Best holiday beach reads: 75 books to read this summer

From page-turners to politics, short stories to science – we pick the 75 must-reads that deserve a space in your suitcase

Special Discount: For 12% off any of these titles, see books.telegraph.co.uk/bestsellers and use the code SUMMER. Offer lasts until June 15.

Crime and Thrillers

A Long Night in Paris by Dov Alfon, tr Daniella Zamir (MacLehose, £18.99)

At Charles de Gaulle airport, a young tech entrepreneur decides that it would be a laugh to nab a stranger’s pickup. Unluckily, the man he playfully impersonates is an Israeli intelligence worker, and the voluptuous blonde driving the taxi is in on a plot to kidnap him. Alfon gives plenty of juicy details about modern spycraft, and although he can be as sardonic and cynical as John le Carré, his style is light and relaxed. JK

To the Lions by Holly Watt (Raven, £12.99)

Watt is a former Telegraph staffer who helped to uncover the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009, and much of her novel’s appeal  lies in the authenticity of its depiction of an undercover hack’s life. The depiction of life at The Post, her fictional broadsheet, is also superbly entertaining (“The reporters were scruffy, grumpy; Dorian Gray paintings of their own byline photographs.”) JK 

Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle, £14.99)

Shepherd-Robinson’s debut novel begins in 1781, when, as one character puts it, “you’d need to work a spell upon the English people if you ever hoped to end slavery. They like cheap sugar in their tea and cheap tobacco in their pipes.” By means of an enjoyably convoluted murder mystery, the book then goes on to show how the abolitionists would win hearts and minds to such an extent that Parliament abolished slavery within 30 years. JK

Metropolis by Philip Kerr (Quercus, £20)

This is the last in the long series of Bernie Gunther novels by Kerr, who died last year aged 62, and whose sardonic humour is perfectly suited to portraying the casual cruelties and careless decadence of the Weimar era, as Bernie witnesses the “Cabaret of the Nameless”, at which the maimed and mentally ill were forced to debase themselves before baying audiences. JK

The Border by Don Winslow (HarperCollins, £20)

Winslow’s trilogy about America’s “war on drugs” and its effect on Mexico, which began with The Power of the Dog in 2005, continued with The Cartel in 2015 and now concludes with The Border, is one of the great literary achievements of the century so far – as multi-stranded as a novel by Victor Hugo, with dozens of characters and storylines. In this novel, the cartels have become more dangerous and unstable – and an oafish US president wants to build a wall. JK 

The Language of Birds by Jill Dawson (Sceptre, £18.99)

Although details have been changed – Sandra becomes Mandy, the Lucans are renamed the Morvens – this is the nanny’s-eye view of the Lucan story. Dawson is an old hand at weaving fictions around real people; her last novel imagined Patricia Highsmith committing a murder. The departures from fact here are less dramatic, but that only makes it more unnerving. JK

Novels

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman, tr Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (Harvill Secker, £25)

In little more than three decades, Grossman (1905-1964) has posthumously gone from being unknown outside Russia to somewhere very high on the roll of 20th-century novelists. The appearance of this 1952 prequel to his 1960 Life and Fate is thus a cause for excitement. The battle of Stalingrad is a natural epic, a great converging, like Troy. Grossman manages to give us the grand sweep and release its intimacy, articulating how it feels to be alive and human under such pressure. JE

Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99)

“How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby?” asks the mother in Li’s extraordinary novel, which takes the form of a series of conversations between an unnamed woman and her dead son, Nikolai. It is both an investigation of grief and a product of it: Li began writing it in the months after the suicide of her teenage son. DW

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton, £20)

For his follow-up to the Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley, James has gone full Hobbit. This is a vast fantasy novel, revelling in the genre, set in a phantasmagorical version of ancient Africa. It even has maps. SL

Graceland by Bethan Roberts (Chatto & Windus, £14.99)

