Wimbledon begins today and the UK has begun its annual convulsion of love for tennis. The sport has a rich literary heritage, so which books should you seek out when rain stops play?

Many writers enjoy watching and playing tennis, including Geoff Dyer, Lionel Shriver and AS Byatt, who has been known to write her novels with Wimbledon on in the background. Both Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace played tennis enthusiastically and have included the game in their fiction and essays. Memorably, Amis transplants the effete grass-court match-ups traditional in English fiction to the more appropriate 1980s setting of a Manhattan skyscraper for John Self’s drubbing by Fielding Goodney in Money. (The sport crops up, too, in The Rachel Papers and The Information.)

But the towering example of tennis fiction is Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is partially set at a tennis academy and whose protagonist, Hal Incandenza, is an unhappy prodigy. The author’s acknowledged non-fiction classic is a 2006 piece on Federer in the New York Times, in which he coined the term “Federer Moments” to describe the “times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK”. Lesser known but equally worth revisiting is “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes”, a 1991 memoir in Harper’s magazine of his tennis-playing midwestern boyhood.

It is perhaps surprising that the sport hasn’t featured more prominently in English fiction. At any rate, lawn tennis hasn’t played a major role, but the original, “real” version of the game has: references to it abound in Elizabethan drama and Webster’s famous line from The Duchess of Malfi (“We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded / Which way please them.”) later gave Stephen Fry a title for his thriller The Stars’ Tennis Balls. There is a memorable (though brief) tennis scene in A Room with a View, when Lucy makes up a four including her Florentine hilltop seducer, George, while her fiance, Cecil, irritatingly declaims from the sidelines.

American writers have generally been more prepared to put tennis centre stage, as is true with other sports. (Think of how many novels have been inspired by baseball.) Some of the best ever descriptions of the game occur in Lolita: “She smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean, resounding crack of her golden whip.”