Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I will be taking on holiday Colson Whitehead's novel Sag Harbor (Harvill Secker), which is about an African-American boy's summer in upstate New York. I've heard him read an excerpt, which I thought was very good – he says this novel should have been his first, because it is autobiographical in a way that his other novels are not.

I've been meaning to read Lola Shoneyin's wonderfully titled novel about a polygamous family in Nigeria, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (Serpent's Tail). So that will come with me too.

William Boyd

It is both tempting and mischievous to conjoin for a summer read William Golding and Anthony Burgess. They represent opposing maverick wings of 20th-century English fiction. They had a lot in common as individuals (similar age, late starters as novelists – both in their 40s – heavy drinkers and smokers, musically accomplished) and yet remained entirely distinct as writers of fiction. Towards the end of their writing lives they generated one of the more intriguing literary feuds at the 1980 Booker prize. Burgess and Golding were head-to-head favourites: Burgess with Earthly Powers (Penguin) and Golding with Rites of Passage (Faber). Burgess refused to attend the award dinner unless he was declared winner. He wasn't, so he didn't. John Carey has recently written a superb authorised biography of Golding, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Faber), and Andrew Biswell's biography of Burgess, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador), expertly rearranges and re-establishes the facts that Burgess tried to blur and obscure. Why not add the novels to these exemplary biographies and see for yourself, with the full benefit of hindsight, how a Booker prize jury managed to get it wrong once again?

AS Byatt

The two books I'd take on holiday are Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction by Rowan Williams (Continuum), and The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus). The archbishop's book is an absorbing critical account of Dostoevsky's work which uses his real understanding of how Christian ideas shaped Dostoevsky's world and people. He is particularly good on the Devil. De Waal's memoir of his very rich Jewish ancestors, the civilisations they inhabited in Paris, St Petersburg and Vienna, the art they collected and their fate with the coming of the Nazis, is wise, strange and gripping. Two different worlds. Two grippingly readable books.

Alastair Campbell

You do not have to be a cricket fan – though it helps – to enjoy Duncan Hamilton's Harold Larwood (Quercus), a wonderful account of the life of one of our greatest fast bowlers. It's as much a story about class and the gulfs between people often on the same side as it is about sport in a very different era.

David Plouffe helped to run Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and his The Audacity to Win (Viking USA) gives as close an account of its ups and downs – admittedly from a very pro-Obama stance – as you are ever likely to get.

Margaret Drabble

I recommend Why Not Socialism? by GA Cohen (Princeton), who died last year. This tiny book will fit in any pocket, and it gives a neat summary of the arguments against private greed and for the communal interest. It may lead you to his brilliant work If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Harvard). He has answers to both his questions.

For a terrifying description of what happens to us without communal interest, try Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia (Pan). This is ideally unsettling reading for anyone taking a holiday anywhere near Naples, although it also sheds lights on what goes on everywhere from China to Aberdeen. Violent and courageous, this piece of reportage is far more thrilling than any thriller.

Helen Dunmore

Tim Dee's birdwatching memoir The Running Sky (Vintage) is as unexpected as it is brilliant. Birdwatching may or may not hold any appeal for you, but read it anyway. It's a moving, powerful meditation on the natural world that envelops us, even in the heart of our cities. Dee is a very candid writer, as observant about his own idiosyncrasies as he is about those of storm petrels in Shetland or peregrine falcons riding the air-currents by the Clifton suspension bridge. The book makes you want to travel to the places he describes so compellingly, but also to look up at the sky from wherever you are.

The characters in Simon Armitage's fire-cracker collection of tall tales and urban myths, Seeing Stars (Faber), are more likely to be seeing stars because they have been knocked out in a grudge fight than because they are gazing at the constellations. "I hadn't meant to go grave-robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive", begins one extravagant but perfectly pitched story of mayhem in the cemetery. Sharp, ironic, deadpan and light enough to slip in a backpack for those moments of holiday torpor.

Richard Ford

For starters, think of Flem Snopes with a law degree. Better yet, think of a whole US state full of Flem Snopeses with law degrees. In The Fall of the House of Zeus (Harmony) Curtis Wilkie, a former crack political writer for the Boston Globe, and a Mississippi native (it helps), follows the money from the coffers of Big Tobacco and asbestos into the pockets of some of the wiliest and crookedest good-ole-boy plaintiffs' lawyers in America and, from there, right down the rat-hole to infamy. It makes addictive reading for anyone interested in shameless greed, hilariously rotten behaviour, inept skulduggery and just plain bad manners.

