Summer books

So many books, so little time, so what should you pack for your holiday reading? Below, Alex Clark sets out the basic rules, and The Observer's panel of critics, booksellers and novelists marks your card by choosing the perfect books to take with you

Whatever I feel like I wanna read. Gosh.' So might Napoleon Dynamite, current hero of slacker teenagers and hipsters worldwide, respond to the question: 'What are you going to read on holiday?' And, in his unformed, gauche and thoroughly contrary way, he'd be quite right. Holiday reading, despite the self-imposed edict to impress your companions, achieve a Zen-like state of total relaxation and catch up on forgotten masterpieces, all at the same time, is an entirely personal affair. And so it should be. Despite the pronouncements of newspapers and magazines as soon as it stops raining and this year's air traffic control strikes get under way, there is no pressure on you to read anything whatsoever if you'd rather not. Fine. Be bored and miserable and a social outcast if it makes you feel good.

For the rest of us, holidays offer an opportunity to extend reading time beyond that snatched half-hour on the train or the slack-jawed period before lights out, in which a kind of literary Groundhog Day dictates that you read the same page an apparent infinity of times without being any the wiser as to what's going on. Suddenly, there's a bit of time, a modicum of quiet and the prospect of an unfolding mental space in which to aim for something more satisfying than remembering to pay the congestion charge and getting through a day without being sacked.

The ensuing challenge is one that all book-lovers should light on with something approaching glee. You know you want something good, something engrossing, something that will hold your attention. You might know, broadly, the kind of things you like, but you're also beset by other imperatives. Should you seize the opportunity to immerse yourself in something out of your normal range? Should you satisfy the modern tourist's conscience by informing yourself about the place you're visiting? Should you work on those areas of your intellect that lie fallow during the rest of the year - renew your acquaintance with contemporary poetry, for example, or bone up on the development of porcelain in the Tang dynasty?

Hmm. Laudable aims, admittedly, but perhaps not the best way to enjoy your well-earned break. But neither is it entirely satisfying to sweep up the novel that's been gathering dust on your bedside table for the last six months together with a couple of paperbacks by an old favourite and throw them into your case with the dimly disappointing knowledge that at least you won't hate them. As in the selection of holiday destination, a touch of ambition pays dividends.

Unless you really are hampered by considerations of space , don't stint on the number of titles. Sling out a slingback in favour of another novel; you can always buy more footwear, whereas the final part of a trilogy might prove harder to locate. Avoid the temptation to go to the other extreme and take all 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time; entertaining and palatable though they are, they're best spread out over a longer period of, say, two or three decades.

Take a punt on a book whose subject matter doesn't immediately grab you, whose author is unknown to you, whose cover looks ill-designed and irritating. Next year, it'll probably be the one you're pressing into others' hands with evangelical zeal. But bear in mind, if you are one of those curious people who regard it a moral failing not to finish a book they have started, that there is an amnesty. If you're not enjoying it, chuck it out and start another one. You're allowed. In similarly amoral vein, think nothing about being one of those appalling types who covets someone else's book and then nicks it, claiming simply to be having a look. The key to this manoeuvre is to leapfrog their bookmark with alacrity, thus gaining territorial advantage.

Naturally, holidays do not always go to plan; in fact, they can be among the most shabby and alienating of all human experiences, as numerous comic novelists have found to their advantage. One of my favourites of recent years, Gerard Woodward's August, takes as its starting point the yearly camping trips enjoyed - or endured - by the ramshackle Jones family. Tuck it in to your suitcase, along with its Booker-shortlisted sequel, I'll Go to Bed at Noon, and wallow in the solace afforded by the knowledge that, however gruesome your family is, they probably stop short of brewing wine out of Brussels sprouts or flogging the bathpipes for beer money.

Always, always include the book that you've read 50 times since childhood, key scenes of which you can re-enact to keep yourself company if strained silence descends. In my case, a quick bout of Nancy Mitford can soothe the most frayed nerves and the severest ennui. In a similar vein, never shy from using a book as a means to other ends. Taking Don Quixote on an adolescent train trip around Europe once might have made for some terrible longueurs, but came up trumps when I was trying to look mysterious and brainy in front of boys.