In this stealthily assured novel, Roberts retools the familiar narrative of Elvis’s life – one of preposterous talent burning up amid untold amounts of money and fame – by focusing instead on his mother Gladys, with whom he shared an intense and complicated intimacy, often calling her baby, as though she were a surrogate girlfriend. “Mama I don’t need no wife,” he tells her. “I got you.” CA

Lanny by Max Porter (Faber, £12.99)

Porter’s debut, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, was the sort of book that doesn’t often come along: both ingenious in its experimentalism and heart-rendingly direct. Lanny is just as startling and moving as its predecessor. The tale of a strange free-ranging child living in a commuter-belt village, it captures the dark and petty undercurrents of life in these islands. TSL

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

Christine, an artist, is married to Alex, a lapsed poet, son of a Czech dissident. Her best friend, the voluptuous Lydia, is married to Alex’s best friend, Zachary, a jolly gallerist. The latest novel from the reliably superb Hadley begins with Zachary’s death, and plays out its consequences, like chess. As Christine prophesies: “Without Zachary, our lives are thrown into disorder. Of all of us, he’s the one we couldn’t afford to lose.” IM

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

In McEwan’s latest novel, Charlie Friend, a drifter, spends his inheritance on a humanoid robot at the cutting edge of technology. Both as a drama and as a reflection on being human and being dehumanised, it may not be a match for Bladerunner, Black Mirror or Westworld, but on every other page there is a felicitous sentence or arresting observation. NK

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Fourth Estate, £16.99)

The rising star of Latin American literature’s fifth novel, the first Luiselli has written in English, is haunted by the refugee children she met in the detention centres on the US-Mexico border. It unfolds as a road trip, with two documentary makers driving their kids through Arizona as their marriage crumbles. Stick with the subtle build of the first half, because the second will take the top of your skull off. HB

For the Good Times by David Keenan (Faber, £12.99)

For this follow-up to his superb debut This Is Memorial Device, about a spoof band in early Eighties Scotland, Keenan turns his funny, fierce and sometimes hallucinatory gaze on a couple of surprisingly dapper Seventies IRA men, Sammy and his sidekick Tommy. It is not for the faint-hearted (“I broke a guy’s jaw with a wrench. Smashed full sets of teeth with a chisel… tore a guy’s ear off with a hoover”) but it has visceral momentum and sudden profundities. JW 

Slack-Tide by Elanor Dymott (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

Dymott’s captivating third novel is narrated by Elizabeth, a 40-year-old writer who recalls an intense relationship with a slightly older man. It lasts all of six months and “when the thing between us was finished”, she says, “it was as if a storm had torn the roof from over me”. The whole thing would be unbearably plangent if it wasn’t so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny. A brilliant depiction of romantic rapture and heartfelt delusion. SR

Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, tr Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)

On a squalid farm in rural Gascony, a baby girl refuses to take her mother’s milk. It is the 1900s, so there’s no formula milk to give her and no money for a wet nurse, either. The mother lays the baby on the “bristly teat” of a sow in the farmyard – then coolly snaps the neck of the piglet that has been displaced. Del Amo’s novel – about five generations of life on this farm as it industrialises – is gruelling and magisterial, a massive sensory experience reminiscent of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. CRC

Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe (Viking, £12.99)

In the finale to Stibbe’s semi-autobiographical comic trilogy, Lizzie Vogel, our (entirely unqualified) heroine, has landed a job as assistant to a dentist who smells “strongly of vinegar and tobacco” and has, considering his vocation, “surprisingly bad teeth”. The tales of buccal inlay, Ossie wrap dresses and “clumsy digging around the gum line” read like a cross between James Herriot and Nicholas Nickleby in a joyfully meandering, episodic novel that probes what it means to become an adult. SR

The Wall by John Lanchester (Faber, £14.99)

The Orwell of our day, Lanchester is our most brilliant journalist-novelist, with a rare gift for reconstructing the chains of cause and effect behind the often inexplicable events in the headlines. His latest novel is set in a dystopian future Britain, several years after “The Change”, a rise in sea levels so drastic that a giant concrete wall has been built along the whole coast. Nobody under 25 has ever seen a beach and politicians foment anxiety about boat-borne migrants. JK