Walks with Men by Ann Beattie (Scribner) is a seemingly modest little novel about either a perversely bad or, if you prefer, a perversely satisfying modern marriage. But there's nothing modest about Beattie's talent: razored perceptiveness, discomforting wit, self-implicating pity and an unstinting, empathetic intelligence about contemporary life. Once you finish it (in about an hour and 10 minutes) you'll want to march right back around to the front and read it again. Ann Beattie's just that good, and she always has been.

Jonathan Franzen

Many reliable friends have been urging me to read Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (Picador) for the sheer pleasure of it, and I've been thinking that Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Penguin Classics) might make the perfect beach read this summer – it has those nice, short sections and those cool, dark depths.

John Gray

The first of the two very different books I'd take with me on a long summer holiday is that solitary classic of British shamanism, The Peregrine by JA Baker (Collins). First published in 1967, the book recounts Baker's observations of peregrine falcons, made over 10 winters, during which he lost something of his human personality and at times came to feel he had become one of the birds he was watching. "Unconsciously," he writes, "I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts." It has just been republished in a magnificent new edition that includes Baker's The Hill of Summer and his Diaries, with an introduction by Mark Cocker. In all of them, Baker's personality is systematically effaced and very little is actually known of his life. Yet the near absence of any human being in these books goes with an extraordinary individuality of vision, producing some of the most arresting and beautiful prose in the English language.

György Faludy's autobiography My Happy Days in Hell, translated by Kathleen Szasz (Penguin Classics), is an account of a life passed pleasantly in the dangerous human world. First published in 1962, this is the Hungarian-Jewish poet's story of his flight to France and Africa, his years fighting as a volunteer in the US air force, and his return after the war to Hungary, where, after refusing to write a celebratory poem for Stalin's birthday, he was interned, emerging years later as one of a very small number who survived. Often at risk of death, even flirting with it in his encounters with Nazis and communists, Faludy revelled in the sheer sensation of being alive. Born in 1910, Faludy spent most of his highly productive later life in Canada and died in 2006. An exultant sensuous verve jumps from the pages of this sometimes bleak, never deceived and yet always life-affirming book.

David Hare

A campus novel, a modern reimagining of the film The Blue Angel, in which a professor is brought low by a creative writing student. Doesn't that sound awful? But Francine Prose's hypnotic Blue Angel (Allison & Busby) belongs, with Fellini's 8½ and Wallace Shawn's My Dinner with Andre, to that select category of great works which, in prospect, ought not to succeed. You will even think it worth damaging your eyesight on the ridiculous ant-like print of the paperback.

When the film director John Hughes died, Molly Ringwald put professional writers to shame with a tribute in the New York Times, comparing her own experiences with Hughes to those of Jean-Pierre Léaud with Truffaut. It was a smashing rebuke to the tedious journalistic libel that film actors are stupid. Here was just one who, for a start, writes far better than they do. That's why I'm taking Ringwald's Getting the Pretty Back (It Books) on holiday, hoping it will be just as good.

Michael Holroyd

Dan Rhodes's Little Hands Clapping (Canongate) is a macabre, brilliant and terrifying novel that comes highly recommended by Douglas Coupland as being "totally sick". This sickness arises from the eating habits of its characters, which range from swallowing live spiders in bed at night to the systematic devouring (after a spell in the freezer) of suicide victims from a museum somewhat desperately dedicated to optimism. Good strong stuff.

Richer, more appetising fare (including beef jerky, guinea pigs and maca cocktails) is offered by the travel writer and art historian Michael Jacobs's wonderful Andes (Granta). Jacobs is such a vivid writer that you can feel yourself completing intrepid journeys while sitting safely in your armchair.

Jackie Kay

I'm planning to pack David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Picador), a meaty and fascinating biography that you need a whole holiday to pore over. Remnick is compulsive reading because he combines a fiction writer's pace with a biographer's psychological depth. He shows how Chicago's complex racial legacy shaped the young Obama, how he crossed the personal to the political to become who he is today, and how his journey illuminates the journey of our whole society.

Certainly Harper Lee would never have imagined, when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (Arrow), that 50 years later Obama would be president. I'm packing that too, because I want to reread it, to revisit the small town of Maycomb, to remember the words of Tom, the accused black man: "If you was a nigger like me, you'd be scared too." I like to think of the conversation that Lee would have with Obama, or, even better, that Atticus Finch would have with Obama, and to think what can happen in the long and short time of half a century.