It's also worth bearing in mind that you might have to fend off numerous encroachments on the solitude necessary for a really good read. Accompanying some sprogged-up friends on holiday once, I was instructed to 'look like a nanny' to facilitate the ritual queue-jumping blithely adopted by families at the departure gate. Soon after we had touched down at the other end, it became clear that lying by the pool was not part of my co-travellers' plan for my summer break. I had, that year, taken 11 carefully chosen books with me; the only things I read, as things turned out, were The Gruffalo and the rules to Junior Scrabble.

I was a lot more biddable then. These days, I reckon there would be more fun to be had from nodding sagely over the pages of the latest toddler-taming blockbuster, breaking off only to fix a stray infant with a steely gaze, tut knowingly and jot a couple of notes in the margin. Or maybe you could just leave a copy of The Story of O on a sun-lounger and see how long it takes them to kick you out.

What we'll be reading - authors, writers and book sellers make their suggestions

Philippa Morris
The Little Apple Bookshop, York
My summer reading is a bit like my appetite: in winter, I want something hearty and comforting; in summer, I like something light and interesting. That's why I suggest any in the series of Picador Shots, each £1. These neat little books are ideal to slip into the bag along with a picnic. Each short story plunges you into a new and intriguing world. I wanted to know what 'Peter Pelham, dependable London solicitor' did after finding a bag of cocaine in the park and why Cheryl the LA newscaster was so messed up. Ideal tasters of quality authors like Jackie Kay, Matthew Kneale or Bret Easton Ellis. Looking back to summers past when I had much more time to read, I fondly remember Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.

Victoria Hageman
Harbour Books, Whitstable
This summer, I highly recommend reading any number of books from the fantastic collection of classics published by Hesperus Press. These include lesser-known works or new translations of the great authors and at around a slim 100 pages each, they make perfect holiday reading. One I particularly enjoyed was In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield, in which the young English heroine is privy to the private lives of her fellow guests. Their stories are told in such a modern voice that it is hard to believe this was written nearly 100 years ago.

Anys Scoular
The Idle Hour, Leeds
Goldilocks as a roving reporter, the Gingerbread Man as a sadistic psychopath, and the Three Bears living in seclusion in Andersen's Wood, Reading. It could only be the new Jasper Fforde novel. The Fourth Bear is a great choice as it has everything - humour, intrigue and cucumbers as a matter of national security. This isn't your regular summer salad of a book and will have you wondering how you haven't discovered Fforde before.

Carole Cadwalladr
Novelist and Observer writer
I'm rather embarrassed at being asked to contribute a summer reading list, having for years slagged them off as vehicles by which writers try to make themselves look like intellectual heavyweights, and yet here I am now picking Joan Didion on the grounds that she has a certain substance. The good news, however, is that she's also always a fine read and The Year of Magical Thinking is a short, but melancholy, account of the year in which she loses her husband and her only daughter becomes critically ill. And while the spareness of her prose is as stark and lovely as ever, there's an unresolved tension in these pages: between words and emotions, and the inadequacy of the first in the face of the second. What I have actually bought to take on holiday, 'tis as follows: Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, just out in paperback and if it's even a patch on The Hours, I know that I'll enjoy it; Peter Carey's latest Theft: A Love Story as I have to read whatever he's written; Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black; and the odd-looking Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. It explores the link between autism and animal behaviour and I do like a bit of neuroscience in the sun.

Tim Adams
Observer writer
Philip Roth's Everyman is a short, sharp shock of a novel. America's most candid storyteller lays bare the life and death of a former advertising executive with unflinching care. Roth has spent a career testing the forces of desire and mortality and he distils that wisdom into these 180 brief pages of lust and bodily decay: perfect beach reading. There is a very different lifetime of attention in The Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by Caroline Moorehead. As well as being one of the greatest of all war reporters, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, Gellhorn was a compulsive letter-writer and a wonderful gossip. Every sentence of her correspondence bears witness to a courageous, glamorous life in the front line of the 20th century. Gellhorn's letters are ideal for dipping in and out of, a quality they share with my perennial favourite holiday book, Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar, which makes me look at things - geckos, topless bathers, flocks of starlings, the sky at night - in ways I've forgotten since the previous summer.

