The best books for summer 2025: our critics' top picks
A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay. Fast approaching her 100th birthday, the indomitable Miss Pauline is anxious to unburden herself of certain secrets before she dies. If the Jamaican dialect is difficult, as it was for me, try reading parts out loud until you get the hang of it. The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston. I read this as a judge for the Sunday Times Young Writer Award. (It was shortlisted.) It's a sort of cowboy western in Cumbria, set during the foot-and-mouth crisis. Gritty and bloody, but also beautiful and moving, and an absolute page-turner. I loved it.
Claire Adam's latest novel is Love Forms (Faber)
Oliver Farry
Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the standout book on the war in Gaza. Part-memoir, part-despairing jeremiad, it will likely be read and studied long after the present conflict and has an inspired title that has already entered the vernacular. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is an often harrowing but stylish account of the author's addiction and recovery that is brilliantly atmospheric, imbued with the heat and dust of Mexico, where much of it takes place. Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story continues her intertextual excavation of Central European history with this acerbic feminist riposte to The Magic Mountain.
Oliver Farry is a foreign correspondent and book reviewer
READ MORE
Ferdia Lennon
The announcement of a new Andrew Miller novel is always a cause for celebration, and The Land in Winter really is a wonder. Strikingly well observed, Miller's evocation of the coldest British winter on record is the perfect summer read by way of contrast. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown is a blistering coming-of-age tale about three best friends, Shaz, Rach and Kel, growing up in Doncaster in the noughties. Utterly immersive, hilarious, and very moving. Read it. Closer to home, Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh is a brilliant and bittersweet ode to young love, friendship and GAA set over a single summer.
Ferdia Lennon's debut novel is Glorious Exploits (Penguin)
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Andrew Meehan's Best Friends, a lively love story about two septuagenarians, is
'perfect summer reading'
according to its Irish Times reviewer (me). It's just right for the plane or train – especially if you've got the travel pass. Patrick Holloway's debut, The Language of Remembering, is a refreshing take on the trope of the single mother in the dark 1970s, which ultimately celebrates love. One of the most entertaining novels as Gaeilge I've reviewed in ages, Darach Ó Scolaí's Bódlaer, is a sparkling, lighthearted satire on the poetry scene in Gaelic Ireland. Brilliant.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest book is Selected Stories (Blackstaff)
John Boyne
Róisín Lanigan's
I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There
has stayed with me since I read it in January. An unsettling debut about a couple renting a London flat, the novel develops a Rosemary's Baby vibe when central character Áine finds her sense of reality being undermined. A chapter featuring a foster dog is extraordinary. Sameer Pandya's
Our Beautiful Boys
delves into the aftermath of a school bully being viciously assaulted and the lengths the parents of his assaulters will go to in order to keep them out of jail. A literary page-turner with a nice twist at the end.
John Boyne's latest novel is Air (Doubleday)
[
'I don't write a lot of personal stuff': author Róisín Lanigan on being married, divorced and surviving cancer before her 30s
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]
Sarah Moss
Assuming that by 'summer reading' we mean 'life changing reading' as well as 'amusing reading', I suggest Adrienne Maree Brown's Pleasure Activism, which will invite you to think differently, more permissively, about the practice and meaning of enjoyment. It's an anthology, so between dips into it you could read Samantha Ellis's Chopping Onions on my Heart, which is also about how to be intelligently happy when there are reasons for sorrow. For absorbing fiction, Sarah Hall's new book Helm is predictably superb.
Sarah Moss's latest novel is Ripeness (Picador)
Claire Hennessy
Campus shenanigans of decades past are skilfully evoked in two very different but equally compulsive titles:
Anna Carey's Our Song
, a swoony but grounded second-chance romance, and Lisa Harding's deliciously dark psychological mystery The Wildelings. Two impressive debuts: Claire Gleeson's Show Me Where It Hurts and
Roisin O'Donnell's Nesting
tackle impossibly painful family situations with care and nuance. Poetry lovers might want to dip into the thought-provoking new collections from Alice Kinsella (The Ethics of Cats) and Kimberly Campanello (An Interesting Detail).
YA-wise
, Caroline O'Donoghue's addictive romantasy Skipshock and Grainne O'Brien's delicate verse novel Solo are this summer's must-reads.
