We asked novelists and historians to tell us which new book and which classic they’re packing this year. From Ishiguro to Napoleon, here are their selections:

Alan Johnson

A new Kazuo Ishiguro novel is always worth waiting for, which is just as well because The Buried Giant (Faber) is his first in a decade. This is yet another masterpiece from one of our greatest living authors, notable for the clarity of its prose.

I read Vanity Fair (OUP) shortly after stepping down as Shadow Chancellor and was rather disconcerted to find that one of the book’s leading characters was called George Osborne.

For anyone who has yet to read William Thackeray’s “novel without a hero” set in Regency Britain, the bicentenary of Waterloo should make this the year that you do. Meeting Becky Sharp will be your reward.

Alan Johnson’s Please, Mr Postman (Corgi) is now in paperback

Claire Tomalin

Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon the Great (Penguin) took me by surprise. I started on the paperback, and was so absorbed that I Kindled it as I was flying to Sydney.

It is a glorious book, doing justice to the man who formed modern France and the military leader whose tactics defeated all comers until they learnt to copy him. Napoleon was a great reader, a fast mover and a leader adored by his men.

Credit: © age fotostock / Alamy/age fotostock / Alamy

He was born a few years before Jane Austen and died a few years after her: I wonder what brought these disparate geniuses into the world together?

After you have enjoyed Roberts’s book, why not turn to Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (Penguin), whose hero, Fabrice del Dongo, is inspired by his admiration of Napoleon to visit the field of Waterloo? It is one of the oddest and best novels ever written. Stendhal had marched to Moscow in Napoleon’s army, survived the retreat and returned to France to write his wonderful books.

Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: a Life is published by Penguin

Steve Hilton

As my closest friends know, I’m not a great reader, but the one proper book I read this year was a pure pleasure. The Beatles: All These Years, Volume One (Little, Brown) by Mark Lewisohn is not just for Beatles fans, or music fans, though it helps if, like me, you’re both. It has a brilliant narrative, propelled by character, action and chance encounters as thrilling as any great novel. It is a fantastic social history, illuminating life in post-war Britain in compelling detail.

Much shorter, and often in my thoughts this year as I wrote my own book, was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. As we debate artificial intelligence, technology’s take-over of our lives and genetic engineering of everything from tomatoes to people, Huxley’s dystopia is worth another look. Interestingly, he said he wasn’t sure whether his masterpiece was a “satire, a prophecy or a blueprint”. See for yourself.

Steve Hilton’s More Human: Designing a World Where People Come Firstis published by WH Allen

Nina Stibbe

For summer reading I’d recommend Naked at the Albert Hall (Virago), Tracey Thorn’s part-memoir, part examination of what it is to sing. Thorn’s anecdotes are nice, but it’s her opinions and some gem-like confessions that make it feel like a proper discussion. I loved it.

I recently re-read Edna O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). This lovely study of growing up, loyalty and friendship contains humour, sadness and wonder as well as some striking images – the peach tin to pee in, a first sight of male anatomy, and the damp cold bedspread of a rented bedroom.

Nina Stibbe’s Man at the Helm is published by Penguin

Juliet Nicolson

Jeremy Hutchinson had an astonishing career as advocate for some of the 20th century’s most famous trials, including defending the publication of Lady Chatterley, the perjury of Christine Keeler and the betrayal of George Blake.

Inspiration for John Mortimer’s Rumpole and now aged a splendidly vital 100 years, Hutchinson has been brilliantly and wittily served by his case-biographer Thomas Grant QC. Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories(John Murray) encapsulates the fascinating untold stories behind the cases defining issues of homosexuality, espionage, class and deference that dominated post-war Britain, and Hutchinson’s own passion for penal reform.

Re-reading DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover will remind us why Hutchinson fought for the publication of one of the most beautifully written and fantastically sexy love stories in literature.

Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters will be published by Chatto & Windus next year

Antonia Fraser

If you want an engrossing read that will carry you happily through the summer months, taking your mind off any conceivable troubles by the dramatic story it tells, you cannot do better than Napoleon the Great(Penguin) by Andrew Roberts.

Although the hardback version is a thing of beauty, it does not set out to be lightweight in any sense; therefore it is convenient that a paperback has become quickly available. Subject and author have in common a heroic swagger, and the resulting match is a delight; as to the general line taken, the title of the book neatly sums it up.

I make no apology for recommending a book I have edited, since it has actually been written by 43 other writers, and all royalties go to a charity whose title also sums up its purpose: Give a Book.