Andrew Cant and Sue Steel
Simply Books, Stockport
May Contain Nuts by John O'Farrell is a book that could have been set on our doorstep ... pushy parents, entrance exam crammers, children's food allergies and 4x4s parked at will on double yellow lines. A funny and perceptive satire on middle-class parenting and its hilarious pretensions.

Tim O'Kelly
One Tree Books, Petersfield
'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.' This epigraph teasingly encapsulates both the story and the tone of Old Filth by Jane Gardam, a moving and complex novel. Long ago, Sir Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong), was a Raj orphan sent 'home' from the East at the age of four to be fostered and educated in England. Now in uncomfortable retirement in the Home Counties, he reflects on a mixed life of opportunities and stunted emotions. Full of humour, darkness and joie de vivre, this is, for me, Gardam's finest in more than 30 years of writing. Barbara Kingsolver's appropriately titled Prodigal Summer is a terrific read set a world away in the Appalachians.

Lynn Johnston
Bailey Hill Book Shop, Castle Cary
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates follows the lives of Frank and April Wheeler and is set in suburbia in Fifties America. It is the story of an unremarkable couple and their everyday aspirations, but is beautifully observed and is a great study of a marriage. The attention to detail and wonderful atmospheric use of words and the building tensions in their marriage has you gripped. I love this book as it has so many emotions and situations that we all recognise - both good and bad.

Rachel Cooke
Observer writer
The first new novel that I read this year is still the best so far: Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn, a beautifully written account of what it means to be a father when your own childhood was irredeemably awful. It's powerful and gripping and he writes children brilliantly. So, too, does David Mitchell, whose Black Swan Green, about a stammering, bullied boy whose parents' marriage has hit the skids, is hugely touching and enjoyable - and a lot less earnest than I've made it sound. Set against a backdrop of the Falklands conflict, it's also a delightful evocation of the Eighties - so if you ever owned a Rubik's cube or pogoed to the Specials at the school disco, it's for you. My best ever beach read? That'd be a toss-up between The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett (plain girl bags an aristo) or almost anything by Georgette Heyer. Who could resist a book called Regency Buck

Hepzibah Anderson
Observer writer
Summer reading recommendations tend to be either brainy or brawny, but Peter Carey's tragicomic caper Theft is both. A rude tale of high art and low cunning, it revels in the down-and-dirty business of creativity, reeling in love, forgery and murder. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel are as gripping as any novel. Newly published in the US and available here at the click of a mouse, they're tart, shimmering fables of passion.

Anna Dreda
Wenlock Books, Much Wenlock
On Beauty by Zadie Smith features profound observations of married life; an irreverent (and honest) poke at academia and an exploration of race and class within a mixed-race, middle-class American family. Smith has really found her form with this one.

Beryl Hewson
The Bookworm, Morpeth
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka is the Midlands-set story of two sisters, each with a totally different outlook on life, joining forces in an attempt to stop their Ukrainian-born father from marrying a voluptuous Russian immigrant half his age. She has other ideas and is determined to improve her life by living in the West. Unfortunately, her presence unearths family secrets the sisters would rather forget. This is a real joy.

Helen Webb
The Watermill, Aberfeldy
The hilarious and thrilling All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre is guaranteed to keep you glued to the sun lounger. Jane Fleming, 46, is the model grandmother, but feels that life has somehow passed her by. Then her life is turned upside down by a kidnap attempt on a member of her family and suddenly her hidden skills lead her into the most incredible adventures. A great rollicking tale that's not for the faint-hearted.

Charles Saumarez Smith
Director of the National Gallery and Observer critic
I think of the summer holiday as an opportunity to catch up on all those books I have ordered from Amazon, but have not yet read. They include Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and James Fenton's School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts

Andrew Anthony
Observer writer
There's nothing quite like sitting on a beach to make one think of the inevitable decline of human flesh. Nothing, that is, apart from a Philip Roth novel, and no Roth novel was ever more devoted to the subject of physical demise than his latest, Everyman. Read it and weep for yourself. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brilliant and courageous woman on whom Europe's liberals have collectively turned their backs. Her memoir, The Caged Virgin, is a moving testament to the power of reason and should be read by everyone who values freedom of expression higher than religious censorship, and especially by all those who don't. Favourite summer read of all time is The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. It has the same effect of which Jonathan Richman sang: 'That summer feeling's going to haunt you.'

