The perfect books for the beach … picked by Freida McFadden, Mick Herron, Robert Harris and more

It is important to follow a balanced diet on holiday. Too many “My Wife’s Sister’s Husband’s Psychopath”, and you’ll get confused and grumpy. Too much sugary romance and your teeth will fall out. Something too big and challenging you’ve been meaning to get round to for ages will make you feel guilty and more liable to give in to scrolling, and if you take too many supposedly upmarket “must reads” of the summer, you will simply prove to yourself just how much overhyped averageness there is out there, when all you want is something satisfying.

You need to be able to chop and change depending on your mood, which means fiction and nonfiction. And finally, you need to be able to throw all of these rules out of the window if you find a sandy old water-stained copy of, for example, James Herbert’s Domain in your holiday cottage and decide to devote yourself to 600 pages of post-nuclear mutant rat-strewn London, or choose to go for a full-on Maeve Binchy sesh.

My top tips for this summer? For the outward journey: Kathy Burke’s smash-hit and brilliant autobiography A Mind of My Own, a reminder of the absolute Britishness you are leaving behind. For that first post-rosé afternoon when you are filled with warmth and benevolence towards the world and everyone in it: Whistler by Ann Patchett.

For a wonderful immersive epic where everyone is also extremely boiling hot all the time: This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin. For cruising altitude day four when everyone else has gone to see some stupid boring hot cave and left you alone and you want something quality and capable of being finished in an afternoon: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. For the day everyone is doing your head in: Emma Cline’s huge hit from a couple of years ago, The Guest, a thoroughly nasty piece of work and the best of all those “neighbourhood psycho” books.

Nonfiction palate cleanser day: OK, everyone is going to be reading the Maggie Haberman Trump book, but for the love of God could we possibly not think about him for one solitary five-second interval? That would be the definition of a holiday. If annoying Americans are still your bag, try Belle Burden’s Strangers, about a seemingly perfect, rich Wasp marriage unexpectedly going down the toilet.

For queueing at non-EU passport control and cursing Nigel Farage’s £5m: The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman. Forget the motley crew of celebrity impersonators that squelched along in his wake; Osman’s lightness of touch and genuine comic ability means this slips down more easily than free limoncello. Bonnes vacances!

Freida McFadden

author of The Housemaid
One of my favourite reads of the year has been The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. I’ve been on a historical kick lately, and this novel set in the southern US during the Great Depression is historical fiction at its best. The audiobook is masterfully narrated and by the last chapter, I had tears in my eyes.

Caro Claire Burke

author of Yesteryear
In The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson a group of friends in their mid-30s in a tight-knit Massachusetts coastal town deal with secrets, romance and the fallout from a stunning betrayal. It’s frothy and clever and perfect for a vacation.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

author of Fleishman Is in Trouble
I brought Here in the Dark by my New York Times colleague Alexis Soloski on vacation a couple of years ago. I couldn’t put it down from the minute I started it, even missing a family dinner so I could continue reading. (Sorry, kids!) It’s a modern noir about an acerbic theatre critic who finds herself caught up in a mystery, and I can’t say enough about its voice, its humour, its darkness, its poignancy and the twists and turns that make it a truly original thriller. I loved it.

Alice Oseman

author of Heartstopper
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is about a woman whose only dream is to work at a convenience store and, like much of Murata’s work, explores the inner world of a woman who feels deeply uncomfortable about the role she’s forced into by society. It’s short, it’s strange, it’s the perfect read for a trip away this summer – and a great introduction to Murata, if you haven’t dipped in before.

Mick Herron

author of the Slough House series
Beaches are for walking along not reading on, but when the paddling’s done and a sand-free environment’s been found, Daniel Mason’s Country People is a treat. A failed academic and his family relocate to Vermont, where his PhD avoidance strategies involve increasingly alarming immersion in local folklore. An absurd, joyful delight.

Nita Prose

author of The Maid
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller. August heat, a summer cabin in Cape Cod, and the unravelling of one woman’s secrets. Elle is happily married with three kids, but her whole life is upended by an illicit encounter with a childhood friend. A charged generational saga about love, desire and loss – you’ll need regular dips in the water to cool yourself as you read.

