America in the 60s and 70s. I read it on holiday in Italy a couple of years ago and remained pop-eyed throughout. I had a similar feeling of elation one summer when I read Don Juan by Lord Byron for the first time. It’s wild, clever, funny, profound, reckless, joyful and bursting with life. What more could one ask of a poem?
Natasha Farrant
Winner of the Costa children’s book of the year award for Voyage of the Sparrowhawk (Faber)
I re-read two classics recently that are ideal for getting lost in. Both are wise, both are perfect, and both achieve that most tricky of accomplishments: a plot-changing waltz. The first is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. There is no one like Tolstoy for delving into the minutiae of our humanity, in all our pettiness and splendour. Anna Karenina made me laugh, cry and occasionally roar. It’s not a relaxing read, but it held me enthralled and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. My second recommendation is my go-to comfort read, Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret Countess, a Cinderella fairy tale about a Russian countess forced to take work as a servant in an English country house after the revolution. A refugee herself, Ibbotson never shies away from the nastier side of human nature, but this is a story in which good and kindness triumph.
Kate Clanchy
Winner of the 2020 Orwell prize for political writing for Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador)
It’s going to be a very British summer for most of us: damp evenings, museum visits, and arguments. I’m suggesting two coming-of-age stories to suck you into, if not a beach, then at least an alternative family. Yara Rodrigues Fowler is the Stubborn Archivist of her own growing up, carefully detailing and finding value in her babyhood, teenage friendships, and especially in her Brazilian heritage. Sally Bayley’s No Boys Play Here is the second part of a trilogy about growing up in a family without men, money or stability, but with many books. Both books are experimental – Bayley’s stories slide freely into Shakespeare; Fowler’s are sometimes in verse – but only with fun in mind and tongues firmly in cheeks. You might even get a little lost, but both books are so well written, visceral and intimate that you won’t mind going backwards in them. Re-reading can be even more absorbing than reading on a rainy afternoon.
Namwali Serpell
Winner of the Arthur C Clarke award for The Old Drift (Hogarth)
Octavia Butler’s Dawn is an engrossing, near-mesmeric long read. You gradually get sucked in by Butler’s lucid prose, just as Lilith, the novel’s heroine, gets sucked in by the Oankali, the xenomorph-like aliens – tentacular and elephantine – who have scooped her up from a post-apocalyptic earth, it turns out, to save humankind. The novel stands on its own, but if you like it you have two more instalments in her Xenogenesis trilogy, Lilith’s Brood, ahead of you: Adulthood Rites and Imago. While Fran Ross’s Oreo is filled with metafictional games – puzzles and diagrams and jokes – it is at heart a simple quest tale: a black, queer, biracial, Jewish woman’s surrealist take on the myth of Theseus and the minotaur. It’s also hilarious – and short: you’ll spend a happy day or two immersed and rollicking along with the titular heroine’s adventure and rolling with laughter at her wit.
Stacey Halls
Betty Trask award winner for The Familiars
I barely came up for air from Snowflake by Louise Nealon, which is an astonishingly accomplished debut. A coming-of-age story about 18-year-old Debbie who lives on a farm with her mother and uncle, it reminds me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, though Nealon’s pin-sharp observations on small-town Irish life will draw the inevitable Sally Rooney comparisons. This is a story full of wit and warmth, disarming in its directness, with a working-class protagonist you can get behind. Equally life-affirming is Conversations on Love, an anthology of musings on love, loss and longing based on the hugely popular email newsletter started four years ago by journalist Natasha Lunn. Philippa Perry, Candice Carty-Williams and Esther Perel are contributors, and Lunn’s own narrative about experiencing miscarriage and infertility is woven throughout. This isn’t a book about romance, more a focus on grown-up love and a manual for grief. I found it immensely moving and immediately passed it on.
Camilla Pang
Winner of the Royal Society science book prize for Explaining Humans (Viking)
Pandora Sykes’s How Do We Know We’re Doing it Right? is a collection of essays that perfectly articulate experiences you thought had no name. It’s a combination of culture, history and philosophy entwined with memoir that puts modern life and its confusions into context and shame back into its box. Resolute, humorous and coherent, Sykes’s prose makes us aware of how important asking questions and thinking independently are when we’re exposed to myths and conspiracies that are all too tempting to believe at times. The Martian by Andy Weir brings out the inner geek in me, because the way he writes is deliciously technical, yet accessible and humorous. Far superior to the recent film starring Matt Damon, the book takes you deep into the world of the Martian – you really feel as if you are there – and there aren’t many books on space and science fiction that feel this plausible, considering where the technology is now. The way the character of the astronaut, Mark Watney, is able to creatively troubleshoot, experiment, fail, succeed and celebrate while in survival mode helped me put the lockdown blues aside and into perspective.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Winner of the Jhalak prize for the book of the year by a writer of colour for The First Woman (Oneworld)
When I saw an old lady in the park not long ago drop her head onto the pages of this book and laugh helplessly, I went and bought it. It is Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. I made the mistake of taking it to bed thinking I’ll read a few chapters and fall asleep. It was like opening a pack of your favourite biscuits. I kept thinking, just one more chapter. I finished it at eight the following morning. Then I visited a friend in Leicester who gave me The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I started reading it on the train back to Manchester. When I got home I went straight to my bedroom, finished it, but failed to sleep for the rest of the night. The following day I bought all Toni Morrison’s books. With both these books, I was gripped by the stories, hooked on the humour and horror. They were at once strange and familiar.
Sarah Hall
Winner of the BBC National Short Story award for The Grotesques from her short story collection Sudden Traveller (Faber)
If you want to be transported elsewhere, try In The Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. It is a gorgeous, sensual, almost visual masterwork. Set in the early 20th-century around Toronto, it features the immigrants who were instrumental in, if not credited for, the city’s major development – loggers, bridge-builders, demolitionists. The protagonist, Patrick Lewis, feels like “the third person” in his romances and in his relationship with history. But Ondaatje reverses his anonymity, and that of the unidentified labourers who helped create the culture, myths and industries of the place. Transferring readers into the minds and experiences of other beings, both human and animal, takes true literary skill. Tania James accomplishes this empathic strangeness phenomenally well in The Tusk That Did the Damage. Set in south India, the novel lyrically interweaves the stories of a documentary filmmaker, a poacher, and an elephant known as “the Gravedigger”, and explores the moral grey areas between nature, conservation and consumerism.
Ingrid Persaud
Winner of the Costa first novel award and the 2021 Authors’ Club first novel award for Love After Love (Faber)
Books that appreciate that laughter and tears live in the same house will always be at the top of my reading stack. Georgia Pritchett’s glorious memoir, My Mess is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety, is exactly that. A multi-award-winning comedy and drama writer, Pritchett writes of navigating a life lived anxiously. She worries about everything – from the comfort levels of the monsters hiding under the bed to motherhood. It’s packed with warmth, tenderness, humour, deep honesty and is exactly the inspiration we need now. Bookended by letters to James Baldwin, Kei Miller’s collection of 14 essays, Things I Have Withheld, is a wonderfully challenging book that I will dip in and out of for years to come. Through brilliant storytelling it explores issues of gender, queerness, race and class. Miller’s insights and his grace are hard won. As always, this Jamaican rock-star poet’s writing is lyrical, original and engaging. I left it challenged but tanked up with a new vocabulary and an understanding of the extent to which so much is inscribed on the body.
Isabella Hammad
Winner of a Betty Trask award for The Parisian (Cape)
For maximum immersion, I recommend two older books, both rompy and dramatic, both striking and powerful. James Baldwin’s Another Country, about a group of friends in New York in the 1950s, is a turbulent soap opera-ish narrative infused with Baldwin’s political edge and wit. It’s also a vivid evocation of New York of the period. The other book is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, starring characters who seem to stand in for, among others, de Beauvoir herself, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. A group of French intellectuals from the mid-40s to the mid-50s fall in and out of love and friendship, and debate the commitments of the left at the start of the cold war. An absorbing novel of ideas exploring questions of political engagement and the dilemma of trying to hold onto ideals in an imperfect world.
Michael Robotham
Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award for Good Girl, Bad Girl (Sphere)
I’ve chosen something old and something new for this summer’s reading. The new is a stunning debut novel by Jacqueline Bublitz, Before You Knew My Name (what a great title). This has been labelled a crime novel, but it is so much more – weaving feminism, philosophy, romance, politics and domestic abuse into a story narrated by an unidentified murder victim. There are echoes of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in the telling, as the layers are pulled back on a short and troubled life. My second choice is a book that inspired me to become a writer. You might think a story about burning books is out of date in our digital age, but Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury has never been more prescient as ideas of censorship, intellectual purges and fake news dominate our public discourse. It is a reminder that any attempt to gag or purge free speech is a threat to democracy.
Claire Adam
Winner of the 2020 Authors’ Club best first novel award for Golden Child (Faber)
You may not think What is Life? Understand Biology in Five Steps sounds like a book to get lost in, but you’d be wrong. This succinct introduction to biology, including things like cells, DNA, genes and natural selection, offers three principles that we might use to define what life is, what it isn’t, and why life, as a phenomenon, is so remarkable – and it is gripping. The author, Paul Nurse, is a scientific heavyweight, with a Nobel prize among his many accolades. Read this slim volume in an afternoon, then talk about it all summer. If you’re sad about missing your summer adventures overseas then Around the World in 80 Trains, by Monisha Rajesh is one for you. Hoist your rucksack onto your shoulders and catch the 14.31 from St Pancras to Paris. Onwards up to Russia, across Siberia, and beyond. Cross paths with many fellow travellers; share food and conversation with some. Conk out, exhausted, in cockroach-ridden hostels in Bangkok. You’ll feel like you’re there.
David Diop
Winner of the Man Booker international prize for At Night All Blood Is Black (translated from French by Anna Moschovakis) (Pushkin)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead are two very immersive books. Both suck you into a race against the clock. From the very first pages of these labyrinthine novels, you find yourself attached to their protagonists, Daniel and Cora, to the extent that you are simultaneously desperate to discover what happens to them and anxious not to learn their fates too soon. Such feverish reads are at once delicious and cruel experiences. They make you want to obliterate the outside world, to the point that you can spare only a brief, bewildered glance for the tiresome person who tries to tear you away from your book for what can only seem to you like the most frivolous of reasons. “What’s that? The house is on fire? Not to worry, we can talk about it once I’ve finished this chapter…”
Winner of an Eric Gregory award for a collection by a poet under the age of 30 for Poor But Sexy
The book I always reach for when I want to drown myself in something otherworldly is The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. It’s an extraordinary collection of short stories about the evolution of the universe. The tales take inspiration from various scientific observations, such as the moon once being much closer to the Earth, but they are as much stories about love triangles as they are about the big bang. Another book you can spend hours in is Caleb Femi’s Forward-prize nominated Poor. It’s a collection about the lives of young black London boys and depicts scenes from being stabbed to witnessing gentrification to house parties that feel like church. The fact that they are poems doesn’t limit the expansive storytelling – the attention to architecture and character transports you to the south London estate Femi has painted with precision.
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Add your own suggestions for immersive summer reading in the comments below