Kate Kellaway
Observer writer
Two novelists who take imaginative leaps and land without so much as a graze: David Mitchell in Black Swan Green is spry, disconcerting and moving. It is also extremely funny even - or especially - at the blackest of moments. Ali Smith's The Accidental, about a woman who is as much a disgrace as a grace note, is dazzling in every way. Smith is an original. And Mother Country by Jeremy Harding, a tale of two mothers (involving some boating on the Thames estuary to buoy up summer readers), is the best memoir I have ever read. The best holiday read ever is Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Quickstep through this 12-volume classic. It is like acquiring a marvellous, extended, alternative life.

Andrew Stilwell
London Review Bookshop
In a strong summer of fiction, Jan Morris's unique imagination is displayed in Hav, which, intriguingly, updates her 1985 allegorical novel, Last Letters from Hav. Will Self is on top form with the scatological ravings of a London cabbie in The Book of Dave, serious satire that is also very funny, and Londonstani by Gautam Malkani flies in the face of those critics who reviewed the hype rather than the book, which depicts British Asian youth with pinpoint accuracy but is also a fine comic novel.

Samantha Hunter
Volumes Bookshop, Romsey
Joanne Harris's Gentlemen and Players is a fantastic book to relish over the summer. It's very different from her other books, with no French countryside, no recipes and no historical backdrops. Instead, she has created a modern-day thriller, based in an exclusive private day school for boys. The narrative is explored from various perspectives, allowing the reader to believe they have the luxury of omniscience. Yet Harris is the master of dramatic irony and only reveals the truth at the very end. A great read to see you through that departure lounge delay or to have waiting by your beach towel.

Stephanie Merritt
Novelist and Observer writer
Two new novels I've been saving for the summer are Theft by Peter Carey and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Carey is dependably brilliant and very funny. Mitchell's novels have all been so different from one another and so inventive that the prospect of a more obviously conventional narrative from him is intriguing.

Inge Sweetman
City Books, Hove
I am recommending not just one but 12 books by Janet Evanovich. If you haven't been introduced to Stephanie Plum, the sassy, sexy bounty-hunter from New Jersey, then may I suggest that you visit your local bookshop and pick up One for the Money, and have a quick read of the first pages. If you think it's to your taste, then buy the first four in the series. Once you are hooked, they might just last you a week.

Keith How
Bakewell Bookshop, Derbyshire
The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin, lyricist and singer of acclaimed but undiscovered band Richmond Fontaine, recounts a tale of bad luck, heartbreak and resolute hope. Set in small-town Middle America, it follows two brothers hitting the road to escape the consequences of a hit-and-run accident. Vlautin writes in an engaging and deadpan style, seducing the reader into the narrative until you, like the brothers, can find no escape.

Peter Guttridge
Observer writer
Ann Cleeves's breakthrough novel, Raven Black - which won the Crime Writers' Association's inaugural £20,000 Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for best crime novel last week - will chill on the hottest day. Its account of the effect the strangulation of a teenage girl has on a claustrophobic Shetland community is haunting and accomplished. Retired policeman Frank Elder is lured from his Cornish hideaway to track a killer he first encountered eight years before in John Harvey's deftly plotted, beautifully written Darkness and Light. Horror writer turned crime novelist Peter James goes behind Brighton's glittering façade in Looking Good Dead, a second seaside outing for troubled cop Roy Grace that will have you glued to your deckchair.

John and Mary James
The Aldeburgh Bookshop, Suffolk
Bertie, May and Mrs Fish: Country Memories of Wartime by Xandra Bingley is the enchanting memoir of a childhood spent on a Cotswold farm during the war. Xandra's mother, the brave May, is left to run the farm, while Bertie, the eccentric father, is away fighting. There are horses, land girls, animals and prisoners of war, beauty and, eventually, sadness. It is a wonderful book that will appeal to a wide range of readers and will stand alongside such English classics as Cider With Rosie and To War With Whitaker.

