Mick Herron’s Real Tigers (£21.60, Buy it now ) combines the spy thriller with farce in a manner befitting a country that puts Coco the Clown in charge of the Secret Intelligence Service. Another compelling satire is Stephen Glover’s Splash (£15.90, Buy it now ). This is an updated Scoop for our age involving a mid-market tabloid with a sinister online operation in its bowels. The characters, Glover assures us, are entirely composite. Like hell!

Howard W French’s Everything under the Heavens: How the Past Helps China’s Push for Global Power (From £11.85, Buy it now ) brilliantly fuses history and reportage to explore China’s relationships with its neighbours, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as the floating one represented by the US Pacific fleet.

Michael Burleigh

For an engrossing under-the-trees read this summer you couldn’t do much better than Francis Spufford’s fabulous Golden Hill (£3.99, Buy it now ) a rollicking good yarn set in Manhattan in the 1740s, which wears its learning so lightly you hardly notice how much historical detail the author manages to pack in while delivering his thrilling set-pieces and plot twists right up to the last page.

At a different tempo, but just as skillful, is Tessa Hadley’s Bad Dreams and Other Stories (Cape, £8.99, Buy it now ), a collection showing all her trademark qualities of pin-sharp observation and arresting expression. And if you aren’t enjoying Club 18-30, why not find a quiet corner in which to read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (£16.99, Buy it now ), which is brilliantly written and poignantly affecting.

Claire Harman

A brilliant, though not exactly relaxing, summer read is Johnny Mercer’s We Were Warriors (£6.99, Buy it now ), not only the best hand-to-hand combat account of a British soldier in Afghanistan, but a journey of the soul, from fighting soldier to MP for Plymouth — the self-deprecating journal of a remarkable man.

Europe After Europe by Ivan Krastev (£15.99, Buy it now ) is an unlikely hit — the best essay today on history and the world of Trump, Brexit, migrants and climate change. For pure self-indulgence the Italians do the best noir around. Maurizio de Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi is top of the tree — fighting fascism and the Camorra in 1920s Naples.

Robert Fox

The best summer reading combines a lightness of attack with a certain heft of intent. Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse (£19.99, Buy it now ) achieves the combination with verve. Exploring the separation of human and equine destinies, which took place from Napoleonic times to the First World War, Raulff’s tender and witty history celebrates the role in human affairs of the most political of animals, and the most symbolic.

Birdcage Walk (£12.91, Buy it now ), the final novel by the late Helen Dunmore is a chilling drama enclosing a graceful and elegiac meditation on how to live well in turbulent political times, on the consequences of choice, the power of language, and the faint trace that individual lives leave on history.

Jane Shilling

Han Yujoo’s novel, The Impossible Fairy Tale (£12.60, Buy it now ), about creepy goings-on in a Korean classroom that lead to a murderous act, has a sensational child voice — innocent and monstrous by turns — that makes it an edge-of-the-recliner read. Another excellent ghost story is Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (£13.50, Buy it now ), about two blues ’n’ jazz hipsters who devise a prank that misfires and unspools a mesmerising tale of white guilt and black oppression in America.

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (£10.49, Buy it now ), has a beguiling lightness that takes us to unexpectedly melancholy places; its brilliance lies in observations of human frailty in matters of the heart.

Arifa Akbar

Giles Udy’s Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left (£26.95, Buy it now ) is about the Marxist infiltration of the Labour party in the 1920s and 1930s, which seems apposite reading today. Peter Stothard’s The Senecans (£16.59, Buy it now ) is about the influence on Margaret Thatcher of four men — David Hart, Frank Johnson, Ronald Millar and Woodrow Wyatt — all of whom I knew and liked.

Andrew Roberts

I doubt that anything to do with politics could make summer more enjoyable. Best to turn to literature. Among the books that have given me most pleasure this year, two stand out. Clive James’s Injury Time (£14.94, Buy it now ) is a fresh volume of poetry describing the joys of the bonus years the great polymath has been given by medicine, determination and love.

Peter Parker’s beautiful Housman Country (£12, Buy it now ) tells you everything you want to know about the life and influence of England’s most satirised but inimitable poets.

Douglas Murray

I choose Phone by Will Self, (£13, Buy it now ), the third volume in his great trilogy after Umbrella and Shark. Some have been deterred by its length (617 pages), but think — this is just the equivalent of reading every word of The Evening Standard for one week.

Eccentrically punctuated, with no paragraphs, it is a series of fast-paced, laugh-out-loud witty, disgusting and frequently well-observed scenes. He has a sharp ear for dialogue, and woven in and out of the surreal narrative are some of the wisest reflections on the folly of war (in this case the Gulf War) that you are likely to read outside the pages of Tolstoy.