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)

This fiercely intelligent thriller, first published in Poland in 2009, starts with the discovery of a corpse, and it isn’t long before another turns up. The whodunnit plot, though, is used to investigate other kinds of connection and causation – “inquiry” in the broadest sense. The result, amusing, stimulating and intriguing, if at times a little dense, feels like Fargo rewritten by Thomas Mann, or a W G Sebald version of The Mousetrap. LR

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)

Heavy on happenstance, light on coherence and psychological realism, Pericles, Prince of Tyre has gone down, in Haddon’s phrase, as one of Shakespeare’s “not-terribly-good plays”. This makes it a curious, though perhaps inspired, choice for Haddon to resurrect under the guise of his new novel, The Porpoise. It is a defiantly odd book, dependent on the fine caul of Haddon’s prose to keep together the heavily spiced romantic mixture within. But it works. TSL

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador, £16.99)

This novel’s primary gingerbread-maker is Harriet Lee, a chronic people-pleaser with a mysterious past that she hides from her 17-year-old daughter, Perdita. There are a few oddities about Harriet’s life in London but travelling to her birthplace – Druhástrana, a landscape littered with half-remembered elements from childhood, like a giant clog and a nightmarish jack-in-the-box – puts us in proper fairy-tale territory. This is a mischievous, modern-mythic romp, sometimes frustrating, always fun. FC

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre, £18.99)

This multi-plotted coming-of-age tale follows the story of SH as she moves from the “wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan”. So far, so New York cliché – then the story takes a gothic turn as, through the paper-thin walls of her apartment, SH finds herself privy to the night-time confessions of her neighbour. SR

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape, £14.99)

Provocative and magnificently risky, this debut novel opens in 1914 with Midhat Kamal on the steamer from Palestine to France to study medicine. Weighing in at more than 550 pages, complete with maps, timeline and dramatis personae, The Parisian maps out the rise of Palestinian and Syrian national movements over a critical 20 years, and asks what makes a character consistent over time – and what a person consists of in the first place. SR

Spring by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)

In this third instalment of her seasonal quartet, Smith channels a Shakespearean romance (Pericles, Prince of Tyre), celebrates a female British artist (Tacita Dean), and tells the story of a platonic – or mostly platonic – relationship between a man and a woman. She is the most Tigger-like of serious novelists but, as Spring amply demonstrates, the tickling can become tiresome. LR

Outside Looking In by T C Boyle (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

The undisputed master of what might be called biographical fiction, Boyle has a fascination with charismatic, powerful men – usually with strong libidos – and the effect on those they draw into their orbit. He has found a perfect subject in Timothy Leary, the psychologist and LSD guru once described by Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America”. Boyle is brilliant at charting the phantasmagorical effects of LSD, the euphoria and idealism around Leary and his followers’ slide into self-destruction. MB

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage, £8.99)

Young, beautiful and living off her inheritance, the unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s second novel sets out to sleep her way to a better life, using a range of soporific drugs. But while her senses have been dulled, the author’s haven’t: this book is a whip-smart dissection of American culture. VR

Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber, £8.99)

Rooney’s bestselling follow-up to her 2017 hit Conversations with Friends is precisely thought out and deeply enjoyable. It follows the on-off romance between Connell, who is poor but the golden boy at school, and Marianne, who is well-off but toxically uncool, as they move to university together. OB

Short Stories

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

Roupenian became a sensation in 2017 with “Cat Person”, a New Yorker short story about a bad date, which went viral and became a totem for modern sexual mores. It is one of the 12 tales in this debut collection, all cruel, blunt pieces, where sex is a cause or effect of vengeance, and happiness expires fast. When Roupenian gives a satirical bite to her cold-hearted prose, local colour floods in, and her broken people come to subtler life. CRC

Turbulence by David Szalay (Vintage, £7.99)