AL Kennedy

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape) is a beautifully written and elegantly frank memoir by Bill Clegg. Once an upwardly-mobile young Manhattan literary agent, Clegg collapsed into suicidal crack addiction – in flight from his loves, his promise, his past and himself. The book is desperately honest about his childhood afflictions and his appetites without making excuses or appealing for pity – there are no easy fixes and no flinching; there is simply a lyrical, funny and shattering narration of a long, hard path. Clegg's subsequent entry into a process of recovery is handled with dignity, and his return to the world of books – one of his deepest and earliest loves – along with the act of creating the book itself are quietly and wonderfully redemptive.

My second recommendation is a public-domain reprint of Marmion Wilard Savage's The Bachelor of the Albany, which I'd been meaning to read for a while. It's a gently witty and intelligent fantasy from 1848 – benevolent merchants, giddy twins, Christmas interiors of which Dickens might be proud, complicatedly estranged relatives, a young widow and, of course, the initially impregnable bachelor. It's a book that enjoys itself companionably and contains some lovely passages of exuberantly virtuoso description – the one concerning the Albany itself along with its denizens would probably stand to this day.

David Kynaston

We sometimes forget that two notable writers died on 22 November 1963, that otherwise slow news day. So for a coalition of dead white males, to complement our public schoolboys in Downing Street, I'm plumping for a long-overdue reading of Aldous Huxley's novel Point Counter Point (Vintage), by all accounts a reminder of when conversation still mattered, and a re-reading of CS Lewis's autobiographical, only dimly remembered Surprised by Joy (HarperCollins), with his conversion to (or was it from?) Hegelianism on a bus going up (or was it down?) Headington Hill in Oxford.

David Lodge

I've been saving up Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape) for the Mediterranean holiday I'm about to start, and not just because it's about the sexual shenanigans of young people on vacation in Italy 40 years ago. I always relish the witty inventiveness of Amis's style and have read the first 20 pages of this one chuckling happily. My interest was quickened by his account, in a recent BBC4 interview with Mark Lawson, of the novel's theme: that the rampant sexual revolution of the 1970s was not on the whole good for young women, a view with which, as an observer rather than a participant, I am inclined to agree.

Pope Benedict is coming to England in the autumn to, among other things, preside over the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the first stage to sainthood. Disputes about Newman's sexuality and the alleged miracle on which his beatification depends have already generated controversy. So, another book I aim to read this summer is Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum), a timely biography by John Cornwell. He admires Newman, but seeks to save him from hagiography and to remind us that he was a great and independent Christian thinker – one of the first, for instance, to accept the idea of evolution – and a master of English prose.

Amis and Newman are certainly an odd couple, but they have one thing in common: they both wrote novels. Denying that he was a saint, Newman said: "Saints don't write tales." Amis would no doubt agree.

Caroline Lucas

I loved Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, because it worked on so many levels – historical, philosophical, political and literary – so I have high hopes of her latest novel, Lacuna (Faber). With fictional characters interwoven with historical figures – Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky – and set against the McCarthy era in the US, it sounds as though it has all the ingredients for another great novel.

A bit closer to work, my husband and I are currently tussling over our one copy of Chris Mullin's diaries, A View from the Foothills (Profile), the way that any couple fight to get the weekend papers first. Mullin is both playful and precise with language, as well as admirably irreverent ("the spooks are livid about the sixth-form essay on Saddam's chemical arsenal cooked up by No 10"), and his book offers a fascinating insight into parliamentary life. What have I let myself in for?

Richard Mabey

I'll need a long summer break just to finish Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's dense but explosively exciting What Darwin Got Wrong (Profile). The celebration of the great scientist's bicentenary last year courteously sidestepped the fact that most cutting-edge biologists now regard natural selection as little more than cosmetic tweaking in the process of evolution. What's happening is far more philosophically thrilling: creatures are doing it for themselves. The authors show how ancient "managerial" genes, self-organising systems in cells and the inherent tendency towards symmetry in living structures all help to generate new organisms fully pre-adapted to their environments. Wings already pre-balanced for flight!

It will be a relief to relax with an account of how, in some hapless organisms, evolution often gets it spectacularly wrong. As a fellow-sufferer from what might be called hydraulic dysfunction, I shall relish Tim Parks's account of his rebellious bladder and his heroic quest for a cure. Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (Harvill Secker) was, fortunately, an unsuccessful odyssey, otherwise we wouldn't have this maverick book about the stand-off between aspiration and biological constraint – one of the kinds of negotiation that drive evolution, whatever view you have of it.