Lisa Jewell

author of None of This Is True
The best page-turner I’ve read this year is It’s Not What You Think by Clare Mackintosh. She already lays claim to one of the genre’s greatest twists in her 2011 hit I Let You Go and here Mackintosh is back to deliver multiple twists, short chapters and non-stop reveals in this scintillating read.

André Aciman

author of Call Me by Your Name
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is about a 19-year-old Londoner who desperately wants to join the world of super-wealthy Russian oligarchs, many of whom live in the capital. He manages to affect belonging to that class until he is finally exposed for who he really is – a smart, resourceful but hapless kid. The story is totally addictive, real, and I couldn’t put it down.

Lucy Foley

author of The Guest List
The Wedding People by Alison Espach is an absorbing, transporting book that left me with a serious what-to-pick-next panic after finishing it. I took it on holiday last year and the summer setting makes it perfect: the waterfront hotel, the excursions on boats and in open-top cars, and also the unfurling sense of optimism. It’s a paean to solo travel, to leaving it – quite literally in this case – all behind. But it’s also a book with teeth, poignancy, depth and humanity, all qualities I look for in a top-notch summer read.

Erin Kelly

author of The Night Stairs
The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee is a satirical thriller set in a Mumbai skyscraper. A washed-up American actor is accused of killing his Bollywood starlet wife. It’s got everything you could want from a book: belly laughs, unforgettable characters, a thumping plot and simmering political rage.

Leigh Bardugo

author of the Ninth House series
The Last Baron by Tom Sancton. Thick with loathsome individuals and rich with history, this heavily researched story of a 1970s kidnapping in Paris spans generations. It is wildly juicy, just be prepared for a Succession experience: you’ll struggle to find anyone to root for but you won’t be able to look away.

Matt Haig

author of The Midnight Library
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon is a weird, wonderful book about a vacuum cleaner that becomes sentient after hearing To Kill a Mockingbird read aloud. Said vacuum cleaner renames herself Scout and embarks on a quest to save the human she lives with. It’s highly original and feels like a sign that – in the age of AI – the way out is through vivid human creativity.

Florence Knapp

author of The Names
A will-they-won’t-they romance is a much-anticipated holiday treat for me, and Annabel Monaghan’s are guaranteed to make my cheeks ache from smiling and keep me reading until 2am. In Nora Goes Off Script, screenwriter and single mum Nora falls for a leading actor when her house is co-opted as a film location.

Robert Harris

author of Conclave
Graham Greene has accompanied me on a lot of holidays over the years, especially the novels set in hot climates. I recommend in particular The Power and the Glory, The Honorary Consul and The Quiet American – perfect reading for a sweltering beach, a deserted baggage hall, or a night-time veranda with a sickly blue light zapping the insects.

Rebecca F Kuang

author of Yellowface
I recently read and loved Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, it’s a testament to ridiculous hope and the power of stories that is also ridiculously, formally ambitious – its crosscutting storylines span centuries and continents. It’s precisely the kind of book I needed to remind me how high human storytelling can soar.

Mike Gayle

author of On We Go
An MP has been murdered and a taunting message left in binary code: “Catch me if you can.” So begins Body of Lies, the politically and technically prescient conclusion to Jo Callaghan’s unique Midlands-set series featuring Kat and Lock, a human and AI detective pairing. Brimful of big ideas and heart, its action-packed finale is, to put it mildly, as moving as it is thrilling.

Bella Mackie

author of Claws Out!
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. I read this recently and found it completely charming and brilliantly transporting. Four women, bored, lost, lonely and miserable respectively, take a villa in Italy for a month of respite. It’s funny, tender and trots along at pace. But above all else, it’s a novel about women and the community that springs up between them. A perfect beach read.