Set in or around airports, each story here takes its cue from a character encountered in the last one, but abandons the previous storyline, making the whole thing feel like a series of mid-flight altitude drops. Szalay perfectly captures the terminal ache of those vast hangars, the airless sheen of duty-free, the banality. A woman turns to the aeroplane window only to find “her own face in the dark plastic, deeply shadowed like a landscape at sundown”. SR

History

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr (Bodley Head, £25)

Americans might like to think of themselves as an exceptional republic that only acts selflessly in world affairs, but exceptional nations never sit still – they grow and conquer, as Immerwahr proves in this fascinating study of the lands the United States has ruled beyond its official borders. Much of this history is unknown to Americans, and the book is full of moments of comic self-realisation, such as the “liberation” of the Philippines from the Japanese in 1945. Many GIs did not realise that the Japanese had in fact liberated the Philippines from the United States. NM

A History of the Bible by John Barton (Allen Lane, £25)

The Bible is an undeniably mysterious book, widely misunderstood, misinterpreted and misused. Barton’s superb overview tackles its internal contradictions, its origins and the different ways in which it is read. He notes, for instance, how the Old Testament is almost always read by Christians as a tale of sin and redemption, finally prophesying the coming of a Saviour, whereas for the Jews the emblematic figure is not Adam but Abraham, and the theme is God’s guiding hand throughout the history of His chosen people, as He assists them in their struggles. BVS

Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie (Bodley Head, £20)

This beautifully written book raises two questions: could the Second World War have been avoided; and was Chamberlain a hero or a villain? Bouverie traces skilfully each shameful step toward war, describes in moving detail the final betrayal of Czechoslovakia and ends with Duff Cooper’s apt verdict on his former chief: “Chamberlain had never met anybody in Birmingham who in the least resembled Adolf Hitler… His mistake was only that of the little boy who played with a wolf under the impression that it was a sheep – a pardonable zoological error – but apt to prove fatal to the player who makes it.” LJ

The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller (Picador, £20)

Most people tend to work from the haziest narrative of the descent of modern European civilisation. In Moller’s summary, it runs: “There were the Greeks, and then the Romans, and then there was the Renaissance.” Yet in the interim between the last two, Europe had misplaced its intellectual heritage, before finding it in the attic. Moller tells the fascinating story of that gap through the neat device of a tour of seven cities, each of which became a centre of classical and scientific scholarship between 300BC and 1500: Alexandria, Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, and, finally, Venice. TSL

1776 by Justin Lovill (Bunbury, £25)

In the year that America declared independence, London was set on diverting itself as it lost an empire: ladies’ headdresses were towering; thousands were bet on whether the Chevalier d’Eon was a man or a woman. In Lovill’s extraordinarily enjoyable chronicle, gleaned from newspapers and private journals, each day of 1776 in London is prefaced by the weather: “Heavy, misling day, bright evening”; “Churlish afternoon”. It embraces the background noise of events as they unfold in 768 pages, without the smoothing out that historical narrative brings. After all, the Londoners of 1776 did not know how things would turn out. CH

A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green (Allen Lane, £30)

Hegel famously wrote, with a complete absence of study in the field, that “Africa is no historical part of the world.” Most books on world history seem barely aware of any pre-colonial African civilisations. Green’s contention is that, far from Africa having no history, the continent was one of the moulders of world history; that far from its history beginning with the encounter with Europe, that encounter was disastrous for it; that its history has been concealed not by its own darkness, but by the fog of European assumptions. A Fistful of Shells is a work of staggering scholarship, peppered with astonishing facts. BO

The Professor and the Parson by Adam Sisman (Profile, £12.99)

This is the biography of a very minor character who was a fantasist and con man. The aim of all Robert Parkin Peters’ trickery was not wealth or power, but respectability as an ordinary academic and priest. He lied, stole and cheated his way from Cambridge to New York, Singapore and South Africa, leaving seven marriages (three of which were bigamous) in his trail of destruction. Yet despite the book’s footling subject, it manages to be implausibly gripping as a study of insanity – the rollercoaster of fibs and frauds went on for more than five decades – not to mention effortlessly funny. NM