David Miliband

Mark Oaten's Coalition (Harriman House) is a history of coalition-making since 1850 and has a fascinating chapter looking forward to the election just gone. I think we're all asking ourselves whether this coalition can work, and I've heard that Mark slowly became disenchanted with the whole concept of coalitions during the writing of the book. Essential reading for anyone who wants to be the next leader of the Labour party, but probably best enjoyed travelling back from holiday to get you back into the work zone.

The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's new and controversial novel (Jonathan Cape), couldn't be further removed from Oaten's book. The reviews have been mixed, but I'm a strong believer in the only way to find out is to read it yourself. I don't think you can ever be disappointed with an Amis novel – his ability to draw you into his writing is second to none. It's definitely one to be enjoyed on holiday, with a cold beer, when the children have gone to bed.

Ed Miliband

I've been reading David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win (Viking USA) – a book to restore your interest and faith in politics. Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager, provides a behind-the-scenes account of how Obama inspired Americans to join his movement, and shows it is possible to win office by combining strategic canniness and a commitment to a politics based on values. One to give to your friends who are cynical about what politics can achieve.

Henning Mankel's novel Depths (Vintage) is one of my favourites. It transports you into a Nordic landscape of intrigue, suspicion, deceit and murder. Part thriller, part psychological fantasy and part political-philosophical tract, it's totally absorbing.

Pankaj Mishra

Having grown up in India, which has far too many sunny, hot days, I find a sofa in a cool dark room more congenial than a crowded beach during July and August; it happily enables a diverse amount of reading. A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf), the new novel by Jennifer Egan, a seemingly unassuming but stunningly resourceful writer, sits on top of my fiction pile. I hope also to indulge my weakness for doorstopper biographies of American plutocrats with TJ Stiles's acclaimed The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf).

Blake Morrison

Two very different memoirs, one about discovery, the other about loss. In Red Dust Road (Picador) the poet and novelist Jackie Kay tells of her tense reunions with her birth parents, whom she finds again in mid-life – her mother has Alzheimer's, and her father, a born-again Christian desperate to forget past sins, wants to keep her a secret from his Nigerian family. It might have made a sad story but, told as it is with zest and humour, it becomes a love song to her adoptive parents.

Jim Perrin is better known as a climber than as a poet, but West (Atlantic), written in the aftermath of the suicide of his son and the death of his wife, has a lyrical intensity few poets could equal. By immersing himself in wild landscapes and all the memories they contain, Perrin finds solace in his grief. As well as his magical thinking, he offers a robust, anarchic hedonism that's more like Byron (or the Johnny Byron of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem) than Wordsworth.

Kate Mosse

My first choice is the powerful new book from Fergal Keane, which tells the harrowing story of one of the forgotten battles of the second world war. Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 (Harper Press) takes us to Rangoon, to the dying days of empire and a particular siege, and a massacre, that reflects all human history through the story of the men and women who died on the road of bones.

For the daylight hours, though, something lighter: the poetry impresario Daisy Goodwin has a novel coming out in August. My Last Duchess (Headline Review) is a love story, set between New York and England in the 1890s, involving an American heiress and her search for a British aristocratic husband.

Andrew Motion

One very English memoir/elegy, Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic), which beautifully evokes the landscape and lore of his postwar rural childhood, with all its country orthodoxies (especially fishing) intact; and one Canadian/postmodern memoir/elegy, Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions), which in form and procedure is about as radical as book-publishing gets these days. They describe different kinds of loss, in enormously different ways, yet they converge on the same spot, where every kind of articulation is defeated. Holiday reading if you're heading for a stony beach.

David Nicholls

For some reason I had a notion of Penelope Lively as a quiet, conventional writer, but clearly I was wrong. Moon Tiger (Penguin) is a remarkable novel, evocative, heartbreaking, formally experimental but entirely gripping. Switching between past and present, first and third person, it's a dream-like kaleidoscope of memories and encounters, and yet it never feels disjointed or episodic. It's a book that will stay with me for a very long time.

I'll also be starting the third volume of Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton), his saga of love and death at a shabby Dublin boarding school. At nearly 700 pages it's that rare thing, a comic epic, but the prose and characterisation are so detailed and funny that it rarely drags. Murray is a brilliant comic writer, but also humane and touching, and he captures the misery and elation, joy and anxiety of teenage life.