Claire Hennessy's latest book is In the Movie of Her Life (Doire Press)
[
Good books: The 20 best holiday reads this summer
Opens in new window
]
Joseph O'Connor
I'd recommend The Kings Head, an excellent debut novel from Kelly Frost set in the Teddy Girl subculture of postwar England, a fascinating movement documented by the photography of Ken Russell. Frost's vivid, supple, filmic prose is a pleasure; she's a writer to watch. Sharon Guard's Assembling Ailish, June O'Sullivan's The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife and Grainne O'Brien's Young Adult novel in verse Solo, are fine achievements, as is Noelle Lynskey's debut collection of poems, Featherweight. Martin Dyar's The Meek is an exceptional second collection from a poet who is also a gifted storyteller. Full of precision, acute observation and reverent encounters with the natural world, it's a book I'll come back to many times.
Joseph O'Connor's latest novel is The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker)
Kevin Power
The best Irish book I've read so far this year is
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuin
, published by Stinging Fly Press. It's a collection of long stories, mostly set in contemporary Derry, mostly about young people, partly about the legacies of the Troubles and wholly about trauma. But the seriousness of Ni Chuinn's stories is inseparable from their superlatively rich, readable, perceptive, highly original prose. I also wholeheartedly recommend Lamorna Ash's Don't Forget, We're Here Forever (Bloomsbury), a brilliant and deeply personal book about the various meanings of Christianity in the contemporary UK.
Kevin Power's latest novel is White City (Scribner UK)
Rónán Hession
Top of my summer reading list is
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth
by my favourite contemporary Irish writer, Adrian Duncan. I'm looking forward to Saltburn by Drew Gummerson and Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, the funniest writers around. My favourite books this year were On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I and II, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland – she also translated the sublime Encircling trilogy by Karl Frode Tiller, which has obsessed me. I heartily recommend The Book of All Loves by Augustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead, and What a Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard.
Rónán Hession's latest novel is Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose)
John Self
I loved
Michael Amherst's novel The Boyhood of Cain
, a debut with its voice fully formed, about a boy growing up in a school where his father is the headmaster. It's sad, funny, rigorous, elegant and very Coetzeean. Irish-Trinidadian writer Amanda Smyth has written a glorious autobiographical novel, Look at You, which is a string of intensely vivid scenes from adolescence and young adulthood: love, sex, family drama, the lot. And Hassan Blasim's Sololand is three novellas around and about postwar Iraq, which are far more blackly funny than they have any right to be. He's a star.
John Self is a critic
Ruby Eastwood
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant are sharp and deadpan, marked by moments of striking insight. This newly gathered volume spans five decades of her work: tales of spiritually exiled characters drifting through shabby boarding houses and inhospitable cities, struggling with fraught, often impossible relationships. Her prose is composed yet surges in unexpected places. The strongest pieces feel loosely assembled: landscape and mannerisms rendered with precise clarity but never quite falling into the recognisable shape of a story. This is how Gallant operates, making her imagined world familiar, then leading you towards an unexpected or elusive truth.
Ruby Eastwood is a book reviewer
John Banville
Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee is the biography of the American scientist Luis Alvarez (1911-1988). He was closely involved in some of the most significant, innovative – and deadly – scientific advances of the 20th century. He worked on the development of radar during the second World War, was part of the team at Los Alamos that built the first atomic bombs, put forward a controversial theory on the assassination of JFK, did important work on particle accelerators, and, late in life, discovered, along with his geologist son, that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a gigantic meteorite hitting the coast of Yucatan. Oh, and he also taught himself glass-blowing and metallurgy.
John Banville's latest novel is The Drowned (Faber)
Jessica Traynor
I've reviewed some great books this year, including
Artists, Visionaries, Siblings by Judith Mackrell
, an absorbing account of the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, and the poignant
This Interim Time by Oona Frawley
. I've loved Elaine Feeney's ambitious and multilayered Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way and Sean Hewitt's Open, Heaven had me entranced. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is a wild and blackly funny ride through addiction and recovery. In poetry, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Keith Payne's Savage Acres, Charles Lang's The Oasis, and Dane Holt's Father's Father's Father.
