What we're reading for summer 2025 — by Rachel Reeves and more

Times

3 days ago

Parliament is in recess, schools have broken up and the sun is taking a little time off — it must be the beginning of the Great British Summer. With room in any suitcase at a premium, we've asked novelists, historians, broadcasters, fashionistas, chefs — and members of the cabinet — to tell us the one book they're packing for their holidays this year. What will the chancellor read to chillax before the autumn budget? Which title is on the Vogue editor's radar — and how do Booker winners choose their beach reads? We asked them all.
And if you're looking for more recommendations, our books desk have put together their 80 picks of the year here, while John Self has curated a list of reads to suit any destination, from Athens to Los Angeles. Happy reading.
I was obsessed with Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith from the moment I read its opening sentence — 'All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling' — and I shamelessly borrowed his concept of an honest policeman in a corrupt totalitarian state when I came to write my first novel. I'm going to reread it this summer, along with Polar Star, its sequel (which in many respects is even better), mostly for pleasure, but also to honour Smith, who died this month — he was a writer, like John le Carré, who showed just how intelligent and artful a thriller can be.
• Robert Harris: Conclave to elect a pope is like a global election
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid is the perfect summer holiday read. It is a beautifully written, immersive story about pioneering women, the bonds of friendship, the beauty and heartbreak of true love and the risks people will take to help it triumph against the odds. Jenkins Reid also offers a fascinating insight into the US space programme in the 1980s, although she has undoubtedly, and rightly, deployed some artistic licence along the way to aid the story. If this book doesn't have you sobbing big ugly tears in the final pages, you must have a heart of stone.
I was a fan already, but David Szalay's Flesh blew me away. Scenes from a man's life, from adolescence to bruised middle-age — it's spare and tough, but also hugely entertaining, gripping like a thriller as Istvan experiences love and violence, sex and success, wealth and failure. Yes, it's a novel about a certain chilly masculinity, but Szalay is also intrigued by luck and chance, the way a random encounter or rash decision can send a life spinning disastrously out of control.
• David Nicholls: I adore Howards End — and I want to throw it across the room
I confess I came late to the works of Norman Lewis, not until a review somewhere piqued my interest (as the best reviews do). A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis is a collection spanning five decades. Spain, South America, Sicily, Cuba and elsewhere — Lewis immerses himself in the local culture and history and brings fresh insights while providing terrific anecdotes and introducing the reader to a range of fascinating characters. The prose is sublime too. It's a chunky book (500 pages), but one you can dip into as the mood takes you.
I hadn't heard of Siân James until I was sent a copy of her novel One Afternoon by the writer Rachel Joyce, telling me I'd love it, and she was right, I did. Born in Wales, James won the Yorkshire Post Book Award when One Afternoon was published in 1975. It follows the adventures of Anna, who is recently widowed and in charge of three small girls when, quite unexpectedly, an inconveniently young and dashing actor declares his love. It's exquisitely written, moving and very funny, the dialogue is perfect and the book impossible to put down.
• Esther Freud — my favourite three books
No-one writes better about celebrity and the gilded, tortured lives of the famous than Roger Lewis. Erotic Vagrancy, his study of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is a gothic masterpiece. So I'm looking forward to his updated The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which is reissued this summer with a new introduction by Steve Coogan. It's the only book of his I haven't read and I know I'll love every detail of his portrait of the genius as monster.
Helm by Sarah Hall is a novel that features a mischievous wind as one of its main characters, a concept I love. It's out in August and I am reading an uncorrected proof that she sent me, which is incredibly exciting as normally I'm reading novels two or three years after everyone else.
Joanna Miller's The Eights, about a group of young women who, in 1920, were among the first female cohort to matriculate at Oxford University, has heart, soul, intelligence and wit, and packing it might well make a suitcase lighter. If, on the other hand, American cop thrillers are more your thing, buy a pile of John Sandford novels — any John Sandford novels — and stack them next to your deckchair. Happy holidays.
• The novelist Mick Herron lets us into his cultural life
Maybe brain rot has truly set in, but my attention span is feeling more challenged than ever. I've always been a sucker for short stories — I recently devoured Send Nudes, Saba Sams's collection, highly recommended. My friend and colleague Funmi Fetto recently turned her hand to the format. The collection is called Hail Mary, and follows the lives of nine Nigerian women. I've been dipping in and out of both. And it scratches the itch of needing good literature — in a hurry.
I love to take a well-thumbed favourite book on holiday, and no book is more of an old friend to me than Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. She is best known for her Moomin books, but this is a wonderful coming-of-age novel about a little human girl called Sophia and her elderly, hilariously cantankerous grandmother. Set on a tiny Finnish island, over one timeless summer, it is a Scandi classic.
Dying to escape the 2020s crop of self-indulgent 'poor-old-me' narratives? Then go back immediately to John Williams's 1965 novel Stoner, one of the most exquisite portraits of a stoical man under life's brutal cosh you will ever read. Born into rural poverty, 'Willy' Stoner escapes the treadmill of farming life in the American Midwest to realise his unlikely dream of becoming a teacher of literature at the University of Missouri. But dream slowly turns to nightmare. An ill-judged marriage and a corrosive academic rivalry inflict lifelong punishment on a man with a dazzling mind and a too-kind heart. In its emotional intensity this novel has been compared to Jude the Obscure and holds up well under this scrutiny.
• Rose Tremain: 'Writing about sex has to be done with taste'
Tom McTague's Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (out in September) is an extraordinary piece of writing and of historical research about Britain's relationship with Europe: it's lively, relevant, telling us so much about the world from which we are emerging, and what seems to be fracturing around us.
I'm re-reading the 1977 revised version of John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus. Fowles described his novel — he worked on it for 12 years — as the work of a 'retarded adolescent'. Consequently, the plot is suitably heady and preposterous, but what redeems the novel is the fact that Greece and her islands are wonderfully, tactilely present on almost every page. If you've never been to Greece, or are a passionate philhellene who can't make it this year, then reading The Magus will make you feel you've actually been on holiday there. A very strange but undeniably beguiling book.
I loved Miranda Cowley Heller's debut novel, The Paper Palace, but I think I like What the Deep Water Knows, her follow-up novel in verse, even more. Each poem is a chapter in a life from childhood through marriage, motherhood, divorce and midlife crises. Funny, moving and above all true. I am looking forward to reading it properly, letting the words breathe before I gulp them down.
Penguin has just brought out another batch of handsomely repackaged Maigret novels by Georges Simenon, including The Saint-Fiacre Affair, a small but resonant masterpiece. The plot is, as usual, preposterous — Maigret is summoned to the village of his birth by an enigmatic announcement of an impending murder — but, as usual, it does not matter. The opening pages, in which Maigret performs his morning rituals in a grubby little provincial hotel, are a perfect example of Simenon's gift for fixing a scene with vividness and poetic accuracy. This is fiction of the highest order, transcending all conventions of mere 'genre'.
• John Banville: I will resist calling myself underrated
I can't wait for the latest Sportsman cookbook, The Sportsman at Home (out in November). I've ordered it already. Stephen Harris and his pub on the Kent coast is one of the most beautiful and best places in the country. To show you how to cook using some of his techniques at home, this is a must-have for everybody.
I went to India for the first time in a decade this year, and feel intoxicated. Keshava Guha's very well-reviewed novel The Tiger's Share promises to chronicle the growing pains of the most diverse, energetic, youthful and complex nation, not to say civilisation, on Earth — and to do it through the prism of difficult family dynamics. Perfect. I have a vast family in India as my mum and dad were one of the 13 and 11 siblings respectively. I'm half expecting one of my cousins to pop up in an early chapter.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this time you'll finally make it through a punishing book you've been defeated by in the past. But do make sure it's something of the highest quality. So: The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Two Australian sisters come to Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Their complex choices are rendered in prose that is gorgeously precise but never precious. One of the greatest — and most enjoyable — novels of the past 50 years.
Lovely One is the memoir of the judge who made history three years ago when she became the first black woman to serve on the US Supreme Court. It goes from Ketanji Brown Jackson's family experience of segregation to her swearing in, and at this tempestuous time in American public life, I am hoping it helps me understand what it takes to serve at this level.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the winner of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction, is an exceptional debut — exquisitely written, haunting, unsettling and deeply steamy. Set 15 years after the Second World War in a rural province in the Netherlands, it shines a light on the 'what happened next' periods of history, the forgotten aftermaths of terrible events and what it meant for those living through such times. It's a story of revenge, the corruptions of history, obsession and desire. Van der Wouden manages to confound the reader so that our sympathies are constantly switching between the two female protagonists, Isabel and Eva. A perfect summer read.
• 80 best books to take on holiday this summer — chosen by the experts
My pick this summer is The Good Liar by Denise Mina. For me, Mina is the UK's finest living writer of crime fiction. Her novel The Long Drop, about a fictionalised 48 hours in the life of the serial killer Peter Manuel, is the best book I've read in the past decade. The Good Liar is the tale of Claudia O'Sheil, a forensic scientist who may have got the biggest case of her life wrong. It's about truth versus legacy and the personal cost of honesty. No one gets under the skin of characters quite the way Mina does. She's sublime, and this book is too.
I'm starting to aggressively rebel against the marginalisation of straight white males in the feminised publishing industry. If you too are sick of girliness and sensitivity, I can't recommend David Szalay more heartily. Flesh is fiercely male. The protagonist isn't given to tiring self-analysis. In a rags to riches to (spoiler alert) rags tale, a young Hungarian makes good in London because so many women want to sleep with him. But what makes this book is the writing: spare and muscular, with no frills, no decoration. Like a flat with bare walls, one table, and a chair.
• Lionel Shriver: Now I've left Britain, here's what you look like
Stephen Alford's All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil, which tells the story of the clandestine life of the chief minister of Elizabeth I and James I. It is a fascinating voyage into the nexus of monarchy, politics, diplomacy and espionage that was controlled by Cecil. There are many books about Elizabeth, but this gives the reader a real grasp of how personal autocracy and government worked under the last Tudor and first Stuart sovereign. It is also a biography of Cecil himself. It is written beautifully, elegantly, sparely. Its research is the fruit of decades in the archives. It is a magnificent masterwork and a joy from start to finish.
The protagonist of Father Figure by Emma Forrest is a precociously clever Jewish girl who becomes entangled with the family of an oligarch when he places his daughter at her private school. The resulting intrigue fizzes and pops with diamond-hard observations on money, class, politics, sexuality and points in between. Forrest puts teenage emotions under the most powerful of microscopes, but this is anything but a small novel, and everything comes together beautifully in a coda that is wise, tender and moving.
The plan is to get up to date (belatedly) with Sarah Perry's novel Enlightenment. I'm always impressed by her capacity to juggle different genres, voices and periods, and I found Melmoth one of the most searching and moving novels I've read for quite a while, so expectations are high for this one. She's one of a handful of British novelists who can anatomise the byways and pathologies of religious faith with real understanding and still find startling things to say about grace and miracle.
• Rowan Williams: 'I shudder to think what Queen Elizabeth thought of me'
Ian Penman is maybe my favourite critic, a mad zealot in praise of his eclectic enthusiasms, and with Erik Satie Three Piece Suite he draws us into the belle époque Paris of the great composer and innovator, and maps out his influence across 20th-century music, art and literature. It's a great book to dip in and out of, a kind of compendium of thoughts and digressions opening out from Satie's work and bittersweet life. I believe it will enliven (and help to inspire a playlist for) even the dreariest of holidays.
AI is changing everything, from the way we work to how we dream. It's wildly powerful, potentially threatening and deeply inspiring. For me, it's not about fearing the future but understanding it, especially how it can help in my world: retail, media, storytelling, social content and creation. The blurring line between what's real and what's machine-made is exhilarating and unnerving. But it's happening fast, and it's best we keep up. So this summer, while I'm soaking in sunsets and slow moments, I'll also be diving deep into the world of AI with How AI Will Change Your Life by Patrick Dixon.
The book of my summer is not — by conventional standards, at any rate — a book at all. The Universal Turing Machine is subtitled by its author, the novelist Richard Beard, 'a memoir', but that barely scratches the surface of how dazzlingly original and multifaceted an achievement it is. Beard has divided his life into 64 chapters, and patterned them on to an online chessboard. The order in which these chapters are read is then determined in part by a randomiser. At once a homage to Georges Perec, a work of science fiction and an often hilarious Bildungsroman, it can be read free here: universalturingmachine.co.uk
• What we're reading this week — by the Times books team
by Max Kendix
As Rachel Reeves eyes her autumn budget, she believes that there is one way out of Britain's economic malaise — economic growth, whatever the cost. Her choice of book, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, reflects this mentality. At its heart is a criticism of bureaucracy that stifles change and growth. Abundance, the notion of plenty that was once a byword for the American dream, has been reduced to a 'politics of scarcity'. Keir Starmer's mantra, that Britain must be a nation of builders not blockers, has echoes in this book. Whether rhetoric will meet reality remains to be seen.
The attorney general is delving into ideological rigidity. In The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod, a political psychologist and neuroscientist, asks whether ideological differences can be explained by the way people's brains work. She highlights brain scans showing that the amygdala, which processes negative emotions, is larger in those disposed to extreme right-wing ideologies. Experiments suggest that those with prejudiced views are more likely to reject the evidence of their own eyes in favour of existing patterns. It's a contentious and provocative book, and an interesting choice from Hermer, who has faced claims of ideological purism himself.
Mahmood, whose first year in office has been dominated by the prisons crisis, has opted for pure escapism. She has picked Richard Osman's thriller We Solve Murders, a globetrotting tale of skulduggery among the super-rich. The book is pure Osman — the protagonists are a young bodyguard and her widowed father-in-law, an ex-policeman. Mahmood loves all detective fiction and would have gone for the new Cormoran Strike book, The Hallmarked Man, by JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith if she could, but it's not out until September.
• Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List
Reynolds has spent much of his first year in office attempting to tread the finest of lines. Securing trade deals with the EU and US has meant attempting to balance competing factions, conflicting interests and at times mutual loathing. His success in negotiating with Donald Trump's regime and the court of Maga was pivotal in ensuring Britain was first in line for a trade deal with the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Reynolds has gone for a classic — Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Intrigue and treachery as courtiers attempt to navigate the whims of one man.
Alexander has picked Karla's Choice by John le Carré's son, Nick Harkaway. He takes over his father's most memorable characters in this novel about George Smiley's attempt to leave 'the Circus' at the height of the Cold War. Set in 1963, it involves a Hungarian émigré, a German double agent and the title's Soviet spymaster. Reviews have praised the grubby tension and murky moral compromises — how much of a holiday that is from Westminster is unclear.
Kyle has chosen to take a complete break from his day job with Robert Harris's Precipice, the rip-roaring tale of the affair between Herbert Asquith, the 61-year-old Liberal prime minister on the eve of the First World War, and Venetia Stanley, a 26-year-old socialite. The book charts their passionate affair, including the deluge of love letters between them, limousine journeys with the blinds down and official secrets. All against the backdrop of the looming conflict.