Phil Griffiths
Metropolitan Books, Clerkenwell
If you like a bit of glitter with your sunshine, then Jake Arnott's Johnny Come Home won't disappoint. Sarah Waters's The Night Watch offers a wonderful evocation of Forties London. I found Ali Smith's The Accidental captivating, but my favourite novel so far this year would have to be Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. Set in the Ozarks, it's a heartbreaking tale of loss and left-alone sadness.

Hilary Spurling
Biographer and Observer writer
The book I've saved up to take away with me this year is Oracle Bones: A Journey between China and the West by Peter Hessler, whose first book, the magical River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, is the best account I know of what life is like for ordinary people in China today. This second book explores the seismic shifts and strains cracking apart a country where once nothing ever changed. As for my strangest memory of summer reading, I've never forgotten my arms coming out in goose bumps as I lay on the grass long ago in an August heatwave in Hyde Park immersed in the chill, white, glacial world of the Swiss sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

Paul Wallace
David's Bookshop, Letchworth
I have chosen Breaking Ground by Daniel Libeskind, the architect responsible for the Jewish Museum in Berlin and rebuilding the World Trade Centre. Subtitled Adventures in Life and Architecture, it is highly unusual for a memoir in that it manages to convey some of the process of genius with child-like simplicity. It's uplifting and fascinating reading .

Adam Mars-Jines
Novelist and Observer writer
I'd recommend any and all of Fred Vargas's detective stories. You couldn't call them old-fashioned, since they're so lively and inventive, but she isn't interested in pathology or hi-tech, or gruesomeness for its own sake. Some books feature a lateral-thinking detective called Adamsberg; in others, there's a brooding logician called Kehlweiler. Sometimes, as in The Three Evangelists, the mystery is solved by amateurs working as a team. Vargas has a particular respect for misfits and failures. I admire her humour and her sense of pace - she doesn't feel the need to start a book with a bang or a mutilated corpse. How much subtler to start with a tree appearing overnight in a Parisian garden. Bill Buford's Heat describes his experiences as a kitchen slave in a New York restaurant, then line cook, pasta-maker, and finally apprentice to a butcher in Tuscany. It's funny and very well written, though, after reading it, you may want to avoid any restaurant where you can't see everything that happens in the kitchen.

Laurie Hardman
Broadhursts of Southport
The Eight by Katherine Neville is a superbly crafted page-turner centring round the modern-day quest for the pieces of a chess set given to Charlemagne by eight mysterious Moors and scattered across the world during the French Revolution. Whoever reassembles the pieces can play a game that could bring about the destruction of all civilisation. For everyone who read The Da Vinci Code and is suffering withdrawal symptoms, this must be a winner.

Lynn Barber
Observer writer
Publishers are weird. I've just read three novels which are perfect summer reading, being frothy and funny and all the things you are supposed to want on the beach, but none of them is out until the autumn. Anyway, they are James Hamilton-Paterson's Amazing Disgrace, Virginia Ironside's No! I Don't Want To Join a Bookclub and Toby Young's The Sound of No Hands Clapping, so catch them when you can. If, like me, you prefer biography, then John Heilpern's life of John Osborne, A Patriot For Us, is total joy. The old favourites I tend to re-read most summers are Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Lampedusa's The Leopard.

Jo Batchelor
Devizes Books, Wiltshire
A new Janet Evanovich is always a reason to book a holiday. She is one of the authors I always look forward to, but then read too quickly and am left wondering what hit me. Twelve Sharp is her latest hardback, featuring Stephanie Plum, a bounty-hunter who courts disaster but always gets her man. Janet's books are fast-paced and full of humour.

Brian Pattinson
The Book House, Thame
I can recommend 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, a thoroughly readable account of Shakespeare's first year at the Globe. In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky wrote a contemporary account of the horrors and unexpected humanity of Nazi occupation, which, 65 years later, was published as the novel Suite Francaise, now regarded as a masterpiece.