Jessica Traynor's latest collection is Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe)
Martina Evans
Tommy Orange's multigenerational Native American novel Wandering Stars spans two centuries yet reads with all the fizz, poetry and pain of something deeply remembered. Terrific characters drive a vital, unputdownable story. Disturbing, wry, riveting, Joe Dunthorne's memoir Children of Radium tells European history like never before. Dunthorne's research into his German great grandfather – scientist, inventor of radioactive toothpaste, Jewish refugee – reveals a literally poisonous family secret. The poems in
Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage
are easy to read, impossible to forget. Exact and complicated on the joys and pitfalls of memory. A keeper.
Martina Evans's latest book is The Coming Thing (Carcanet)
Henrietta McKervey
Beginning with a trim, hand-luggage-only sized novel, Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection elegantly skewers the perfectly curated lives of a Berlin-based hipster couple. Set six months into the Nazi occupation of Rome, the intertwined fates of three strangers are the propulsive force driving Joseph O'Connor's excellent
The Ghosts of Rome
, the second in his Escape Line trilogy. A novel about a UN deradicalisation programme doesn't sound like it would be a bundle of laughs, yet Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, the story of an academic who goes to Iraq to run a UN programme to deradicalise Islamic State brides, is witty, smart and entertaining.
Henrietta McKervey's latest novel is A Talented Man (Hachette Books Ireland)
Neil Hegarty
In Seán Farrell's first novel,
Frogs for Watchdogs
, we meet a little boy living in the midst of change, and we are introduced to a world crowded with danger and with fear. The novel's power lies in its intensity of feeling: a child's experience is elemental and stark and filled with powerful emotions, and love and hatred in this universe are clean-cut presences, sharply lit, vivid, unmistakable. Farrell sustains this remarkably full-tilt atmosphere throughout: and in my reading life, I have seldom felt so wholly slotted in behind a child's eyes, seeing the world as something new and – always – incalculable.
Neil Hegarty's latest novel is The Jewel (Head of Zeus)
Edel Coffey
Abigail Dean's The Death Of Us really stood out for me this year. It's a hybrid crime novel/love story that examines the disintegration of a marriage following a violent home invasion. Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is a high-concept dystopian novel about a not-too-distant future where everyone has a 'risk rating' compiled via their metadata. This offers much food for thought on the topics of personal data, freedom and authoritarianism. I also loved Elaine Feeney's new novel Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, which is the story of a woman's relationship, but also the story of how our personal and shared cultural histories impact our lives.
Edel Coffey's latest novel is In Her Place (Sphere)
Michael Cronin
Summer is typically when the kids are not in school, so what better time to reflect on schools and our expectations of them? Joseph Dunne, Ireland's leading educational philosopher, has written What's the Good of Education?, a challenging and compelling exploration of how education can contribute to a flourishing democracy provided that our classrooms are not hijacked by tech oligarchs and bean counters.
Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive?
is another urgently persuasive work from the author of Landmarks and Underworld. A master storyteller, Macfarlane uses richly poetic and precise prose to make a timely plea for the rescue of our rivers from callous neglect and wanton destruction.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
Sarah Gilmartin
In Greece earlier this month, I disturbed the peace of other sunbathers with intermittent shrieking laughter. The culprits? Miranda July's All Fours and
Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident
. Both are brilliantly observed, funny, provocative, and my favourite kind of beach read: deceptively easy. For crime fans, Andrea Carter's first stand-alone novel There-Came-A-Tapping is an involving, intelligent story, full of intrigue (and ravens). Of this year's debuts,
Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors
and
Garrett Carr's The Boy from the Sea
are two standouts, such brightly inventive storytelling from born writers.
Sarah Gilmartin's latest novel is Service (One)
Wendy Erskine
I found
Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare
, a story about three young women in a Belfast shared house, so funny, taut and complex. David Collard's A Crumpled Swan, which offers 50 brief essays on an Abigail Parry poem, is an ingenious and companiable book, which considers aspects of poetics – and so much more. Marcia Hutchinson's The Mercy Step, told from the perspective of a child, is vibrant and striking, its voice distinctive. And Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, conveys the personal and political so precisely and compellingly.