Upheaval by Jared Diamond (Allen Lane, £25)

Diamond’s fascinating, globe-hopping study argues that nations cope with trauma the way individuals do: by honestly assessing their strengths and weaknesses and adapting to new circumstances. His model is Finland, which could so easily have been absorbed into the Soviet sphere like the Baltic states after 1945, but maintained its independence and became, per capita, one of the richest, most advanced democracies in the world. Upheaval is a bit too rational and too keen to wrap things up in “lessons learned”, but leaves the reader with plenty to ponder. TS

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam, £20)

Higginbotham has spent 12 years investigating the story of Chernobyl, and his account is surely definitive. He makes the plant sound rather like the one that employs Homer as its safety officer in The Simpsons, and traces how the disaster sparked a chain reaction that eventually destroyed the Soviet Empire, as it “finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world”. LJ

Chaucer by Marion Turner (Princeton, £30)

What Chaucer would make of 21st-century London is anyone’s guess, but to judge by the shrewd observer and cosmopolitan operator of this excellent biography, it would not take him long to acclimatise. The poet-diplomat saw and understood far more of the world than one would guess from his bumbling narratorial personae. TSL

Children’s Books

Paper Planes by Jim Helmore (Simon and Schuster, £6.99)

This is an irresistibly touching book from the author of the much-loved Stripy Horse series. It follows two friends who live beside a lake on which they love to fly paper planes, but who are separated when one of their families moves away. “Perhaps, one day, they would make a plane that could fly all the way over the lake…” EB

The Wall in the Middle of the Book by Jon Agee (Scallywag, £11.99)

Jon Agee’s latest offering is one of several enchanting titles from the new children’s publisher Scallywag Press. Telling the story of a timid knight who fears the dangers that lurk on the other side of his wall, but eventually has his horizons broadened by a kindly ogre, it strikes exactly the right balance between comfort and peril, thanks not least to Agee’s gentle illustrations. EB

Captain Cat and the Treasure Map! by Sue Mongredien (Macmillan, £5.99)

Sue Mongredien, author of the bestselling Secret Mermaid books, has embarked on a cracking new pirate series. In this first instalment, brilliantly illustrated by Kate Pankhurst, we meet Patch the Cat as she sets sail on the Golden Earring and comes to the rescue of her inept pirate crew, led by the curmudgeonly Captain Halibut. EB

Charlie Changes into a Chicken by Sam Copeland (Puffin, £6.99)

Sam Copeland, a literary agent, has launched many careers. Now he has written one of most hyped children’s book debuts of the decade. Its hero is a “normal boy” with “one MAJORLY HUGE, MASSIVE difference”: he can transform into animals. While the book is packed with laughs, it’s also a thoughtful exploration of childhood anxiety. A modern masterpiece. EB

Sensational Butterflies by Ben Rothery (Penguin, £20)

Butterflies are overtaking dragons in the popularity stakes, and Ben Rothery’s book is one of this year’s most sumptuous titles. The deceptively informative text will satisfy the most inquisitive young lepidopterist, but it is the author’s glorious, double-page illustrations of butterfly wingspans that make this a book to cherish. EB

Kind by Alison Green (Alison Green Books, £12.99)

A book about kindness might sound slightly saccharine. But this one is different. With pictures by 38 leading children’s illustrators, including Quentin Blake, Axel Scheffler and Lauren Child, it has become one of this year’s most celebrated releases. The book begins with the question, “What can you do to be kind today?”, and goes on to provide children with plenty of ideas. EB

The Umbrella Mouse by Anna Fargher (Macmillan, £6.99)

Horses and dogs are popular heroes of children’s fiction set during wartime – but what about the urban mouse? This beautifully written book, set towards the end of the Second World War, tells the story of Pip, who is orphaned after a bomb hits the umbrella shop where she lives with her parents – and sets off on an adventure. EB