The Pleasure of Reading (Bloomsbury) is the ultimate bedside companion. The writers range from the wonderful 93-year-old Judith Kerr – a refugee from Hitler – via Margaret Atwood, Melvyn Bragg and Sir Tom Stoppard to Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson, Rory Stewart and Kamila Shamsie. This is an account of their discovery of reading and the books that made them into the writers they are today.

Antonia Fraser’s most recent book is My History: a Memoir of Growing Up(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Tom Holland

If Jon Hotten’s profile as an author on cricket were only the equal of his brilliance, he would be very well known indeed. He has the rare ability to write about cricket in a way that makes it interesting even to those who know nothing about googlies or on-drives – and his collaboration with Simon Jones, hero of the 2005 Ashes-winning England team, demonstrates this to potent effect.

Scintillating as it is when describing a series often rated as the greatest of all time, The Test: My Life, and the Inside Story of the Greatest Ashes Series (Yellow Jersey) is also profoundly moving on what it is like, after attaining a rare pinnacle of achievement, to return to the lowlands.

Helen Macdonald’s prize-winning H Is for Hawk (Vintage) was only published last year, but I have no hesitation in nominating it as a classic. Part threnody, part meditation on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, part biography of TH White, I had only to read it once to recognise it as one of those books that I know I will always love.

Tom Holland’s Dynasty: the Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar is published by Little, Brown in September

Lewis Dartnell

The new science book I have enjoyed most this year is The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being (Heron Books) by Alice Roberts. Like Neil Shubin’s great Your Inner Fish, it explores the curious quirks of the human body, bestowed upon us by the vagaries of evolution over 500 million years, and the astounding process of how an embryo develops in the womb, often drawing on Roberts’s own recent experiences of pregnancy.

One of my favourite novels is Look to Windward (Orbit) by Iain M Banks. Set on a rotating artificial ring-world as the anniversary of a devastating interstellar war approaches, this is sci-fi but also offers a powerful tale of love, loss, honour, loyalty and morality.

Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratchis available from the-knowledge.org

Michael Morpurgo

Mary Wollstonecraft died after giving birth to Mary Shelley. Romantic Outlaws (Hutchinson) by Charlotte Gordon is an exceptional achievement, for it is a double-headed biography of these two remarkable women.

Both lived through seismic political change, travelled widely and faced penury. Both were single mothers, out of wedlock, lived in exile and fell in love with difficult men. Both produced iconic books – Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

RC Sherriff is best known for that great play, Journey’s End. Until I read The Fortnight in September (Persephone Books) I hadn’t realised he had written a novel. This is a masterpiece of gentle understatement, an insight into quiet people living unassuming lives. Almost nothing happens, yet it is the most absorbing book I have read in a long while.

Michael Morpurgo’s The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips has been adapted by Emma Rice as 946, and will be performed at the Asylum at Heligan Gardens in Cornwall from July 25 to August 23 (hallforcornwall.co.uk)

Viv Albertine

The book I look forward to reading this summer is The Paying Guests(Virago) by Sarah Waters. You know you are in the hands of a skilful, confident writer when you read a Sarah Waters book.

She slowly reels you in. She weaves plots and themes that creep up and entangle you while you are innocently following her characters. They go about their shadowy business and by the time you raise your head from the page to take a breath, you’re hooked.

My classic book, which would have escaped me if I hadn’t had such a boring childhood, is Elective Affinities (OUP) by Goethe. My copy has Barnet College Library stamped inside its yellowing pages though I never went there. The title is off-putting, but the book is a beautifully written love story. The subject of responsibility versus passion is explored almost scientifically by Goethe. He seems to be posing the question: are we drawn together like chemicals? Are we subject to the same scientific laws? If we are, my chemical balance is completely out of whack.

Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys is published by Faber

Credit: © Blend Images / Alamy/Blend Images / Alamy

Kate Saunders

I am fascinated by the last Kaiser of Germany, and am currently still working through Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900-1941(Cambridge) by John CG Rohl; the third and final volume of his immense biography.

It is a breathtaking piece of scholarship, but I’m more interested in the wonderful personal details crammed in alongside the stuff about treaties – the Kaiser’s tantrums, his posturing, his silly ideas, his often hilarious attempts at colloquial English (he’s Mr Toad, without the steadying paw of Ratty).

Rohl is quite open about not liking his subject, and he has been criticised for his insistence that the Kaiser started the First World War. I think he makes a very good case.

Little Women (Puffin) by Louisa May Alcott is the classic to which I keep returning, and I just read it for the zillionth time because a friend gave me a lovely Thirties edition for my birthday. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy were as fresh and charming as ever, and 15-year-old Jo is still one of my favourite fictional characters.

Kate Saunders’s latest children’s book is Five Children on the Western Front (Faber)

Andrew O’Hagan

If you believe Britain is an under-described territory, you will welcome a brilliant new voice in non-fiction, Joanna Biggs. Her debut, All Day Long: a Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail) is so well-written I’m taking it on holiday to read again.

Biggs writes profiles of workers in different parts of the country, demonstrating fantastic delicacy and a true passion for accuracy, discovering the pulse of austerity in the way we get busy now. We find her sitting with a fishmonger and his son in Belfast, we see her interviewing a half-idle midfielder for Aston Villa, we meet a Swindon robot, and Donald MacSween, a crofter on the Isle of Lewis – more than 30 modern workers altogether, bringing the spirit of Studs Terkel onto the British scene.

Read a terrific profile each night before you fall asleep and dream of a greener and more pleasant land.

My classic read for the summer will be Paradise Lost (Penguin). It’s the best Western and the best war narrative there’s ever been, and I love the characters. It’s great fun discovering all the ways Milton has of bigging up the baddies, so I look forward to large drafts of epic verse, as I sit beside a lake of fire somewhere in Europe.

Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations is published by Faber

Katherine Rundell

Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic (Scribner; reviewed on page 26) is a beautiful book. Set in part on an artists’ island refuge near Istanbul, it’s about the two most unwieldy kinds of alchemy, art and love. The bold intelligence of the voice would have been enough to sustain the book, but it also provides all the pleasures of obsessions, rich detailing of the Sixties world and plot-twists.

EM Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady (Penguin) is as funny as anything by PG Wodehouse, though her protagonist is far less hapless, more ruefully knowing, than Bertie Wooster: “Am sorry to note that abuse and condemnation of a common acquaintance often constitutes very strong bond of union between otherwise uncongenial spirits.”

Katherine Rundell’s new novel for children, The Wolf Wilder, is published by Bloomsbury in September

Anthony Horowitz

I’m quite addicted to Twitter so I very much enjoyed Jon Ronson’s salutary examination of what happens when the internet turns on you: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Picador). One stupid picture, one misplaced joke, and your life can be completely trashed. The book examines a very dark corner of the times we live in but manages to be both entertaining and humane.

Faber has just re-released a classic thriller by Lionel Davidson: Kolymsky Heights. It’s the story of an impossible journey, an attempt to break into a secret military installation in some godforsaken corner of Siberia.

It’s hugely thrilling, brilliantly written, perfect for the beach. Like all the best holidays, I didn’t want this book to end.

Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond novel Trigger Mortis is published by Orion in September

Penelope Lively

My favourite museum is the Pitt Rivers, in Oxford. This is the museum of ethnography – an amazing cornucopia of objects that identify human behaviour across space and time. So I am delighted that Michael O’Hanlon, its director, has done the museum proud with The Pitt Rivers Museum: a World Within (Scala).

He gives an elegant and erudite account of the history of the collections, from the founding donation by the eccentric but ground-breaking General Pitt Rivers, and then a fascinating exploration and discussion of the contents, from the shrunken heads through musical instruments, weaponry and keys to the glass bottle said to contain a witch. Buy it; go there.

I have been reminded, reading reviews of Zachary Leader’s new biography of Saul Bellow, that it is a long time since I read any Bellow, and also that I have always read him with respect rather than great enjoyment. Time for another go. I’ll start with Herzog (Penguin) and see if the essential truth that one’s relationship with a book, an author, changes over time will work here.

Penelope Lively’s most recent book is Ammonites and Leaping Fish: a Life in Time (Penguin)

Benjamin Markovits

Ten years ago, my brother-in-law, Asher Price, was diagnosed with the same kind of cancer that almost killed Lance Armstrong. Lance helped save Asher’s life by setting him up with the clinic in Indiana that pioneered the treatment that saved his own. Asher has now written a book – not about the cancer specifically but about spending a year trying to learn to dunk a basketball at the age of 34. Year of the Dunk (Crown) is part memoir, part science history, and mostly an attempt to see whether, with 12 months of squat thrusts and wind sprints, you can reinvent yourself. Or whether you’re more or less stuck with the raw materials.

When my wife was pregnant we took a last childless holiday to Giglio, where the Costa Concordia hit the rocks (though that happened later). For a week I sat on the beach reading Towards the End of the Morning (Faber), Michael Frayn’s 1967 satire about Fleet Street life, laughing quietly and annoyingly to myself.

Somehow the book managed both to make me nostalgic for Sixties Britain, and nostalgic for the longing the British in the Sixties felt to get away – from the grey skies and the bad food and the insolence of office life.

Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This is published by Faber

Sheep in the Lake District Credit: Mark Pinder / Barcroft Media/Mark Pinder / Barcroft Media

Marina Lewycka

The Wolf Border (Faber) by Sarah Hall is a perfect summer read if you are planning to spend your holiday in the British countryside, for this wonderfully sensuous book evokes the seasons, landscape, weather, flora and fauna of the Lake District in intimate unromanticised detail. This story of a project to reintroduce wolves to northern England is also a meditation on fecundity, wilderness and wildness, and the force of human purpose.

Penelope Lively’s memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: a Life in Time(Penguin) is a clear-eyed appraisal of a long and interesting life by someone standing on the doorstep of old age. Structured around six precious personal objects she has collected during her life, this is a book full of wisdom, memory and consolation.

Marina Lewycka is the author, most recently, of Various Pets Alive and Dead (Penguin)

Julian Clary

Short stories don’t often appeal – not enough to sink your teeth into, some might say – but things are different when Fay Weldon has written them. It is Weldon’s voice that is the star, not the characters that feature in her stories. And in Mischief (Head of Zeus) we can hear her thoughts: wise, witty and, well, yes, mischievous, across four or more decades. She writes about women’s lives, haunted houses and communications from the dead, and the book culminates in a brilliant, Swiftian novella called Ted’s Dreams. Elegant, droll and thought-provoking.

I read all of the Lucia novels every few years (and steer well away from any TV adaptations). I immerse myself in EF Benson’s Twenties small town life, where everyone has a maid who brings them tea on a tray, snobbery rules and disastrous consequences might result from being seen in the wrong dress.

In Queen Lucia (Xist Classics) our heroine jostles for her position in Tilling Society when an enigmatic Guru comes to town. I won’t go into the delicious consequences, but as it says on the back of my 1984 edition: “If the pens of Evelyn Waugh and Jane Austen had mated, Lucia would have been the offspring.”

Julian Clary’s children’s novel The Bolds, with illustrations by David Roberts, is published this month by Andersen

Daisy Hay

My pick for 2015 is Ruth Scurr’s magnificent John Aubrey: My Own Life(Chatto & Windus), a re-imagined autobiography of Aubrey meticulously constructed from a maze of manuscripts and primary sources. Aubrey’s voice and character shine through, resulting in a biographical portrait that feels astonishingly unmediated.

My classic pick is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (OUP), which I’ve been re-reading this summer as part of a new book project. Wollstonecraft’s history of her Scandinavian travels attracted legions of admirers when it was first published, influencing Coleridge and Wordsworth and prompting William Godwin, Wollstonecraft’s husband and biographer, to describe it as a book “calculated to make a man in love with its author”. It is less frequently read now but it remains a wonderfully evocative account of a journey undertaken in the most difficult circumstances by a courageous and brilliant woman.

Daisy Hay’s Mr and Mrs Disraeli: a Strange Romance is published by Chatto & Windus

Noel Malcolm

Dominick Tyler’s Uncommon Ground: a Word-Lover’s Guide to the British Landscape (Guardian Books/Faber) is a simply wonderful book. It’s simple, because it just presents one word at a time (tolmen, swag, meol, machair, dell, saltings), explaining its origin and meaning, and the region where you’ll find it. And it’s wonderful, because each is illustrated with a superb, sometimes heart-stoppingly beautiful, full-page photograph. Any holiday in the UK will be enhanced by this book.

For foreign holidays, what I most want is not something to read on the beach (I don’t do beaches), but something to bury myself in when stuck in airports. I buy old “India paper” editions of Dickens from second-hand bookshops. They slip into a pocket: 800 pages, just half an inch thick, a sort of Edwardian Kindle.

I’m deep into Martin Chuzzlewit (OUP) now, and almost longing for delayed flights.

Noel Malcolm’s Agents of Empire is published by Penguin

Bettany Hughes

This summer I’m walking the Via Egnatia through Albania, Macedonia and the Greek mainland so am planning to indulge my inner phil-Hellene. The historical novels of Mary Renault – The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, Funeral Games and The Persian Boy – have been republished by Virago (with new introductions by Tom Holland and by me).

I first discovered these as a teenager on the wind-swept, stony chill of Hythe beach in Kent. Immediately transported to the pulsing symposia of ancient Athens and the sensuously brutal boy-king sacrifices of the Bronze Age, I didn’t look back.

Meanwhile, Edith Hall reminds us not just how to imagine the Greeks, but why it is worth trying to access the brilliance of their imaginations. Her new book,Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Bodley Head), asks with vigour and charisma if there was indeed such a thing as “Ancient Greece” – and, if there was, why we need to care.

Bettany Hughes’s new BBC series on Socrates, Confucius and the Buddha will be broadcast this summer

To order any of these books at a reduced rate, call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk