John Banville
Novelist
I'm afraid I don't go in much for holidays. I once saw a postcard from Brian Friel, on holiday in France, who wrote: "Here for two weeks. One, with good behaviour." I know what he means. In these dog days, I'm reading Charles Townshend's The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, a marvellous and beautifully judged study of that strange war. Cheating a little – because it's not due for publication until October – I have a proof copy of Colm Tóibín's luminous new novel, Nora Webster, set in Enniscorthy and environs in the late 1960s, and bound to be an enormous success. As for a classic, I'm afraid I'm rereading – oh dear – Nietzsche's The Gay Science, in a fine translation by Josefine Nauckhoff. This I consider Nietzche's greatest work, though I wish translators would call it The Cheerful Science, which is a far better and far less ambiguous Englishing of Fröhliche Wissenschaft, with its sly echo of "frolics". For in these pages, frolics abound.
Ali Smith
Novelist
I'm home for my summer holidays this year (taking an autumn holiday) with the pile of new books I've been waiting to read for months, including Paul Bailey's The Prince's Boy, Sebastian Barry's The Temporary Gentleman, Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others and Jacqueline Rose's forthcoming Women in Dark Times. Four writers I love, four brand new works, a surfeit of elegance and intelligence. Could summer get any better? Yes – a friend has just sent me Chekhov's About Love and Other Stories, translated by Rosamund Bartlett. First line: "A sweltering, muggy midday. Not a cloud in the sky." (If you're looking for me, I'm in the garden.)
Naomi Wolf
Author of Vagina: A New Biography
I am in the Hudson River Valley surrounded by beautiful thunderstorms, and reading the original 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass for my doctoral thesis. Whitman hand-set the type and printed the volume himself, which I find quite moving. I also picked up a copy of David Perlmutter's Grain Brain, which makes the case that GMO-affected wheat, such as we are forced to eat in the US, is having terrible neurological effects on health.
William Dalrymple
Writer and historian
I'm looking forward to sitting by the pool outside Siena reading two classy new Indian novels – Akhil Sharma's Family Life and Deepti Kapoor's A Bad Character, both of which have received tremendous acclaim. For my big non-fiction read for the summer, I'll be taking on the second half of a huge, extraordinary tome on the deep past of the Mediterranean, The Making of the Middle Sea by Cyprian Broodbank. It's a wonderfully sweeping and oddly unputdownable history of the region and full of the oddest facts imaginable – for example, in Mesopotamia c1750BC, a large piece of rock crystal was worth 3,000 sheep and 60 male slaves. Broodbank is especially gripping on the Neanderthals, who ate peas, acorns, ostrich eggs and tortoises, built weapons but not boats, and lived "brief, hard lives of uncertain cognitive depth". The last stand of the Neanderthals was in Spain, where there is some evidence of inter-breeding and hybridity between us and our distant, defeated cousins. "It is a thought-provoking geographical coincidence, or no coincidence at all, that Iberia was the focus for the earliest hominins in Mediterranean Europe, and the place from where the last who were not us walked out forever into the night." Highly recommended.
Teju Cole
Novelist
I return every summer to George Seferis's Complete Poems, in the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Also on my desk at the moment are Peter Stamm's stories We're Flying and Rana Dasgupta's Capital: A Portrait of 21st-Century Delhi. I'm excited by the new-to-me poet Sarah Lindsay and have been dipping into her Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower. And I'm also reading two academic titles connected to my current project of writing about Lagos: Kristin Mann's Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900, and Brian Larkin's study of infrastructure in Nigeria, Signal and Noise.
Helen Dunmore
Novelist
On holiday in Italy a few weeks ago, I read Philipp Meyer's novel The Son for its gripping story of a young boy, Eli McCullough, abducted into a Comanche band in mid-19th-century Texas. I was also reading Emily Dickinson, who would have been Eli's contemporary. Their worlds are so different, but there's something Comanche in Dickinson's poetry. For many years, I found it daunting but now I love it. It's as fearsome and technically brilliant as the great chief Quanah Parker on horseback with his lance. I also took the Welsh poet Tony Curtis's brief, funny and illuminating My Life With Dylan Thomas: "Dylan was the mountain you had either to climb or bypass; tunnelling through him left you in the dark."
Robert Peston
BBC economics editor
I am not taking Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century with me, because it has been spoiled by all the blooming polemics I've read about it, and it's so enormous it will break the luggage allowance on the flight. Also I am currently bingeing on fiction, so will take Phil Klay's Redeployment and David Grossman's Falling Out of Time. Klay is a sort of Wilfred Owen of the last Iraq war. And Grossman is the poet of grief. Eliot's Middlemarch will come too, as it has on many holidays. This time it will be read.
Philip French
Former Observer film critic
No books to be carried to exotic places. This is staycation time: what the government in the austere 1940s persuaded us to call "holidays at home". In my case it's been 10 woozy, pill-popping days in hospital having a knee replacement (with Geoffrey Grigson's great, final anthology The Faber Book of Reflective Verse to carry me away from groaning 3am wards to tranquil places in the mind) followed by weeks with physios, crutches, Zimmer frames, sticks, rollators and oxygen.
My chief anticipated reading is The Unexpected Professor, the autobiography of my esteemed exact contemporary John Carey with a near identical CV: lower-middle-class grammar school boy, national service officer in Egypt, going up to Oxford on the same day in 1954. How differently did we play the hands we were dealt? My hitherto unread classic is Georges Simenon's enticing roman dur, The Mahé Circle, set on an island off the Côte d'Azur, published in 1944, hitherto untranslated into English. I've also dug out my 1911 Nelson's Library edition of Erskine Childers's classic espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands (bought in 1948 for a shilling) because it just matches my present condition. Its hero, perfectly named Carruthers, a self-important, upper-midle-class Foreign Office employee stuck in a hot, deserted Edwardian London summer, is suddenly dragged out of his torpor by an invitation to join a friend on a yacht in the Baltic and finds himself involved in a scheme to frustrate a German naval invasion of Great Britain across the North Sea. An enduring masterpiece with authentic nautical maps.
Eben Upton
Raspberry Pi inventor
We are going to China on business in August and will try to tack a few days on the end to see Hong Kong when I'll be reading To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris. I'm a notorious luddite in my day-to-day use of technology, so this book about a curmudgeonly New York dentist coming to grips with a Twitter stalker sounds right up my street.
The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross. Definite beach reading: the fifth book in the Laundry Files series of spoof spy novels, it's about a secret government department charged with fighting supernatural beasties. Yes Minister meets HP Lovecraft.
Finally, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Is consciousness a recent development? Did all our ancestors hear voices in their heads? This one has been lurking on my bookshelf for half a decade and I hope finally to crack it this summer.
Maggie Gee
Novelist
I need to go to Madrid and Gibraltar for my next novel, but it will be too hot in August, so we plan to leave mobiles at home and spool around undiscovered beaches of Thanet, on trains/buses, with books and winey picnics. Bliss! I will be reading: Lyndall Gordon's Divided Lives, a follow-up memoir to her wonderful Shared Lives; Gabriel Gbadamosi's highly praised Vauxhall; and for my classic, Thackeray's Barry Lyndon – why have I never read it, given that Vanity Fair is my all-time favourite novel?
Damian Barr
Author
I feel ashamed that I've never read Christopher and His Kind so Isherwood and I will be having some summer loving. David Nicholls's new novel, Us, is all about a family taking an epic holiday – as many emotions as air miles. I am also excited about Alex Preston's In Love and War. Pilgrimage to Dollywood: A Country Music Road Trip Through Tennessee by Helen Morale promises to be a double delight.