Our Castle by the Sea by Lucy Strange (Chicken House, £6.99)

This mesmerising novel is as much fairy tale as historical fiction. Pet, a 12-year-old girl, lives in a lighthouse, and has grown up steeped in seafaring myths. When the Second World War breaks out, she is confronted with a harsh new reality. But after she sees her mother sneak off to follow a mysterious figure, the legends of her childhood take on an eerie new resonance. EB

Biography

LEL by Lucasta Miller (Jonathan Cape, £25)

In 1838, a 36-year-old Englishwoman was found dead in Cape Coast Castle on the West African coast. In her hand was a bottle of prussic acid. Her name was Letitia Landon and, writing under the initials L.E.L., she was known as “the female Byron”, a poet who enjoyed the celebrity of a Sixties pop star. Miller’s terrific book deconstructs the tumultuous life behind the poems. JR

The Man who was Saturday by Patrick Bishop (William Collins, £20)

Airey Neave’s heroic escape from Colditz in 1942 set the course both for his wartime intelligence work, and for his career in politics, which ended with his assassination by Irish terrorists in 1979. Bishop’s biography, published to mark the 40th anniversary of Neave’s death, is masterly on military matters, psychologically acute, sympathetic and alert to irony. LJ

Furious Hours by Casey Cep (William Heinemann, £20)

In 1977, after 17 years of post-Mockingbird writers’ block, Harper Lee heard of a trial in rural Alabama that might provide her with material for a new book. In this gripping study, Cep argues that the appeal went beyond a cracking story: Lee had objected to her friend Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and was hoping to write a more honourable true-crime book; she might also have seen in the trial’s lawyer the chance to write a less admirable Atticus Finch. JW

The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Ratcliffe (William Collins, £16.99)

Adultery is “a most conventional way to rise above the conventional”, said Nabokov. The memory of an old affair is still rattling around in Ratcliffe’s heart, setting something in her apart from the mundanity of motherhood and allowing her to forge a spiritual bond with Russian literature’s most famous adulterer, Anna Karenina. The consequence is this compelling mix of criticism and startlingly exposed personal memoir. HB

War Doctor by David Nott (Picador, £18.99)

Nott has spent 25 years taking unpaid sabbaticals from his job as an NHS vascular surgeon to travel to conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza and Syria. The stakes are impossibly high, and often as much about lack of resources as bullets. His book is not for the faint-hearted, but it is a triumph: a love letter to surgery, and to helping others in extremis. CW

This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith (Pelican, £20)

Shakespeare’s capacity to create art that remained, as Keats put it, happily “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” is the subject of Smith’s 20 essays, which each deal with a single play and aim to cut through the accumulated crust of “schoolroom platitudes”, cant and literary piety about the Bard. TSL

Salt on Your Tongue by Charlotte Runcie (Canongate, £14.99)

“There is a pull,” says Runcie, “an understanding between women and the sea that has fascinated and scared men for thousands of years.” It’s a relationship that The Telegraph’s radio critic explores with easy-going erudition in her first book: a seductive, estuarine merging of personal memoir and scholarly reportage. HB

An Impeccable Spy by Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury, £25)

Richard Sorge, the half-German Soviet agent who in the Thirties created a Tokyo spy ring, really did change the course of history by assuring Stalin in the late summer of 1941 that Japan would not join Germany in attacking Russia. This allowed Stalin to move troops from Siberia to prevent the Nazis from capturing Moscow and, eventually, turn the tide of the Second World War. It’s an incredible story and Matthews tells it very well. SD

The World I Fell Out Of by Melanie Reid (Fourth Estate, £16.99)

Reid started her day in 2010 looking forward to a riding competition. She ended it in a Glasgow hospital, a tetraplegic. This account of what followed is searingly frank. She tells you about her weeing and pooing and sex life, her overwhelming desire to walk and ride again and how it drove her near to a breakdown. It is a very personal tale, and one that makes you laugh and cry. GK