Wendy Erskine's latest book is The Benefactors (Sceptre)
Naoise Dolan
I'm currently reading Deepa Bhasthi's English translation of Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq, the first story collection to win the Booker International. There's a translator's note where Bhasthi explains the cultural context of the original Kannada language and defends her choice not to italicise foreign words or use footnotes. Good woman for treating anglophone readers like adults. Up next is Labharfad le Cách (I Will Speak to You All) by
Peig Sayers
. I invariably love the writers people hated in school when I read them of my own volition, so let's see if the pattern holds.
Naoise Dolan's latest novel is The Happy Couple (W&N)
Diarmaid Ferriter
I came late to
Richard Flanagan's Question 7
,
published in paperback last month, but it was worth the wait. It is an extraordinary mediation on his family story, blending memoir, history and fiction, covering his native Tasmania, nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, writers behaving badly, the natural environment, and his father's prisoner of war experience in Japan. Big questions are thread through the book, such as 'why do we do what we do to each other?', how we go on, and the meaning of love and forgiveness. Each time he seems headed in the direction of answers, he underlines the emptiness of meaning. This is a melancholic, direct, lyrical and beautiful book.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD
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Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights
A couple of weeks back, I did a public event in a bookshop, for which I and two other writers were each required to pick three beloved books, and to talk about each of them for five minutes or so. Choosing the books I wanted to talk about proved an interesting challenge, because although I can easily think of any number of books I have read and loved, it is considerably less easy to think of books I have not only read and loved but can also remember well enough to talk to an audience about for five minutes. A major criterion for the books I chose, I have to admit, was that I knew them well enough to not have to re-read them for the event. I felt that I had in some sense internalised these books, in a way that could not be said for very many others I had read. In the few days afterwards, I began to wonder why it was that I remembered certain books so well, and others barely at all. It is not uncommon for me to read and greatly enjoy a book and then, within a year or two, remember next to nothing about it other than, perhaps, that I once read and greatly enjoyed it. But there are books that, many years after reading them, have remained a presence in my life. And these books – the ones that seem to belong to some small and select psychic library, whose volumes collectively account for my basic sense of myself as a literate person – are, I realised, the books that I have written about. The Information, Martin Amis 's comedy of thwarted literary ambition and writerly jealousy, features a protagonist whose career as a novelist has devolved into ceaseless book reviewing – a job in which he takes no real pride, but which he nonetheless does very well. 'When he reviewed a book,' writes Amis, 'it stayed reviewed.' It's a line that comes to mind when I think about this subject. It is, for me, the act of writing about a book that causes it to stay read. And a disproportionate number of the books that have stayed read for me are ones that I wrote about at university. I read Ulysses and wrote an essay about it; the essay, I can assure you, was not very good, but the book stayed more or less read. I read and wrote about the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and those stories stayed read. I read and wrote about Edgar Allen Poe, and Poe has stayed read. The writing of those essays was in some sense inseparable from the depth and durability of the reading. READ MORE [ Zuckerberg saying AI will cure loneliness is like big tobacco suggesting cigarettes can treat cancer Opens in new window ] I am saying all of this now because of two facts that seem fairly self-evident: the fact that the writing of essays is a central aspect of an education in the humanities, and the fact that this centrality is increasingly threatened as a result of the widespread use of ChatGPT and other LLM (large language model) technologies. The general feeling among university administrators, if not necessarily among academics as a whole, seems to be that it would be futile to try to stop students using AI in their work. The technology exists, and in the narrow sense of producing a functional piece of writing on a given topic, it's an effective tool, and it's not going anywhere. I've spoken to a few academics in the humanities recently who seem resigned to (though by no means at peace with) the idea that assessing students through essays may no longer be a viable pedagogical approach. No one seems quite sure what will replace essay writing, but it seems likely that something – a greater emphasis on written exams, perhaps, or some form of oral