Marina Warner
Author
I'm chairing the Man Booker international prize 2015, so there are heaps of novels I'd love to recommend or waiting to be read, but I mustn't tell. Sticking to other genres, the artist Marion Coutts has written a fierce love letter-cum-elegy in The Iceberg for Tom Lubbock, the artist and art critic who died three years ago. This is far more than just another book about grief. Sandra M Gilbert has found a funny, lively literary topic in The Culinary Imagination, about every kind of meal in every kind of story. Giuliana Bruno's book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media is sumptuous, irresistible: it begins with Fortuny fluted silk and closes with Sally Potter's filmed colours and textures. The Poetry of Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell, displays magnificently the poet's lyric dynamism and invention, sustained over 50 years in an endless play of breeze, sea and sky. I've just become a grandmother so I'm fascinated by Andrea Brady's poem-essay Mutability, in which she's forging a new way of thinking about the mutual absorption of mother and infant – before the child finds language for herself. David Constantine has just turned 70 and his new collection, Elder, has a beguiling archaic goddess on the cover and many dreams and adventures inside. As for a classic, I'm looking forward to Albert Cossery's 1945 novel, Laziness in the Fertile Valley.
Mariella Frostrup
Observer columnist and radio/TV host
As presenter of Radio 4's Open Book, I'm never short of reading material but part of the pleasure of summer holidays is turning to the books I want to read. To improve my agony aunt skills this summer, when we'll be taking a staycation in Somerset and Dorset so we can finally finish our house, I'm devoting myself to self-improvement with a cluster of the many new books blessedly free of American psychobabble. What better way to start than by unblocking the paths to true inspiration with Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull. Next is Ruby Wax's Sane New World, offering help in everyday mindfulness and finally, what wouldn't be nice about Hardwiring Happiness? Rick Hanson promises to help me achieve that goal. The trick to achieving Gravitas, according to its author, Caroline Goyder, is to "fake yourself under pressure", which I'll also be learning more about. If I get through them all by autumn I'll be practically perfect and ready to start afresh on my Observer column readers!
Robert Macfarlane
Author and academic
I'll be in Trieste and Ljubljana in the late summer and plan to read Adam Nicolson's The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters; and to feed my deep-running genre-fiction habit with the new Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath. Like half a million other people, I'm much looking forward to David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. And I plan to return to VS Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987), as a means of seeing the English landscape from the outside.
Viv Albertine
Musician and writer
I'm going to Iceland this summer with my 15-year-old daughter. Sounds a bit odd, but I don't like the sun and nor does she. I keep checking the weather conditions in Reykjavik on my phone and when it says "rainy and cold" I think, Yay! The relief of not having to buy a bikini is massive.
I'll take four books. First is Any Other Mouth by Anneliese Mackintosh, which I picked up recently in a bookshop in Manchester. It was written by a girl who used to work in the shop and she sounded like my kind of person.
Then there's Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. I loved her Gone Girl. I'll take John Green's The Fault in Our Stars too. I'm very interested in contemporary young adult fiction, and this book is a huge hit with my daughter and her friends. Finally, I always take a self-help book away and Richard Bode's First You Have to Row a Little Boat is so elegantly written.
Rachel Cooke
Observer writer and author
I've been saving up two novels for my holiday (in the south of France): Akhil Sharma's Family Life and Mona Simpson's Casebook. They'll make a good pair: both take a child's view of the world; both are about families coming apart at the seams. I'll also be taking Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson; I'm especially looking forward to the chapter on Lubetkin's Finsbury health centre, which is close to where I live. A classic I've always meant to read is After Claude by Iris Owens, which was first published in 1973 and is the story of a break-up. Kenneth Tynan called it "barbed, bitchy and hilariously sour", which is good enough for me.
Rachel Joyce
Novelist
This summer, I'm going to return with my family to Embleton Bay in Northumberland. We discovered it when I was researching my new book. It's a vast arc of a white-sanded bay with views towards Dunstanburgh Castle and I can't wait to walk alongside the rock pools at 6am and pretend for a moment that it's mine. I will take Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel. A friend gave me a copy of Middlemarch, which I haven't read since I was a teenager.