In our depressingly middlebrow intellectual climate, it is refreshing that at least one novelist is raising the bar.

A.N. Wilson

I am loving Jerzy by Jerome Charyn (£11.99, Buy it now ), a brilliantly fascinating, weirdly original novel about the fantastical adventures and lies, fall, rise and fall of the American-Polish-Jewish novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who wrote Painted Bird and Being There, featuring a bizarre cast — from Princess Margaret and Peter Sellers to Stalin’s daughter and a Cockney gangland hitman.

George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (£13.61, Buy it now ) is an extraordinary act of poignant literary virtuosity about love, death, ghosts and history, starring the grieving president. Elizabeth: The Later Years by John Guy (£13.89, Buy it now ) is the best biography ever written of the Virgin Queen — a revisionist, sensitive, compelling, majestic masterwork that you can’t put down.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

I loved Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It’s Doing To Us by Will Storr (Picador, £15.19, Buy it now ). It’s a broad-ranging history of the western self, from the age of Aristotle to the age of Instagram, and Storr builds a convincing case that free will is an illusion, change is impossible and our entire political system is built on a lie. But he’s funny with it.

Richard Godwin

Unsettling, challenging and gloriously written, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (£6.49, Buy it now ) is the multi-generational story of an hallucinatory sort of summer.

The women in this novel, preoccupied in their different ways by sex, survival, control and confusion, startle and delight and shock in one of the most mesmerising titles on last year’s Man Booker Prize short list.

When Clover Stroud’s idyllically lyrical childhood is ruptured by her mother’s catastrophic riding accident in The Wild Other (£16.59, Buy it now ), she embarks on a long escape route, ironically sustained by a love of horses. Wild adventures in Ireland, Texas and Russia motivated by a sequence of intensely sexy romances provide the escape route from the tragedy.

Juliet Nicolson

The Power (£3.99, Buy it now ) by Naomi Alderman is the feminist flipside to The Handmaid’s Tale, asking what happens when women are suddenly the stronger sex.

Technically aimed at the Young Adult market, After the Fire (£6.74, Buy it now ) Will Hill’s novel about a girl who escapes a cult — will doubtless find its way into many adult hands this summer. It’s intense, evocative and deserves to have Hollywood producers sniffing around to put it on screen.

If you want to laugh this summer — the kind of filthy guffaw that will make your sun-lounger neighbours wish they were reading what you’re reading — buy A Ton of Malice: The Half-Life of an Irish Punk in London (£12, Buy it now ), Barry McKinley’s tale of sex, drugs and working at Sellafield.

Rosamund Urwin

Years ago I spent a rainy July week on the deserted Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides with their owner Adam Nicolson and, though the sun shone only on one day, I have never forgotten the sight and the sound of the astonishing sea-birds there: puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, razorbills, gannets, and skuas. So I am very much looking forward to reading the ultimate tribute Adam Nicolson has paid to this inspiration in his life: The Seabird’s Cry (£11.89, Buy it now ).

The landscape I feel at home in, however, is limestone and I have been completely captivated by the poet Fiona Sampson’s Limestone Country (£13.49, Buy it now ), set in the Perigord, Slovenia, Jerusalem and Oxfordshire, a new way of bringing together geology, ecology and the human life these landscapes generate and sustain.

David Sexton

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, reissued as a sumptuous paperback (From £13.41, Buy it now ), is a marvel of film criticism. Over a week in the summer of 1962, the young French director held a series of conversations with “Alfred the Great”, who was then editing his 48th picture, The Birds. The tape-recordings amounted to over 50 hours and took four years to transcribe, but the “hitchbook” (as Truffaut called it) was worth the wait.

Dante’s friendship with the great Tuscan lyric poet Guido Cavalcanti serves as inspiration for Peter Hughes’s new verse in Cavalcanty (£9.99, Buy it now ), an erotico-intellectual meditation on the subject of love that name-checks Dolce & Gabbana, daleks and Debussy. Lovely.

Ian Thomson

There’s nothing like being away from the workplace to make us realise how much time we waste when we’re in it. Rest (£9.99, Buy it now ) by Silicon Vallery guru, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang shows us how much more productive we can be by spending less time in noisy open-plan offices, answering fewer emails and making meetings shorter etc, etc, while giving more time to exercise and proper rest, and switching off devices. It should be compulsory reading for office managers everywhere.

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes (£14.88, Buy it now ) is a beautifully rendered portrait of his life in New York City after he moved from San Francisco and how he came to meet and fall in love with Oliver Sacks, with whom he shared the last eight years of the great neurologist’s life.

Katie Law

I’m jealous of anyone who has yet to read The Idiot (£13.85, Buy it now ) by Elif Batuman, a long, directionless, silly and utterly charming debut novel. It’s about a six-foot tall Turkish-American woman, Selin, who tries to navigate university life at Harvard in the mid-1990s. In her first year she attends linguistics lectures, ponders the subjectivity of language and ignites an enigmatic email correspondence with a Hungarian classmate, Ivan, that develops into a tragi-comic infatuation. It’s a book about books, which makes it the perfect summer romance for nerdy students of literature.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

The East Anglian coast, from Sheringham down to Aldeburgh — Peter Grimes-land — is popular with summer visitors, short and long stay and has the best fish and chip shops in the country. It’s also a region with a high literary quotient, fed by festival and reading groups (what else is there to do in the un-holiday months?) and vibrant locally written fiction. Particularly crime fiction.

One of my favourite locals is John Nightingale — check out his The Appearance of Murder (£7.99, Buy it now ). He self-publishes because he doesn’t like interference. He just pops up.

Permeated with local colour, for a day visit to the beach, is Elly Griffiths’s first crime work, The Crossing Places (£7.99, Buy it now ) — a child’s bones are found on the Norfolk sands — and Ruth Dugdall’s chillingly anti-familial My Sister and Other Liars (£5.99, Buy it now ).

John Sutherland

In Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy, Sofia is 25, stuck in a rented Spanish apartment with her overbearing mother and desperate for an escape. She finds it in a hot kiss from a German tourist and with the student who mans the injury hut on the beach. Like Levy’s last novel, Swimming Home, where a family holiday in France belies a reality of depression and deceit, her latest story leaves the reader similarly enraptured — and unnerved.

If only Sofia had what Naomi Alderman gives her heroines — the power to electrocute men from their fingertips. The Power is a thunderous dystopian novel in which the world’s women — victims of injustices through the centuries — monstrously abuse their new-found power. You almost feel sorry for the truly weaker sex. Almost.

Jackie Annesley

Philippe Sands’s East West Street (£13.60, Buy it now ) is a masterpiece. He weaves together his search for his own family’s history, full of astonishing twists, with the legal response to Nazi genocide, culminating in the Nuremberg trials. By eerie coincidence, the inventors of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, were, like Sands’s mother’s family, from the now-Ukrainian town of Zolkiew.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has followed his Pulitzer-winning 2015 debut, The Sympathizer, with The Refugees (£5.99, Buy it now ), a collection of short stories set in the same milieu of Vietnamese boat people in the US. Longing and loss infuse these tales of damaged war veterans, tough women and children caught between two cultures, memorably rendered in Nguyen’s lapidary prose.

Andrew Neather

It’s undeniably tricksy but I was won over by the sheer brio, writerly flourish and humanity of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders which imagines a disputatious convocation of the dead observing the US president as he mourns his son.

Poet and wit Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (£14.94 , Buy it now ) is a very funny memoir of family life dominated by her father, a married submariner and family man who got god, became a Catholic priest, and who loves red meat, guns and playing heavy rock guitar solos in his pants.

Nick Curtis

Spook Street (£14.43, Buy it now ) by Mick Herron is the fourth outing for Jackson Lamb, a flatulent, crapulent monster, who has to deal with the fall-out from a suicide bombing in a west London shopping mall.

Earthly Remains (£15.19, Buy it now ) by Donna Leon is Commissario Brunetti’s 26th examination of vice in Venice, and The Burial Hour (£9.49, Buy it now ) by Jeffery Deaver is the 13th case for Lincoln Rhyme, finds the paraplegic investigator in Naples.

And Love Like Blood (£8.49, Buy it now ), Mark Billingham’s 14th thriller featuring Tom Thorne, has the wise-cracking DI tackling so-called honour killings. It is his best book so far. All four novels are five-star reading.

Mark Sanderson

I love All That Man Is by David Szalay (£11.99, Buy it now ), a novel about all kinds of blokes roaming around Europe, trying to handle their feelings about women.

I’d also recommend The Girls by Emma Cline (£5, Buy it now ), in which a middle-aged woman looks back on her life in a Manson-like cult. Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli (£11, Buy it now ), which explains Einstein, is one of the best books on science I’ve ever read.

William Leith

ESBest product reviews are unbiased, independent advice you can trust. On some occasions, we earn revenue if you click the links and buy the products, but we never allow this to bias our coverage. The reviews are compiled through a mix of expert opinion and real-world testing.

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