The 20 books to read this summer

Illustration by Livia Falcaru for The Observer

In this delightfully genre-blurring work of first-person fiction about three friends living in the French capital, each is searching for something, whether her next erotic encounter, a missing cat unhelpfully named “it”, or an endpoint for an essay on the radical modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Here, we learn a lot about Stein, not least that she dressed like a monk, found question marks revolting and preferred to drive with one hand brandishing a chicken leg. Along the way, both writers show us how language – and life itself – can be deconstructed and put together anew.

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £16.14 (15% off RRP)

Set in the 1990s on the isolated Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, the third novel by the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain follows 22-year-old Cal (AKA John-Calum), returning from Edinburgh to his father’s croft with a textiles degree, a Walkman, some back issues of the Face and a mountain of debt. Cal and his father, John, are both torn between the demands of sexuality and family, in a community defined by faith, surrounded by beauty and riven with secrets and loneliness. The landscape, culture and traditions of Harris are masterfully evoked in Stuart’s most consummate work of literature to date.

Picador, £20; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17 (15% off RRP)

Anam’s latest novel is short but weighty. Uprising is set on a floating brothel in Bangladesh, an island inhabited by sex workers (many of them trafficked) and their children. Every night, men travel there by boat. When an educated woman, Kusum Khan, arrives, she galvanises her fellow women in an attempt to remove the island’s cruel madam. The book, which was a finalist for the Orwell prize for political fiction, is all the more memorable for its distinctive first-person plural narrative voice: a chorus of daughters who have grown up watching their mothers subjected to unthinkable violence, now about to witness a rebellion they never thought possible.

Canongate, £16.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29 (10% off RRP)

Harrison has described his book as a seaside novel, a Brexit novel, a work of gothic and a road movie; The End of Everything is all those things and more. In a post-apocalyptic Britain, haunted by strange lifeforms called iGhetti and cut off from mainland Europe by fog, people flock to boats to emigrate. Money has failed. The fabric of reality has changed. There is full-on body horror here, but the deepest terror of the novel is in how perfectly it conjures a general epistemological collapse. The characters can’t work out what’s real. Brilliantly destabilising, this is weird fiction of the very highest order.

Serpent’s Tail, £16.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29 (10% off RRP)

The chapters of Moss’s surprising and engrossing ninth novel alternate between two different timelines. In the 1960s, we follow 17-year-old Edith, who has just left school when her mother sends her to rural Italy where her sister, a ballet dancer, is pregnant. We then find Edith aged 70, a divorced woman living in present-day Ireland, where her friend Méabh is contacted by an unknown older brother who was adopted and now wants to see where he comes from. As the events of the past and present merge, Edith realises she is only just beginning to understand the secrets her family kept during that long-ago summer. Moss’s tale is endlessly intriguing.

Picador, £9.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £8.49 (15% off RRP)

In the concluding part of French’s trilogy set in the west of Ireland town of Ardnakelty, a well-liked local girl, Rachel Holohan, is found dead in the river. Suicide or accident? The rumour mill quickly settles on the former, directing the blame at Holohan’s boyfriend for breaking her heart – but it appears that she is a casualty of a larger conflict centred on people’s relationship with the land. For retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper and his fiancee, Lena Dunne – both of whom are investigating the case – the republic’s tussle between progress and tradition is also a factor to consider. Once again, French proves herself to be one of the most insightful chroniclers of contemporary Ireland.

Viking, £16.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29 (10% off RRP)

Patchett’s novels are the perfect literary comfort reading; thrilling and heartfelt, they remain gratifying at the sentence level. Her latest is no exception. Whistler tells of Daphne, who bumps into her long-lost stepfather, Eddie – her mother married once more after him – at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daphne and Eddie are both besotted with the idea of rekindling their relationship. Daphne’s husband, Jonathan, knows she likes older men, and is less sure. Patchett unravels a series of revelations about Daphne’s childhood and the reasons Eddie split up with her mother. The author’s characters, so sensitively drawn, bring delight and devastation in turn.