Lara Feigel
Writer and lecturer
I've begun my summer reading with Hermione Eyre's novel Viper Wine, a stylishly exuberant true story of the 17th-century beauty Venetia Stanley succumbing to potions to stave off the loss of youth. It's an oddly haunting book, unlike any other historical novel I've come across. For my summer holiday (in Cornwall, with a bucket and spade), I'll be packing Ruth Padel's new poetry collection, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth and Rebecca West's A Train of Powder. Both West and Padel lead us to see political conflicts freshly by observing them through a wonderfully precise and very intimate lens.
Kate Kellaway
Observer writer
At the front of the summer queue is Akhil Sharma's Family Life – said to have been prodigiously long in its earliest drafts but now a short, semi-autobiographical novel about a Dehli family in New York and the tragedy that overtakes young Ajay's life. Also The Shock of the Fall, a first novel about a schizophrenic by psychiatric nurse Nathan Flier (a Costa prize winner). And then, to offset what might otherwise be a desolation overdose, Angela Carter's Wise Children, about south London thespians. I'm cheating here, actually, because I've already started it and her high-kicking prose is sublime.
Geoff Dyer
Author
No plans to go anywhere but I am looking forward to Jenny Offill's slender and smart new novel Dept of Speculation and moving on to volume three – Boyhood Island – of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle sextet. I'll also be finishing Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, her magnificent history of the great migration of African Americans from the segregated south to the democratic promise – and challenges – of the urban north.
Christos Tsiolkas
Novelist
I am spending summer in Europe this year, in Greece and in France. I am working with a terrific photographer, Zoe Ali, on a collaboration called A Boy, a Girl and a Gun. Apart from that, I am also reading and researching for a new book. What will I be reading? Plato, Petronius's Satyricon, David Malouf's Ransom and the letters of St Paul. I am eager to begin Olivier Assayas, a collection of essays on the film-maker, edited by Kent Jones. And I am very much enjoying reading Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, a deliriously passionate and proto-queer ode to antiquity, written by Hans Licht, first published in Germany, in the 1920s.
Louise Doughty
Novelist
We have booked an apartment on a beach in Corsica; water sports for the boy, sun lounger for me. I've been reading a lot of non-fiction as research recently so it's going to be novels all the way. Harriet Lane's Her, along with Jean Hanff Korelitz's You Should Have Known and, according to my resolution to read more fiction in translation, Summer House With Swimming Pool by Herman Koch. I would also like to catch up with the Caribbean writer Kerry Young, having recently seen her read from Gloria, the sequel to Pao. As for a classic, I've never read In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu.
Jess Walter
Novelist
This summer, at Pajaro Dunes in northern California, I'm planning to read We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride, because my wife says it's gorgeous and devastating. McBride is from my hometown, Spokane, Washington, which spits out writers like sunflower seeds. I'm also planning to read Tom Rachman's The Rise & Fall of Great Powers. His first novel, The Imperfectionists, was so good.
John Gray
Philosopher
The classic I'm taking on holiday to New York is one that's been almost forgotten – Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. First published in 1929, it's a surreal novel of childhood adventure that turns how we see the human mind upside down. From recent fiction, I'm taking another book that questions what it means to be human: Michel Faber's Under the Skin, the brilliant and unsettling novel that inspired Jonathan Glazer's astonishing film. My non-fiction choice is Adam Phillips's Becoming Freud, for its wonderful epilogue on Freud's original sin, and much else.
Alex Preston
Novelist
Three weeks in Puglia will allow me to give full rein to my Italo Calvino obsession. Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics are the collections coming with me, but I'd read his shopping lists I love him so much.
I'm also putting together a reading list for the MA in creative writing I teach in Paris. So, sticking on the Oulipo vibe, I'll be reading Perec's Things and rereading his astonishing Life: A User's Manual, one of my favourite novels.
My wife is taking two of the hottest debuts of the year – Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know and Hermione Eyre's Viper Wine. When I run out of reading material, I'll steal them from her as they both blew my socks off.
Elizabeth Day
Observer writer and novelist
I'm looking forward to a week in southern Spain in the company of Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. It has a fascinating fictional premise: a missing child who comes back and a changed family who have to get used to the idea. I've dipped into it already and the writing is clear and beautiful. Besides, a novel that comes with effusive quotes from John Irving and Alice Sebold has to be pretty good.