assessment – will have to. I wasn't a particularly industrious student as an undergraduate. I half-assed a lot of my courses, and often didn't do nearly enough reading of supplementary material – works of academic literary criticism and other secondary sources – to give my essays a plausible veneer of academic credibility and rigour. The essays I wrote were not especially good, even by the standards of undergraduate essays. But I realise now that their being good or bad was of secondary importance to the writing of them. The writing of essays seems to me to have two main uses as an educational tool. It is useful as a means of assessing a student – how much they know, how widely and deeply they have read in a subject, and how rigorous and original their thinking on that subject is. The other is both less measurable and more significant: in writing an essay, you find out what you think about a subject; you learn, in some sense, how to think about it. [ AI is already a focus of endless delusion, magical thinking and plain old foolishness ] In a recent study conducted by MIT's Media Lab, three groups of participants, aged 18-39, were asked to write essays using, respectively, ChatGPT, Google's search engine and no technology at all. The brain activity of the participants was measured using EEG. Of the three groups, the ChatGPT users consistently had the lowest level of brain engagement, and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels'. As the study progressed, the group using ChatGPT got steadily lazier with each subsequent essay, often simply copying and pasting the text produced by the LLM, rather than using it as a source for their own work. One way of thinking about this, from an educational perspective, is that writing an essay is to one's intellect as lifting weights is to one's muscles. The point of going to the gym is not to get good at lifting weights; it's to train your body to become stronger. Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights. The forklift might do a perfectly good job of moving around some heavy iron plates, but you'd be wasting your time. (You would also be causing a serious disruption, and would probably have your gym membership cancelled – and rightly so.) Just as you can't get someone, or something, to work out for you, there is nobody and nothing that can think on your behalf. As with so many of the supposed benefits of so-called artificial intelligence, it's not clear what we're actually gaining. What we stand to lose is so large, and so fundamental, as to be incalculable.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
The Boys by Leo Robson: ‘I enjoyed it as I enjoy a packet of crisps at the pub'
The Boys Author : Leo Robson ISBN-13 : 978-1529428186 Publisher : riverrun Guideline Price : £16.99 British journalist Leo Robson has written some excellent criticism for outlets such as the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, and the New Left Review (among others). Now he has written a debut novel, The Boys, set in London during the summer of 2012. It may be strange to speak of a novel as performing functions, but that is how I read The Boys. Robson, here, assigns his novel a number of tasks: narrating a story spread across a loose family's generations, contriving a cast of characters whose relations are nominally tenuous but affectively robust, and staging their quintessentially witty back-and-forths. Johnny Voghel, the novel's 30-year-old narrator, is in a state of repressed grief. Returned from an admin job at a college in the West Midlands to an empty house in Swiss Cottage inherited from his deceased parents, he mourns a lost time when he, his estranged half-brother Lawrence and the latter's ex-partner lived together in the family home. But the domineering and mercurial Lawrence is beckoned back to London from Chicago following news that his teenage son Jasper is expecting a child. Soon, the house in Swiss Cottage is full again with family and new friends. Lawrence, however, drifts in and out of the narrative, leaving Johnny with a choice: tracking him down to restore their relationship, or orienting his efforts towards the future by helping Jasper and his pregnant girlfriend. READ MORE By the novel's second half, Johnny has opted for posterity. But in its accounting of the Voghels' family history, and its depiction of a bygone London backdropped by the Olympics, The Boys luxuriates in a particular kind of north London nostalgia, decisively slotting into the traditions and tropes of a distinctly British literature. In my imagination, Robson has read so many such novels that he has learned their mechanics inside out. This results in The Boys' technical perfection – a unity achieved by an astute and skilful box-ticking. Robson proves a critic can produce a good novel, where 'good' arises from careful stylistic choices. Readers of The Boys might find comfort in that conservatism. I myself enjoyed it as I enjoy a packet of crisps at the pub – pleasurable, and still, it left me wanting. As I finished, I wondered: mightn't a critic – with his knowledge of what has come before – be well placed to probe what could come next?