Our Man by George Packer (Jonathan Cape, £25)

Packer explains that he’s telling the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s story not for its own sake, but “to see and feel what happened to America during Holbrooke’s life”. In fact, the man himself – posted to Vietnam aged 21 in 1963; driving force behind the Bosnian peace talks – often proves too compelling for Packer to stick to this plan. Even so, the result is an exploration of American decline that’s heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time. JW

The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand (Simon & Schuster, £20)

In March 1940, Udham Singh shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer through the heart at point-blank range in Westminster, fulfilling a 20-year-old vow to avenge the 1919 Amritsar massacre. Anand follows Singh’s peripatetic adventures up to that point in a meticulous piece of historical detective work that reads like a shadow-world conspiracy thriller. RH

Walter Gropius by Fiona MacCarthy (Faber, £30)

Poor Walter Gropius, forever doomed to be the hate figure of modern architecture. MacCarthy’s engaging biography of the Bauhaus founder sets out to scotch the myth that he was a cold fish, but there’s still a fascinatingly hard, diamond-like quality about him. IH

What You Have Heard is True by Carolyn Forché (Allen Lane, £25)

The title of Forché’s memoir is taken from her most famous poem, “The Colonel”, about a chilling encounter with a Salvadoran colonel who mocked the rights of his people as he emptied a bag of human ears on to the dinner table. Here, Forché takes that distilled moment of casual cruelty and contextualises it within the disappearances and mass murders of El Salvador in 1978, when it was on the brink of civil war. DB

Socrates in Love by Armand d’Angour (Bloomsbury, £20)

What Socrates knew – or at any rate claimed – about love is one of the very few philosophical treatments of the subject to be at all worth reading, and he credits his ideas to a “wise woman from Mantinea”. D’Angour’s study, sympathetic and irreverent, dares to ask whether she was perhaps a real person who really did what Socrates said: teach him all he knew about love. NK

Unbreakable by Richard Askwith (Yellow Jersey, £16.99)

The Grand Pardubice is a horse race in the Czech Republic run over four miles, covering 31 terrifying fences, with vast hedges, solid rails and huge open ditches. Its nickname is “the Devil’s race”. Unbreakable is the astonishing story of the only woman ever to have won it, Lata Brandisova, who, at the age of 42, in 1937, rode to victory against a field of Nazi paramilitaries on a little golden mare called Norma. CS

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell (Little, Brown, £20)

Soon to be a film starring Daisy Ridley, Purnell’s life of the SOE agent Virginia Hall is a cracking story about an extraordinarily brave woman. Tall, beautiful and one-legged, Hall’s mission in occupied France was to mobilise résistants, ready for the day when the Allies would invade, but not to let them kill Germans, who would then retaliate by killing four times as many civilians. She became, in the Gestapo’s view, the Allies’ most dangerous spy. ADC 

Noble Savages by Sarah Watling (Jonathan Cape, £25)

This is the first biography to shine a light on the Olivier sisters, a family of "shocking flirts" on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group. (Rupert Brooke fell in love with three of them.) One, Brynhild, had a scandalous divorce on the grounds of her adultery, and relied on cash from her friends HG Wells and GB Shaw to make ends meet. It's a fascinating read. LB

Travel

Underland by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £20)

Credited with setting off a new renaissance in nature writing, the ever-attentive Robert Macfarlane here ventures downwards into barrows, caves, tunnels and catacombs: the places where “we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save”. Written with his usual blend of lyricism, memoir and literary criticism, this subterranean journey is both exhilarating and a little terrifying. NK

Horizon by Barry Lopez (Bodley Head, £25)

An angry book about the “throttled Earth” and what we have done to it and our fellow Earthlings while chasing “Western-style progress and its twin sister, profit”. It’s life-affirming, too. Lopez finds inspiration in James Cook and Charles Darwin, and writes with a sense of awe and mystery about the High Arctic, the Galapagos Islands and all the places he has visited in a lifetime of exploration. MK

Politics and Ideas

Becoming by Michelle Obama (Viking, £25)

The former US First Lady’s memoir rings true, and tough. She writes frankly about her miscarriage, about IVF and about going through couples’ therapy with her husband when he became a politician. The story of how they fell in love after sneaking out of Les Misérables for a scoop of ice cream, meanwhile, is Nora Ephron-esque romantic gold. GW

Dangerous Hero by Tom Bower (William Collins, £20)

This meticulous and highly readable account of Jeremy Corbyn’s unlikely rise must be absorbed from start to finish. Funny and devastating, it stands as an indictment of both the Labour Party and a political system that allows such an individual as Jeremy Corbyn to come within shouting distance of the levers of power in this country. TH

Engines of Privilege by Francis Green and David Kynaston (Bloomsbury, £20)

Anyone sending their children to a private school is buying an advantage “at the expense of other children’s futures”, argue social historian David Kynaston and UCL professor Francis Green, in a study which, despite its finger-wagging tone, draws attention to some eye-opening statistics. Only about six per cent of the UK’s school population attend such schools, but the privately educated make up 74 per cent of judges and 60 per cent of British Oscar winners. AP

Lowborn by Kerry Hudson (Chatto & Windus, £14.99)

A personal account of the hardships at the extremes of working-class life, where one fifth of us live. Hudson went through nine primary schools, two stays in foster care and two abortions before her 18th birthday. Returning to the towns of her harrowing childhood in this excellent memoir, she demonstrates that only by lifting whole communities out of poverty can we hope to help children and young people like her. KDW

The New Childhood by Jordan Shapiro (Yellow Kite, £14.99)

Parents should stop worrying about smartphones addling their children’s minds, says Jordan Shapiro. His bold thesis is that it’s time to throw out limits on screen time and embrace new technology. Shapiro’s optimism verges on techno-utopianism, but this is a necessary, important book, and a refreshing antidote to fearmongering headlines. AB

Science

The Way we Eat Now by Bee Wilson (Fourth Estate, £12.99)

Humans were once defined by what they ate. But global eating trends are changing, and our tastes are converging. Spanish and Italian children are swapping the much-praised “Mediterranean diet” for ready meals. Wilson’s book, which is gracefully written and packed with arresting facts, explains what this means for our health as well as our identity – and offers some eminently sensible solutions. DD

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (Allen Lane, £20)

Wallace-Wells has produced a terrifying account of climate change and the future of our species (spoiler: there isn’t one). More than half the extra carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has been added in the past 30 years, and oceans are carrying at least 15 per cent more heat energy than they did in 2000. The consequences are going to be ugly – famines, floods, fires, droughts, brackish oceans, toxic winds, war – and in some cases it’s too late to mitigate against them. Urgent and unignorable. SI

The Moon by Oliver Morton (Economist, £20)

Morton, a science journalist, grew up as part of the generation dubbed “Apollo’s orphans”: those who witnessed the triumph of the moon landings, then saw humanity’s lunar ambitions wane. This cool, melancholy book, which traces our shifting relationship with the moon over the centuries, shines a light on the reasons why. SI

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Contributors: Claire Allfree, Lynn Barber, Alex Beard, Emily Bearn, Dzifa Benson, Orlando Bird, Helen Brown, Mick Brown, Francesca Carington, Anne de Courcy, Saul David, Daisy Dunn, Bart D Ehrman, Julian Evans, Tom Harris, Ivan Hewett, Rachel Holmes, Christopher Howse, Simon Ings, Lewis Jones, Michael Kerr, Jake Kerridge, George Kershaw, Nakul Krishna, Sam Leith, Noel Malcolm, Iona McLaren, Ben Okri, Allison Pearson, Leo Robson, Sophie Ratcliffe, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Cal Revely-Calder, Jane Ridley, Leo Robson, Tim Stanley, Clover Stroud, Tim Smith-Laing, Kit de Waal, James Walton, Gaby Wood