I'll also be packing The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Despite a long-standing interest in novels written just after the first world war, to my shame I've never read it.
Sara Wheeler
Travel writer and biographer
I'm looking forward to Vanora Bennett's new novel The White Russian, as it sounds so exotic, set among the Russian emigré community in 1930s Paris. There is also a plump classic in my suitcase – Pushkin's Complete Prose Tales, in Gillon Aitken's translation. Is he going to be as good as Chekhov? As I am going to be somewhere off the coast of Maine, I am taking Ann Hood's latest novel, The Obituary Writer. Some years ago, I much enjoyed her debut – Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine.
Julie Myerson
Novelist
I'm going to be in Suffolk and I can't wait to read Thunderstruck, Elizabeth McCracken's new short stories – I've just finished her brilliant memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and want more of her direct, funny and heart-stoppingly honest take on things. Having failed to get into Herman Koch's The Dinner, I'm going to give him one more chance with Summer House With Swimming Pool – partly because I like the title and partly because one of my favourite authors, David Vann, is recommending it. Also on Vann's recommendation, I'm determined finally to read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Both had better be good or I'm never listening to him again.
Julian Fellowes
Screenwriter and novelist
We're off to a villa on the Amalfi Coast this year and my plan is to lie flat with a book and a glass of something cheerful balanced on my stomach. I shall take Josephine, the new biography of Napoleon's empress by Kate Williams. I love the whole concept of accidental greatness and here we have an uneducated girl from Martinique who found herself at the centre of European affairs.
My classic would be Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by HG Wells. Wells is not much credited with a sense of humour, but Kipps is full of warmth. It is also a wonderfully perceptive analysis of British society at the time, which seems remarkably un-different from our own. Finally, I have recently discovered They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy. It is an account of the last years of the Habsburg empire, a gently lyrical, romantic tribute to the strengths and weaknesses of that intense time, when the sun inexorably set on the old aristocratic values for ever.
Stephanie Merritt
Observer writer and novelist
I'm walking from coast to coast (a 200-mile route from Cumbria to Yorkshire) so I'm taking Rebecca Solnit's thoughtful and fascinating Wanderlust: A History of Walking to inspire me. I'm also taking Tana French's new novel, The Secret Place – she's a seriously talented writer and I love her Dublin Murder Squad series. I've been eagerly awaiting this one for ages.
Justin Cartwright
Novelist
For the beach at Hydra, where I am heading, I am looking forward very much to reading A Place in the Country by WG Sebald. I revere him and his unique style. Also on my list would be The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders (right). If you haven't discovered Saunders, get on to him immediately: he is a genius. The last book of his I read was his short story collection Tenth of December; he deservedly won the Folio prize a few months ago.
Recently, I read The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian who is warden of St Antony's College, Oxford. Reading it has made me eager to find a week or so to read her magisterial book, The War That Ended Peace, apparently the definitive account of the Great War. I also want to read The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which somehow I have missed.
Salley Vickers
Novelist
I shall be taking John Burnside's latest poetry collection All One Breath, Nicola Barker's novel In the Approaches and Beowulf on my regular summer retreat to my old colleague Anthony Steven's beautiful old farmhouse in Corfu. Burnside is our most exciting living poet and I love his shrewd and delicate psychological observation, and Nicola Barker is a writer I admire because I could never write like her, yet we share a similarly subversive view of life. Her latest novel boldly takes a religious theme, a subject for which I am also known, but I bet she does it differently and with style. Finally, Beowulf, which I lazily ducked as an undergraduate; an omission I have been meaning to repair for some time.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Screenwriter and novelist
I'll be spending Summer in Sligo and lovely Dumfries and Galloway. The book I'll be reading aloud to anyone who comes to visit is Jon Klassen's utterly brilliant This is Not My Hat – a submarine tale of hubris and death (spoiler alert). All great picture books – Where the Wild Things Are, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The Gruffalo – have their moments of darkness. But nothing as dark as the ending of this masterpiece. It has the world's funniest ever drawing of a crab pointing. I'm also taking Clive James's translation of The Divine Comedy. It's got an urgent clarity that makes you want to give it your full attention.