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
The best books for summer 2025: our critics' top picks
Claire Adam A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay. Fast approaching her 100th birthday, the indomitable Miss Pauline is anxious to unburden herself of certain secrets before she dies. If the Jamaican dialect is difficult, as it was for me, try reading parts out loud until you get the hang of it. The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston. I read this as a judge for the Sunday Times Young Writer Award. (It was shortlisted.) It's a sort of cowboy western in Cumbria, set during the foot-and-mouth crisis. Gritty and bloody, but also beautiful and moving, and an absolute page-turner. I loved it. Claire Adam's latest novel is Love Forms (Faber) Oliver Farry Omar El Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the standout book on the war in Gaza. Part-memoir, part-despairing jeremiad, it will likely be read and studied long after the present conflict and has an inspired title that has already entered the vernacular. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is an often harrowing but stylish account of the author's addiction and recovery that is brilliantly atmospheric, imbued with the heat and dust of Mexico, where much of it takes place. Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story continues her intertextual excavation of Central European history with this acerbic feminist riposte to The Magic Mountain. Oliver Farry is a foreign correspondent and book reviewer READ MORE Ferdia Lennon The announcement of a new Andrew Miller novel is always a cause for celebration, and The Land in Winter really is a wonder. Strikingly well observed, Miller's evocation of the coldest British winter on record is the perfect summer read by way of contrast. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown is a blistering coming-of-age tale about three best friends, Shaz, Rach and Kel, growing up in Doncaster in the noughties. Utterly immersive, hilarious, and very moving. Read it. Closer to home, Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh is a brilliant and bittersweet ode to young love, friendship and GAA set over a single summer. Ferdia Lennon's debut novel is Glorious Exploits (Penguin) Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Andrew Meehan's Best Friends, a lively love story about two septuagenarians, is 'perfect summer reading' according to its Irish Times reviewer (me). It's just right for the plane or train – especially if you've got the travel pass. Patrick Holloway's debut, The Language of Remembering, is a refreshing take on the trope of the single mother in the dark 1970s, which ultimately celebrates love. One of the most entertaining novels as Gaeilge I've reviewed in ages, Darach Ó Scolaí's Bódlaer, is a sparkling, lighthearted satire on the poetry scene in Gaelic Ireland. Brilliant. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest book is Selected Stories (Blackstaff) John Boyne Róisín Lanigan's I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There has stayed with me since I read it in January. An unsettling debut about a couple renting a London flat, the novel develops a Rosemary's Baby vibe when central character Áine finds her sense of reality being undermined. A chapter featuring a foster dog is extraordinary. Sameer Pandya's Our Beautiful Boys delves into the aftermath of a school bully being viciously assaulted and the lengths the parents of his assaulters will go to in order to keep them out of jail. A literary page-turner with a nice twist at the end. John Boyne's latest novel is Air (Doubleday) [ 'I don't write a lot of personal stuff': author Róisín Lanigan on being married, divorced and surviving cancer before her 30s Opens in new window ] Sarah Moss Assuming that by 'summer reading' we mean 'life changing reading' as well as 'amusing reading', I suggest Adrienne Maree Brown's Pleasure Activism, which will invite you to think differently, more permissively, about the practice and meaning of enjoyment. It's an anthology, so between dips into it you could read Samantha Ellis's Chopping Onions on my Heart, which is also about how to be intelligently happy when there are reasons for sorrow. For absorbing fiction, Sarah Hall's new book Helm is predictably superb. Sarah Moss's latest novel is Ripeness (Picador) Claire Hennessy Campus shenanigans of decades past are skilfully evoked in two very different but equally compulsive titles: Anna Carey's Our Song , a swoony but grounded second-chance romance, and Lisa Harding's deliciously dark psychological mystery The Wildelings. Two impressive debuts: Claire Gleeson's Show Me Where It Hurts and Roisin O'Donnell's Nesting tackle impossibly painful family situations with care and nuance. Poetry lovers might want to dip into the thought-provoking new collections from Alice Kinsella (The Ethics of Cats) and Kimberly Campanello (An Interesting Detail). YA-wise , Caroline O'Donoghue's addictive romantasy Skipshock and Grainne O'Brien's delicate verse novel Solo are this summer's must-reads. Claire Hennessy's latest book is In the Movie of Her Life (Doire Press) [ Good books: The 20 best holiday reads this summer Opens in new window ] Joseph O'Connor I'd recommend The Kings Head, an excellent debut novel from Kelly Frost set in the Teddy Girl subculture of postwar England, a fascinating movement documented by the photography of Ken Russell. Frost's vivid, supple, filmic prose is a pleasure; she's a writer to watch. Sharon Guard's Assembling Ailish, June O'Sullivan's The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife and Grainne O'Brien's Young Adult novel in verse