Curtis Sittenfeld

author of American Wife
Crash Into Me by Robinne Lee is the ideal beach read not just because I literally was reading it on the beach earlier this week, though I was, or because the American cover features waves crashing on the sand, but because it’s an irresistible mix of glamorous, thought-provoking and sexy. Jamaican-born, New York‑raised, France-dwelling photographer Cecilia is living temporarily with her famous director husband and kids in LA when she reconnects with Anouk, a model with whom she had a complex encounter 20 years earlier. Now the two women are middle-aged and equally tempted to protect and blow up their lives. This is Lee’s follow-up to The Idea of You, and it’s just as juicy.

Harriet Tyce

author of Witch Trial
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford is an absolute banger. Historical meets fantastical in this London blitz-set novel. The perfect combination of literary and compulsive page-turner, it reads like a dream. A bonus recommendation for Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd, which also starts in the blitz but adds a thoroughly contemporary, compelling time-travelling twist.

Abir Mukherjee

author of The Burning Grounds
My choice is The Shadow Step by Mark Billingham, the latest in the Blackpool-set series featuring the wisecracking, ballroom-dancing detective Declan Miller. This one sees our hero running an investigation into the murder of a rather despicable young man, which quickly gets derailed by the kidnapping of a student. As with the others in this series, Billingham weaves a fiendish plot but also lets rip with the jokes. An absolute joy to read.

Abigail Dean

author of The Death of Us
I’d recommend Main Characters by Bobby Palmer. Seb and Clara meet in a Soho square, and an epic on-again, off-again romance begins. But their story is narrated by everybody except the main characters. Sometimes it’s a close friend, but we also hear from people‑watchers, neighbours and colleagues. The result has the feeling of a short-story collection, with small, perceptive insights into a vast cast of characters, and the ways lives collide and divert. Make sure you have sunglasses to hand – I wept.

Jennie Godfrey

author of The Barbecue at No 9
This year, Dead Heat by Sabine Durrant exceeded my unofficial “beach read” criteria of 1) page-turning crime or thriller 2) set in hot weather. This elevated psychological thriller, which takes place over a Greek summer, gave me serious Patricia Highsmith vibes. It’s classy, cinematic and truly thrilling.

Shari Lapena

author of Getting Away With Murder
In Five by Ilona Bannister, someone on a London train platform will die in five minutes when the train arrives. As the clock ticks down, you meet the characters who might die, and you get to know them intimately. If you want a completely immersive read, this is for you.

Nick Harkaway

author of Karla’s Choice
If Lewis Carroll sat down with Mick Herron to write a thriller about memory and nightmare, you’d get There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. A funny, gripping and genuinely disturbing counter-espionage monster novel told in beach-friendly episodic style. What’s not to love?

Paula Hawkins

author of The Girl on the Train
Four Terrible Parents by Calla Henkel. Careering towards 40, two rock stars, an artist and a former banker decide the time has come to settle down, get married, and co-parent a child (while also renovating a hotel in South Carolina). Henkel’s comedy-slash-thriller is so fiendishly plotted you might not even notice all she has to say about art, love, friendship and family.

Kate Mosse

author of The Map of Bones
Recently reissued, Fenny by Lettice Cooper – first published in 1953 – is a coming-of-age story set in the Tuscan hills. Dripping with heat, the sound of cicadas and the smell of the pine trees, this is the story of a Yorkshire governess who pitches up at a villa outside Florence in the years before the second world war and falls in love with the country, the light, the Italian pace of life. Heartwarming, atmospheric, a perfect summer read.

Adele Parks

author of Just My Luck
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. You may not have heard of this Australian-born, New York Times bestselling author yet, but I’ve been reading her for years; I love everything she’s written and I’m waiting to see her to blow-up here. Her bittersweet, thrilling dramas are shot through with life-enhancing humour. Somehow Hepworth’s Aussie sunshine floods off the page even when she’s delivering dark twists and murders. In this novel, unapologetically grumpy, fiercely independent 81-year-old Elsie lives quietly in an Australian suburb, except everywhere she goes people die in mysterious circumstances.

Claire Powell

author of All In
I couldn’t get enough of Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer, which is told from the perspective of a husband whose terminally ill wife asks him to move out so her best friends can move in. The literary equivalent of a friend telling an increasingly shocking story, it’s an unexpected and deeply moving read.