Bloomsbury, £20; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18 (10% off RRP)

A man walks into a bush in south-east London and emerges from another in central Dublin. Bartholomew Port (AKA Mew) is returning to his home city for a literary festival but has arrived amid strikes and anti-government protests, and an atmosphere of imminent violence. Though it takes place in a world resembling our own, this eerie, deranged and hilarious picaresque proceeds more like a dream; the text is full of puzzles that may or may not unlock its mysteries. There are references to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, while Flann O’Brien’s antic presence can also be felt. Dooneen steps outside consensus reality and goes deep into defamiliarisation to convey just how strange and chaotic life feels now.

Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49 (10% off RRP)

Kennard’s second novel takes its story from a real-life social science experiment in 1960s Oregon in which a university student attended lectures for a term dressed head to toe in a black bag. The experiment tested the “mere exposure effect”, the idea that human attachment is shaped by proximity; hostility towards Black Bag turned to affection over time. Kennard, whose wonderful Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward prize for poetry, relocates the experiment to the present and has all kinds of fun with millennial anxieties – from influencer culture to the supposed crisis in masculinity – breathing fresh life into that neglected genre: the comic campus novel.

John Murray, £18.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.09 (10% off RRP)

Parsipur died at the age of 80 this month. She was a pioneer of women’s literature in Iran who was jailed on numerous occasions, including for her subversive writing. Her 1989 novel Women Without Men, which was published in the UK for the first time this year and longlisted for the International Booker prize, shows why. It follows a group of women forming a makeshift family in a house outside Tehran. They are without men because they have outlived them, been spurned by them, or even pushed them down the stairs. It’s a vital, surprising feminist work that thrillingly blends social and magical realism.

Penguin, £12.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69(10% off RRP)

Author and screenwriter Cottrell-Boyce, whose term as children’s laureate has just ended, spent the last two years visiting our schools, libraries, GP surgeries, charities and prisons, seeking to understand the problems facing today’s families and young people. Drawing on these encounters, and reflecting on his own childhood and the books that shaped him, he shows that the crisis in childhood is not all about smartphones: the greatest damage has been caused by austerity and the brutal hollowing-out of the communities that allow our children to flourish. This is a hopeful book, ultimately, and it may be the most important one you’ll read all year.

Picador, £14.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49 (10% off RRP)

It is perhaps fortunate that it took the writer and creator of Girls seven years to write this memoir; with some distance from her conjoined experiences of becoming famous and falling ill, she writes with total clarity and an undimmed sense of humour. Reading Dunham recounting these years – from the pressure she was put under by supposed mentors and executives, to her public breakup – it is hard to walk away not feeling some collective guilt for the character who she was cast as in the public eye. Fittingly, the book is dedicated to women treated similarly, such as Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy “and anyone else who was too Famesick to be cured”.

Fourth Estate, £18.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £16.14 (15% off RRP)

Korsgaard’s record of tracking 64 species of butterfly in her native Denmark across one summer is part nature-cure memoir, part historical study into our fascination with these beguiling insects. On her travels around the country, she comes across the small tortoiseshells that appeared at profound moments in her mother’s life, exploring butterflies as symbols for death and rebirth. The author also aligns herself with fellow butterfly hunters throughout history, such as Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian lepidopterist and diarist, and Vladimir Nabokov, whose passion for collecting them influenced and infected his writing.

Particular Books, £24; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £21.60 (10% off RRP)

“Floods are shape-changers,” writes Jeevan Vasagar at the start of this sobering, fascinating account of how surges of water – from rain, river or sea – have shaped our societies in the past and will reshape them with intensifying force in the coming years. It’s not just that ice sheets are melting because of the climate crisis, leading to sea-level rises and fiercer storms. As populations grow and prosperity rises, more and more people worldwide are living in flood-prone areas. Talking to water-management experts, architects, economists and insurance brokers, Vasagar – The Observer’s climate editor – asks whether our societies are capable of adapting to a rapidly changing world where floods occur with freakish regularity.

Mudlark, £22; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18.70 (15% off RRP)

In this fitting, fleet-footed tribute to the artistry of the man who popularised technical football, the French poet Deudon produces a stirring short essay for each goal scored by Cantona during his five-year stint at Manchester United. A “goalography” that reads like a series of miniature match reports, the entries capture the star’s singularity on and off the pitch; one entry foreshadows the kung-fu kick aimed at a Crystal Palace supporter in the stands that would later come to define his career. There is also a broader footballing history at play, with one goal scored at Hillsborough three years after the fatal crowd crush at the stadium, and another on the 35th anniversary of the 1958 Munich air disaster. An ideal paperback to pack for a summer of sport.

Open Borders Press, £12.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69 (10% off RRP)

Moss, who is best known for the four indie pop albums she released as Emmy the Great between 2009 and 2020, was 11 years old when she moved with her family from Hong Kong to Sussex. In her first book – a memoir – she examines how her relationship with Cantonese pop holds the secrets to solving the crisis of identity that originated with that relocation. Covering her memories of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, and the songs of Faye Wong, Aaron Kwok and more, it is an original exploration of identity and politics, as well as a fascinating analysis of modern Hong Kong.

Jonathan Cape, £22; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18.70 (15% off RRP)

In April, Anderson told The Observer that, as a young man, he’d promised himself he would get to war. “I felt that it was something that was common to human history and I had been appalled by it since I was a little boy.” True to his word, he became one of the pre-eminent war correspondents. He found himself drawn to Afghanistan, which represented the world at its most ancient and untamed. To Lose a War collects 20 years of his reportage from the country, from the US-led 2001 invasion to its catastrophic 2021 withdrawal. Interviews with warlords and puppet rulers jostle for attention with gunfights and edgy audiences with inscrutable strongmen. Taken together, they stand as a record of breathtaking imperial hubris and ignorance. It is, in many ways, a horror story – one that has lost none of its power, despite its familiar ending.

Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49 (10% off RRP)

The story of James Baldwin’s life has largely been told through his commitment to activism and considerable writing achievements. In this engrossing book, Baldwin scholar Boggs narrows the lens to focus instead on the author’s most sustaining intimate relationships and how they shaped his life and art. In tracing his subject’s life in love – from the lack of it from a cruel stepfather who mocked his “frog-eyes”, to the platonic love of a teacher who nurtured his talent at an early age, to the amorous encounters with men on his travels – Boggs finds a new way of seeing both him and his writing.

Bloomsbury, £30; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £25.50 (15% off RRP)

Film director, crossbench peer and longtime online safety advocate Kidron created digital avatars based on real children with specific genders, ages and interests. A few hours after they went live, online services targeted the boys’ avatars with pornography, adult contacts and sex workers, while girls’ avatars were targeted with self-harm or extreme diet material. Powerful, shocking and prescient, this blend of exposé, memoir and manifesto combines heartbreaking personal stories with hard-headed evidence and demands for political reform. Baroness Kidron makes a complicated subject remarkably accessible, taking the reader from the corridors of power in Westminster to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the Vatican.

WH Allen, £22; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18.70 (15% off RRP)

In her fascinating memoir, now out in paperback, Roy introduces us to a character who has shaped her life and her writing in more ways than one: her mother, Mary. “She was my shelter and my storm,” she writes – and, as the book progresses, Mary’s abundant contradictions become increasingly apparent. The Booker prize winner recalls a fragile childhood, her alcoholic father’s absence leaving the family seeking refuge as squatters on the move, and her mother’s moods being the temperamental weather that followed them as they went. Yet, despite the pain inflicted, Roy finds genuine compassion for her mother, explaining that she left her “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”.

Penguin, £12.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.04 (15% off RRP)