June may not quite be upon us, but thanks to the heatwave experienced by much of the UK this week, it feels like summer is already here. And whether you will be off on holiday imminently, or not until the school term is out, it’s never too early to start organising your reading list – not least when there are pre-orders to consider for the hottest new releases. To help you plan, here is a selection of the best books to read this summer.
1. Ripeness by Sarah Moss (Picador)
Whether you are travelling abroad and fancy a novel to suit warmer climes, or you’re staying put but hoping to be mentally whisked elsewhere, Sarah Moss’s latest novel – now in paperback – will delight. In the 1960s we follow Edith, who has just left school when her mother sends her to rural Italy to be with her pregnant sister. In alternating chapters we find Edith some decades on, divorced and living in Ireland, and only just beginning to understand the secrets of that long-ago summer.
2. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Penguin)
Arundhati Roy’s mother “was my shelter and my storm”, the author writes in this intimate memoir that tells of how her mother shaped her life and writing. The Indian novelist, best known for the 1997 Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things, describes a spirited matriarch with a dark side. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, it will be published in paperback on 11 June.
3. Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta)
If you remain a devotee of the physical book yet are concerned about suitcase space, you’d do well to sample some of the season’s slimmest novels. One such title is Transcription by the feted American author Ben Lerner, whose narrator is on his way to interview an author for a magazine when he breaks his phone, leaving him without a recording device. So he pretends to tape the interview. It’s just 144 pages, but full of thought-provoking questions.
4. Katabasis by Rebecca F Kuang (Harper Voyager)
The bestselling author of the speculative fiction book Babel and the publishing satire Yellowface returned last year with her sixth novel, Katabasis. A return to fantasy, it traces two Cambridge “magick” students as they travel to hell on a quest to retrieve their professor.
5. Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today by Naomi Alderman (Fig Tree)
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Escapism isn’t for everyone. If you wish to use your holiday to refocus on reality, rather than depart from it, try this exploration of how digitisation is reshaping our world by Naomi Alderman, now out in paperback. In it, she looks back first to the invention of writing and then to the dawn of the printing press to better understand how to cope in our age of information overload.
6. What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain by Colin Grant (Jonathan Cape)
During the season of travelling, consider the journeys others have taken to find new homes, via this oral history by Colin Grant, published on 4 June. In it Grant hears from migrants including an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton and a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading to build a moving account of today’s Britain.
7. Life Cycle of a Moth by Rowe Irvin (Canongate)
One of last year’s stand-out debut novels will arrive in paperback on 4 June. Life Cycle of a Moth tells of Daughter, a “half-grown, child-adult-animal”, who lives with her mother in a hut in a forest. Apart from her mother, Daughter has never seen another person – until a man infiltrates their refuge. Playful and idiosyncratic, it’s an unforgettable feminist fable.
8. It Will Come Back To You by Sigrid Nunez (Virago)
If you’re looking for something brand new, put in a pre-order for the latest book by the bestselling novelist Sigrid Nunez, whose first collection of short stories lands on 14 July. Known for her brutal honesty and humorous depictions of everyday relationships, Nunez is a future favourite author for readers already enamoured with Elena Ferrante and Ann Patchett.
9. Triage: Truth, Art and Fiction by Claudia Rankine (Allen Lane)
The groundbreaking poet and essayist best known for her much acclaimed book Citizen returns with a blend of narrative, memoir and criticism that sees two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. Expect poignancy and political resonance in this treatise on friendship, which will be published on 4 August.
10. Life of M by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
The trailblazing author of the Outline trilogy is back with the story of M, a world-famous film star, whose biography an author plans to write. Metatextuality and philosophical provocation abound in this novel, which will arrive on 27 August – making it one last treat before the summer is out.
Photograph by Observer Design