Audrey Niffenegger

I recommend The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Arrow) for the beach, followed by Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (Harper Perennial).

The Magicians is set in a sort of Harry Potteresque dystopia: our hero, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessive and whiny but has unsuspected magical talents that waft him into a super-secret college of magic in upstate New York. Many of the students are devoted to a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory, and Grossman explores the boundaries between fiction and reality with great imagination when the students discover that Fillory is real and they can visit it. This is a dark, well-written book that takes the wizard genre into thoughtful places.

The Year of Magical Thinking is an anguished and eloquent account of Didion's grief following the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. She recounts with great precision her loss, her disbelief, her memories. It's is in no way a beach read, but it does give the reader a heightened sense of the pleasures of simply being alive.

Joseph O'Connor

I will be revisiting two acclaimed masterworks by leading English storytellers: The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson) and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Vintage). One is a somewhat controversial work about a tender love affair, a troubled honeymoon and the loneliness of marriage. The other is On Chesil Beach.

David Peace

Not one person in the United Kingdom voted for the present "coalition government". So every cut, every budget, every single piece of legislation that this "coalition government" proposes has no mandate from any single member of the electorate. Equally, every single penny of every single pound that we pay in taxes then goes to this unelected "coalition government" – a "coalition government" with no authority whatsoever. A "coalition" of a lust for power and a contempt for democracy. A "government" of the richest 10%, for the richest 10%. And so my "coalition books" remain the Holy Bible and its fifth gospel, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford); here is a coalition you can vote for, and vote for today: the Shield of Marx and the Sword of Christ.

Fred Pearce

Marek Kohn's Turned Out Nice (Faber) is an intimate and stylish geographical romp through the near-permanent summers of Britain's future under global warming. Kohn reckons we will get off lightly. What I really like is the way he puts future change in the context of past transformations of our varied landscape. On holiday in Sussex, I will take this to explore the South Downs and the beautiful Cuckmere valley with new eyes.

Beer provides its own intimate geography of Britain, as Roger Protz highlights in his new edition of 300 Beers to Try Before you Die (Camra Books). Most of his (and my) favoured British brews are rooted in the local landscape that provides their ingredients. And they seem to have been around nearly as long as the places they celebrate. I will be following Protz's tracks to taste Harvey's Sussex Best and Fuller's London Pride; Pendle Witches Brew and Orkney Dark Island.

Annie Proulx

If food for thought is what you like, here are two savage banquets. Bill McKibben's Eaarth (Times Books) is a chilling look-what-we've-done-to-the-planet review that says the globe on which we wasteful, spoiled consumers grew up is gone and in its place is this damaged human-world, eaarth. Yet McKibben focuses not on an endgame, but on new beginnings in response to our narrowing choices. Those new beginnings revolve largely around hunger and food supplies and a return to a simpler life.

Very different is the riveting new book by John Vaillant, The Tiger, to be published by Knopf in August, and to be made into a film. Fans of Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala may know that the source for his film was the 1921 book of the same title by Russian explorer-naturalist Vladimir Arsenyev. Vaillant explores the same fascinating geography: Russia's wild, far-eastern taiga, near the Chinese border, populated by a variety of ethnic groups, ginseng hunters and poachers. The book focuses on the threatened Siberian tiger, a strangely spiritual animal that in legend and fact harbours grudges and takes vengeance. The story is told through the men who work to protect the tigers, and those who kill them. In Arsenyev's day the local people lived with the tigers in something resembling harmony and did not kill them. The tigers recognised human individuals, and, in Vaillant's book, they still do.

Ian Rankin

I recently asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend new books and writers to me. I've now ordered half a dozen of the suggested titles. The first to turn up was The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra (Picador). I can't tell you much about it except what the jacket tells me, so I know it's about a young man who arrives in Benares hoping to do a lot of reading, but who finds himself affected by his location in strange and wonderful ways. I visited India for the first time this year and am hoping to learn more about the country from this novel.

One city I know pretty well is Belfast – my wife was brought up there and we make regular visits back, so my summer reading will also comprise the latest offering from my favourite Belfast crime writer, (Colin) Bateman. His first name has to go in parentheses, as his publishers want us to ignore it, for some reason. Bateman writes about the real city, so much so that his hero in The Day of the Jack Russell (Headline) owns a bookshop called No Alibis – a shop I know to be real. He also holds meetings at the cafe across the road from it, a cafe I also know very well. This adds an extra layer of pleasure whenever I read (Colin). He is a terrific guide to post-Troubles Belfast and is also very funny, though if he keeps losing names at this rate he'll soon be called Anon . . .

