70 brilliant books for the summer

From dynamite debuts to must-read memoirs and magical children’s fiction, here’s our selection of this year’s hottest holiday reads Leading authors Mark Haddon, Samantha Harvey, Zadie Smith select their favourites A middle-aged writer returns to his college town to record the final interview with his 90-year-old intellectual mentor. But he’s broken his phone, and doesn’t seem able to confess that it’s not recording … this anxiety dream of a beginning leads us into a series of sharp insights into family, memory, inheritance and storytelling – all that it means to be human, and how smartphones are changing our sense of the world at every level. Following Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s latest historical novel has a personal connection. Inspired by an Irish ancestor who drew up maps for the English in the aftermath of the great famine, it builds into a multigenerational tale of folklore, migration and the meaning of home. A social media influencer pushing a confected olden-days lifestyle of babies, baking and prairie dresses wakes up in the actual olden days – to dirt, poverty and domestic abuse. Critics have argued about a lack of political depth in this buzzy tradwife

Jun 13, 2026 → Jun 13, 2026