Geraldine Bedell
Observer writer
The two books I've been pressing on friends, teenagers, sisters etc for summer reading are Alexander Masters's inspired Stuart: A Life Backwards, and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, a treat for anyone easily distracted and beguiled by language. Holidays are when I can concentrate best, so I'm looking forward to applying myself to Amartya Sen's reportedly brilliant The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. Unfortunately, I doubt whether any holiday book will ever again come up to Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay, read round a pool in Sorrento at the age of 18. But that's all to do with being 18.

Elaine Nelson
Sam Read Bookseller, Grasmere
As well as the pleasure a good novel provides, it is even more worthwhile if the storyteller can enlighten you along the way. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See, is just that kind of book, a beautiful depiction of a real and secret world that has only just disappeared, a story of two extraordinary women, shaped by suffering, yet surviving in feudal China through their enduring friendship. Read it and be transported.

Pippa Brook
The Bookshop, Kirkstall
The luxury of having time to read is a great opportunity to tackle epics. William Horwood's Duncton Chronicles are tales of good, evil, warfare, love and family dynasty in the world of moles. Travel with the inhabitants of Moledom and you will find that these volumes are not for the faint-hearted.

Dawn Hall
Shakespeare & Hall, Exmoor
Drop the dead Dan Brown and take up The Manchurian Candidate. Richard Condon majored in wild metaphor in the late Fifties, and his lacerating irony has lost nothing in the intervening decades. A pulsing story of the impossible-to-like Medal of Honour man, Raymond Shaw, and his repellent mother, it never misses a beat. The wit, the humour, true love, treachery, tragedy and triumph - forget the Vatican, this is where it was always at.

Robert Potts
Poet and poetry critic
Holidays allow both the time and energy necessary for more rewarding reading. I'm looking forward to spending time with John Wilkinson's latest volume of poetry, Lake Shore Drive; his poems are lyrical, sensual, political, challenging, intelligent. Initially alluring and mysterious, they open up gradually in surprising and provocative ways.

Tom Dixon
Old Hall Bookshop, Brackley
Summer days are long in Sweden, and Sidetracked by Henning Mankell contrasts the endless hours of daylight with some desperate goings-on and the deep gloom of the main character, Kurt Wallander. On a very much lighter and appealingly retro note, why not revisit Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City? Set in San Francisco in the Seventies, it's great fun and has tiny chapters that can be easily dipped into.

Phil Hogan
Novelist and Observer writer
I am not a big Ian McEwan fan but I thought Saturday was pretty fabulous. Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot was uncannily similar to its predecessor, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but so what? Lovely sentences and fine New York drollery. At the moment, I'm reading Tim Parks's latest novel, Cleaver, which is about an egotistical political TV heavyweight who goes off to a hut in the Alps to find himself, or possibly lose himself. A bit like his Booker-shortlisted Europa; a bit like his Destiny. No British writer does male midlife self-flagellation like Parks. Brilliant. I read Lolita on holiday in Italy in 1982, some time before child sex abuse was discovered to be our national sport. It's a measure of Nabokov's genius that he can get us inside the head of Humbert Humbert without making us want to hang him up on meat hooks.

Natasha Roderick-Jones
Chipping Campden Books
Warnings of Gales by Annie Sanders would be most appropriate. Convinced it'll be the perfect holiday, three families take a house in Cornwall but soon realise that, in confined spaces, irritations arise and the baggage they bring is more than just buckets and spades. The title reflects the rising pressure in this funny, touching and painfully accurate novel.

Matthew Huntley
P&G Wells, Winchester
Richard Mabey's Nature Cure is a beautifully written memoir full of insights about life and nature and hope for the future -'to make the heart sing'. And, destined to become a travel classic, Terry Darlington's Narrow Dog to Carcassonne is an irresistibly funny account of taking a narrow boat (and dog) through France, encountering a rich cast of eccentrics along the way. And finally Paulo Coelho's latest novel The Zahir (Harper Collins) is a must.

· Get 10% off featured Observer summer reads and free UK delivery at the Observer bookshop. Call 0870 836 0885 or go to observer.co.uk/bookshop to order
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