Robert McCrum
Observer writer
My summer classic is a short book I hope will distract from airport hassles. I recently saw Brian Friel's adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in a wonderful Donmar production. But I've never read the novel and will take the Penguin edition with me on my travels to Turkey.
By contrast, as an injection of contemporary financial savvy, I'll also take Flashboys by Michael Lewis. No one writes better about the cutting edge of American life. Finally, to unwind, watching the sun sink over the sea, I'll travel with Homecoming by Susie Steiner, a name to watch.
Joe Dunthorne
Novelist
I take extra pleasure in books that are not yet available to the public so I intend to read the uncorrected proof of Ben Lerner's second novel, 10:04. I'm also going to read PG Wodehouse's Jeeves Takes Charge. Line for line, no other author brings me as much happiness.
Charlie Higson
Author and comedian
I do question the sanity of flying halfway round the world to sit in the shade reading a book, but I suppose these days time is the ultimate luxury. I don't want to be challenged on holiday. I want the familiar. We always go to our house in Italy and I always read at least one Bernard Cornwell. I'm working my way through his Sharpe novels and am up to Sharpe's Revenge. Sunshine, beautiful women, bloody battles. Bliss.
I recently discovered Robert Aickman's short stories, which are somewhere between Kafka and MR James via David Lynch, and am very pleased that Faber and Faber is republishing all his books. I'm taking Dark Entries. It's advisable to take a thick book that you can get lost in and a few people have recommended The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, so I'm going to give it a go. If it doesn't work out, I'll use it as a float.
Josie Rourke
Theatre director
For me, holidays are all about lying around reading. I shall be lounging in La Rochelle on a bed of paperbacks and French cheese. I am looking forward to Rachel Holmes's excellent Eleanor Marx: A Life. I loved her The Hottentot Venus and she is a biographer with a sense of adventure that carries the reader along. My next directing project is a film noir musical, City of Angels, so there will be some work brushing up my Raymond Chandlers and Dashiell Hammetts. Kamila Shamsie's new novel, A God in Every Stone, is my special treat.
Julian Baggini
Writer and philosopher
The fact that I can't tell you exactly what Philology means – and I bet not many others can either – makes James Turner's book of the same name an intriguing prospect. I'm keen to find out more about the one-time "queen of the human sciences" and how she was deposed. Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan is about a woman who is convinced she is telepathic and converses with Lacan. Ideal for avoiding the beach. And maybe this will be the summer when I very belatedly get through George Orwell's Essays.
Scroobius Pip
Spoken-word artist
Sadly, I don't get holidays – I am always touring. This summer I will be going to Glastonbury, Bestival, Latitude and Godiva, and I will be taking Tape by Steven Camden. His spoken-word pieces have been a massive inspiration so I can't wait to see how his style translates to paper. Jodi Ann Bickley is another whose spoken-word stories have inspired and One Million Lovely Letters, a true-life tale, is worthy of the coverage it has received. Finally, Kerouac's On the Road. It's a book I have had since I was a teen and drifted in and out of. Time to read it properly.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
I'm really looking forward to reading the debut novel The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma, which is about several generations of Chinese-American women; I've loved Ma's short stories. I'm also intrigued by Lily King's novel Euphoria, which is about a Margaret Mead-like anthropologist in 1930s New Guinea. Finally, and rather shamefully, I've never read Middlemarch, so I want to tackle that and follow it up with Rebecca Mead's literary memoir, The Road to Middlemarch. I heard Mead speak recently and she was wise and delightful. I'm headed to the mountains of Colorado but only briefly, alas – not for a remotely Middlemarch-ish stretch.
To buy any of these titles for a special price, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk/observer-summer-reading
• This article was amended on 14 July 2014 to correct the spelling of Robert Aickman's name.