Solo, are fine achievements, as is Noelle Lynskey's debut collection of poems, Featherweight. Martin Dyar's The Meek is an exceptional second collection from a poet who is also a gifted storyteller. Full of precision, acute observation and reverent encounters with the natural world, it's a book I'll come back to many times. Joseph O'Connor's latest novel is The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker) Kevin Power The best Irish book I've read so far this year is Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuin , published by Stinging Fly Press. It's a collection of long stories, mostly set in contemporary Derry, mostly about young people, partly about the legacies of the Troubles and wholly about trauma. But the seriousness of Ni Chuinn's stories is inseparable from their superlatively rich, readable, perceptive, highly original prose. I also wholeheartedly recommend Lamorna Ash's Don't Forget, We're Here Forever (Bloomsbury), a brilliant and deeply personal book about the various meanings of Christianity in the contemporary UK. Kevin Power's latest novel is White City (Scribner UK) Rónán Hession Top of my summer reading list is The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by my favourite contemporary Irish writer, Adrian Duncan. I'm looking forward to Saltburn by Drew Gummerson and Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, the funniest writers around. My favourite books this year were On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes I and II, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland – she also translated the sublime Encircling trilogy by Karl Frode Tiller, which has obsessed me. I heartily recommend The Book of All Loves by Augustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead, and What a Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard. Rónán Hession's latest novel is Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose) John Self I loved Michael Amherst's novel The Boyhood of Cain , a debut with its voice fully formed, about a boy growing up in a school where his father is the headmaster. It's sad, funny, rigorous, elegant and very Coetzeean. Irish-Trinidadian writer Amanda Smyth has written a glorious autobiographical novel, Look at You, which is a string of intensely vivid scenes from adolescence and young adulthood: love, sex, family drama, the lot. And Hassan Blasim's Sololand is three novellas around and about postwar Iraq, which are far more blackly funny than they have any right to be. He's a star. John Self is a critic Ruby Eastwood The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant are sharp and deadpan, marked by moments of striking insight. This newly gathered volume spans five decades of her work: tales of spiritually exiled characters drifting through shabby boarding houses and inhospitable cities, struggling with fraught, often impossible relationships. Her prose is composed yet surges in unexpected places. The strongest pieces feel loosely assembled: landscape and mannerisms rendered with precise clarity but never quite falling into the recognisable shape of a story. This is how Gallant operates, making her imagined world familiar, then leading you towards an unexpected or elusive truth. Ruby Eastwood is a book reviewer John Banville Collisions by Alec Nevala-Lee is the biography of the American scientist Luis Alvarez (1911-1988). He was closely involved in some of the most significant, innovative – and deadly – scientific advances of the 20th century. He worked on the development of radar during the second World War, was part of the team at Los Alamos that built the first atomic bombs, put forward a controversial theory on the assassination of JFK, did important work on particle accelerators, and, late in life, discovered, along with his geologist son, that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a gigantic meteorite hitting the coast of Yucatan. Oh, and he also taught himself glass-blowing and metallurgy. John Banville's latest novel is The Drowned (Faber) Jessica Traynor I've reviewed some great books this year, including Artists, Visionaries, Siblings by Judith Mackrell , an absorbing account of the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, and the poignant This Interim Time by Oona Frawley . I've loved Elaine Feeney's ambitious and multilayered Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way and Sean Hewitt's Open, Heaven had me entranced. Tim MacGabhann's The Black Pool is a wild and blackly funny ride through addiction and recovery. In poetry, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Keith Payne's Savage Acres, Charles Lang's The Oasis, and Dane Holt's Father's Father's Father. Jessica Traynor's latest collection is Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe) Martina Evans Tommy Orange's multigenerational Native American novel Wandering Stars spans two centuries yet reads with all the fizz, poetry and pain of something deeply remembered. Terrific characters drive a vital, unputdownable story. Disturbing, wry, riveting, Joe Dunthorne's memoir Children of Radium tells European history like never before. Dunthorne's research into his German great grandfather – scientist, inventor of radioactive toothpaste, Jewish refugee – reveals a literally poisonous family secret. The poems in Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage are easy to read, impossible to forget. Exact and complicated on the joys and pitfalls of memory. A keeper. Martina Evans's latest book is The Coming Thing (Carcanet) Henrietta McKervey Beginning with a trim, hand-luggage-only sized novel, Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection elegantly skewers