Helen Simpson

Side by side in the holiday suitcase are Indignation by Philip Roth (Vintage) and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus). These very different writers, now well into their 70s, both seem recently to have extended their already awesome reach. Roth's short furio-comic novel is inflamed by the narrow-minded strictures forced on the young in 50s America by a system which also recklessly sent them to war. The monologue of a dead 19-year-old remembering his short life, this masterly spiralling rant works by means of repetition and recapitulation.

Munro's latest collection also deals with the work of memory – with the past and how to digest it – in breathtaking style. She is subtler but bolder, too, than Roth in her handling of fictional structures, in stories that show how we change (and continue to change) until the day we die. She grows ever more daring in her treatment of the non-stop different versions of events that time produces as perspectives shift and slide.

Hilary Spurling

My ideal book for total immersion on the beach is Katharine McMahon's The Crimson Rooms (Phoenix), the story of a young female lawyer caught up in her first murder case in the aftermath of the first world war. It is one of those books so intensely alive in the past that it makes the world you actually live in feel flimsy and thin. McMahon combines a thriller writer's grip, pace and punch with the true novelist's depth and warmth of feeling.

For a long, slow, lingering read, try Candia McWilliam's What to Look for in Winter (Jonathan Cape), a strange and startling memoir slung between the central poles of writing, alcoholism and blindness. It is a kind of literary origami trick, where the author folds in on herself in tight, dense, intricate coils, then unfolds herself again with miraculous lightness and delicacy.

Tom Stoppard

In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered £1m – each – for the solution of seven problems that had continued to resist the best efforts of the best brains. Two years later, a Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, proved the Poincaré conjecture, which people had been working on for 98 years. Then he refused the million dollars. He felt insulted and betrayed. Perelman and the world of Soviet maths training make a fascinating, moving tale, and in Perfect Rigor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Masha Gessen tells it brilliantly. Among recent novels, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Penguin) is faultless.

Colm Tóibín

If you need a book that people will laugh at you for reading anywhere from the airport to the beach, and that you in turn can laugh at for its mad details and its sheer barking insanity, then I suggest you follow my example and move around the world with William Shawcross's biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (Macmillan). There are certain beaches especially (and indeed certain airports) where the sight of someone reading this book will cause people to gather their friends and form a circle and simply howl.

On the other hand, if you want to look like a rock of good sense, a person who is deep and wise and worried, then I suggest Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (Allen Lane). It not only looks good and solid, but it explains with casual wit and total clarity why everything went wrong and makes sense of the most complex financial matters. If only the Queen Mother were still alive, it would make sense even to her.

Rose Tremain

Bill Clegg's audacious Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape) – read, preferably, with a poolside hangover – could shock you into lifelong sobriety. I've never read anything about crack addiction as painful as this. Luckily for Clegg, he was saved by the love and patience of his friends and is once again a (still-young) literary agent working in Manhattan.

He and others might take as their night-time read Peter Matthiessen's classic The Snow Leopard (newly reissued by Vintage, with an introduction by Richard Mabey) to remind themselves how man can be liberated from himself in other ways. After the death of his wife in 1978, Matthiessen joined his explorer friend, George Schaller, on a trip to the Crystal Mountain in Nepal, in search of the elusive snow leopard and of some way forward for his interrupted life. To say that this is a gripping and awesome journey is to sell short the whole magnificent and complex endeavour. As Mabey writes, Matthiessen did want to glimpse the leopard, but he was also "desperate for it to remain invisible, secretly itself, untouched by his cravings".

Sarah Waters

One of the books I'll be taking on holiday I've actually just finished, but it's such an impressive, enigmatic, multi-layered novel that I want to read it all over again. It's Austin Wright's Tony & Susan (Atlantic; see review, page 9), a page-turner of a literary thriller that explores the dynamics of family life, of love and betrayal – ultimately, of the reading experience itself. Not since Cormac McCarthy's The Road have I been so gripped and unsettled by a piece of fiction.

The other book in my suitcase – a new biography of Emily Dickinson – may sound more gentle; but that, perhaps, is because we've inherited a view of Dickinson as weedy and reclusive – the ultimate fey "lady poet". Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Virago) promises to cut through the stereotype to expose the dramas and passions of life in the Dickinson home, and sounds like a brilliant, gob-smacking read.

Compiled by Ginny Hooker.