the perfectly curated lives of a Berlin-based hipster couple. Set six months into the Nazi occupation of Rome, the intertwined fates of three strangers are the propulsive force driving Joseph O'Connor's excellent The Ghosts of Rome , the second in his Escape Line trilogy. A novel about a UN deradicalisation programme doesn't sound like it would be a bundle of laughs, yet Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, the story of an academic who goes to Iraq to run a UN programme to deradicalise Islamic State brides, is witty, smart and entertaining. Henrietta McKervey's latest novel is A Talented Man (Hachette Books Ireland) Neil Hegarty In Seán Farrell's first novel, Frogs for Watchdogs , we meet a little boy living in the midst of change, and we are introduced to a world crowded with danger and with fear. The novel's power lies in its intensity of feeling: a child's experience is elemental and stark and filled with powerful emotions, and love and hatred in this universe are clean-cut presences, sharply lit, vivid, unmistakable. Farrell sustains this remarkably full-tilt atmosphere throughout: and in my reading life, I have seldom felt so wholly slotted in behind a child's eyes, seeing the world as something new and – always – incalculable. Neil Hegarty's latest novel is The Jewel (Head of Zeus) Edel Coffey Abigail Dean's The Death Of Us really stood out for me this year. It's a hybrid crime novel/love story that examines the disintegration of a marriage following a violent home invasion. Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel is a high-concept dystopian novel about a not-too-distant future where everyone has a 'risk rating' compiled via their metadata. This offers much food for thought on the topics of personal data, freedom and authoritarianism. I also loved Elaine Feeney's new novel Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, which is the story of a woman's relationship, but also the story of how our personal and shared cultural histories impact our lives. Edel Coffey's latest novel is In Her Place (Sphere) Michael Cronin Summer is typically when the kids are not in school, so what better time to reflect on schools and our expectations of them? Joseph Dunne, Ireland's leading educational philosopher, has written What's the Good of Education?, a challenging and compelling exploration of how education can contribute to a flourishing democracy provided that our classrooms are not hijacked by tech oligarchs and bean counters. Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is another urgently persuasive work from the author of Landmarks and Underworld. A master storyteller, Macfarlane uses richly poetic and precise prose to make a timely plea for the rescue of our rivers from callous neglect and wanton destruction. Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin Sarah Gilmartin In Greece earlier this month, I disturbed the peace of other sunbathers with intermittent shrieking laughter. The culprits? Miranda July's All Fours and Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident . Both are brilliantly observed, funny, provocative, and my favourite kind of beach read: deceptively easy. For crime fans, Andrea Carter's first stand-alone novel There-Came-A-Tapping is an involving, intelligent story, full of intrigue (and ravens). Of this year's debuts, Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors and Garrett Carr's The Boy from the Sea are two standouts, such brightly inventive storytelling from born writers. Sarah Gilmartin's latest novel is Service (One) Wendy Erskine I found Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare , a story about three young women in a Belfast shared house, so funny, taut and complex. David Collard's A Crumpled Swan, which offers 50 brief essays on an Abigail Parry poem, is an ingenious and companiable book, which considers aspects of poetics – and so much more. Marcia Hutchinson's The Mercy Step, told from the perspective of a child, is vibrant and striking, its voice distinctive. And Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds, Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, conveys the personal and political so precisely and compellingly. Wendy Erskine's latest book is The Benefactors (Sceptre) Naoise Dolan I'm currently reading Deepa Bhasthi's English translation of Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq, the first story collection to win the Booker International. There's a translator's note where Bhasthi explains the cultural context of the original Kannada language and defends her choice not to italicise foreign words or use footnotes. Good woman for treating anglophone readers like adults. Up next is Labharfad le Cách (I Will Speak to You All) by Peig Sayers . I invariably love the writers people hated in school when I read them of my own volition, so let's see if the pattern holds. Naoise Dolan's latest novel is The Happy Couple (W&N) Diarmaid Ferriter I came late to Richard Flanagan's Question 7 , published in paperback last month, but it was worth the wait. It is an extraordinary mediation on his family story, blending memoir, history and fiction, covering his native Tasmania, nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, writers behaving badly, the natural environment, and his father's prisoner of war experience in Japan. Big questions are thread through the book, such as 'why do we do what we do to each other?', how we go on, and the meaning of love and forgiveness. Each time he seems headed in the direction of answers, he underlines the emptiness of meaning. This is a melancholic, direct, lyrical and beautiful book. Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD
