The Nerve's summer books 2026

What if your road-trip novel was set on Manchester’s curry mile? On “that shisha-haze mecca of mischief and magic, a jannat-al-firdous of kebab houses and jalebi bars. Oi, oi, oi!” I adored Wimmy Road Boyz (Merky Books), a sweltering debut by animator-screenwriter-author Sufiyaan Salam. It’s not just lyrical, it’s a headspinning, voracious, 300-page rap battle. It’s a Shakespearean saga of three brown boys barely holding on in the north of England. This summer I intend to read London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador). It’s shameful I haven’t yet, given the author’s god-level status. My restraint will pay off … I’m saving this one for when I need a little treat.

The one book I implore everybody to take on holiday is Female, Nude by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (Tinder Press). It’s an immersive, compelling, beautifully written and staggeringly moving portrait of one woman’s needs, desires, appetites and complexities – and of how women are forced to bend these things to the will of the world, and, sometimes, each other. The book I’ll be taking away is Family Friends by Chloe Ashby (Fig Tree). I absolutely adored Ashby’s debut, Wet Paint, and Family Friends looks to be an equally thrilling and lyrical journey into the ways in which the human psyche attempts to come to grips with grief, loss and complicated love.

The very funny Irish journalist Patrick Freyne’s debut novel, Experts in a Dying Field (Sandycove), is a fast-moving, unpredictable delight. Ostensibly about the survivors of an obscure 90s indie band, it’s full of twists and stylistic games: a chapter might take the form of an album review or an interview. Its combo of punk and postmodernism recalls Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad but has a charm of its own. I’m planning to pack The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (Riverrun), translated by Ross Benjamin. Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, Kehlmann’s novel audaciously reimagines the film director GW Pabst’s Faustian pact with the Nazis. I’m already a sucker for fiction based on historical figures, especially when Europeans do it. Throw in fascism, cinema and the price of complicity and I’m sold.

I envy anyone who hasn’t yet read John of John by Booker-winner Douglas Stuart (Picador), as it’s the perfect novel to get lost in on holiday. Superb at evoking character and place, Douglas transports readers to the windswept Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides where 22-year-old art school graduate Cal is ordered to return home from the mainland to help his father care for his grandmother. A tender exploration of family, community and sexuality, it also has one of literature’s most hilarious, potty-mouthed grandmothers in the form of Ella. A masterpiece. Speaking of fabulous older women, I’ll be packing The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph), winner of the Women’s prize for fiction, a novel told through the letters of a prickly 73-year-old that’s been endlessly recommended to me.

If your idea of satisfying summer reading material is less about escape and more about finally having a moment to reflect and absorb, then I’ll recommend the ultimate “wait, what just happened?’ read for 2026: If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable by Daniel Trilling (Macmillan). It’s lucid and clear-eyed but also compact enough to finish in a week, leaving you better prepared for a return to reality. I’m also planning to finish Gloria Don’t Speak (Weatherglass Books), a tender but sticky summer story about a woman with a learning disability by GP-turned-novelist Lucy Apps. 

A memoir by a former actor who started out on C4’s Skins and played Gilly in Game of Thrones is certainly not one that my algorithm would suggest as a match for me. However I was gripped by Hannah Murray’s The Make-Believe (Hutchinson Heinemann), which kicks off on the set of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, where she is an exuberant young woman juggling work and lovers and parties … before she’s drawn into a disturbingly wacky wellness cult – wands and magic! – and ends up hospitalised after a psychotic breakdown. A fine debut. Having just returned from holiday, I know that it’s worth packing Dave Eggers’s magnificent new novel Contrapposto (Canongate), which unfolds over six decades and 400 pages with two unforgettable lead characters, Cricket and Olympia, at its heart.

Whatever your plans for summer, I guarantee that if you start reading Flashlight by US novelist Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape), all you will want is a quiet place to carry on, such is the grip of this breathtaking family saga. Set in the US, Japan and North Korea, it tells a multigenerational tale that starts with Serk, born in Japan to immigrant Korean parents, walking with his 10-year-old daughter Louisa along a coastal breakwater. When Louisa is later found unconscious on the shoreline, her father has vanished, presumed drowned. What follows is a riveting read, informed by the ways in which trauma and secrecy play out in the lives of a richly complex cast of displaced characters. Shortlisted for both the 2025 Booker prize and 2026 Women’s prize, Flashlight began life as a short story and is now a 500-plus page masterpiece. My holiday read will be The Finest Hotel In Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (Cornerstone). She is the finest of foreign correspondents and the book comes highly recommended, having recently won the 2026 Women’s prize for non-fiction. Afghanistan’s history is told through workers at its first luxury hotel (still standing in Kabul after more than 50 years).

Forget whether or not you liked Lena Dunham's extraordinarily successful Girls, Famesick (Fourth Estate) is both one of the great social-media-era fame memoirs and a deeply feminist exploration of living with chronic pain. As Dunham's celebrity grows, so does the abuse she receives (and not just from strangers), as do the appalling effects of her endometriosis. It is tempting to see Dunham's experience as a kind of fable of privilege – be careful how much fame you wish for, young lady – and Dunham is self-aware enough to recognise this. She is smart, mordantly funny, and by the end of this tale so kind and full of hard-won wisdom you just want to applaud her endurance. I’ll be taking Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (Hamish Hamilton) on holiday. Levy is such a confident, singular writer and her hybrid books – this one is a blend of fiction, literary criticism and biography – always have the potential to surprise, with the kind of observant sentences that make you want to stop, lay your book face down and think for a minute. Perfect for lazy afternoons when you just want to read a few pages.

Britain's rivers are in such a state that a summer swim is generally inadvisable. But you can read about them instead in Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? (Penguin). In previous books, the celebrated nature writer has pondered mountains, caves and footpaths. In his latest, he turns his attention to the legal and philosophical status of the world's endangered waterways, journeying to India, Canada, Ecuador and elsewhere in typically poetic prose. This summer I'm looking forward to reading Greg Doran's Walking Shadow (Bloomsbury), in which the former artistic director of the RSC recounts the globetrotting quest he undertook to find as many copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio as possible, following the death of his husband, the actor Anthony Sher, in 2021.

Who better to read on the beach than the matchless Elizabeth Strout? The Pulitzer prize-winning author of seven addictive novels about Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton is always unputdownable but never more so than in her latest book, The Things We Never Say (Viking). Centre stage is a new character, kind-hearted schoolteacher Artie Dam. Outwardly happy and popular, Artie is inwardly struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation, and plagued with a fear that America under Trump is “committing suicide”. Then one day he discovers a secret that forces him to reconsider his entire life. It’s a beautiful, moving, wise and tender novel that lingers long in the mind: possibly her best yet. The book I’m most looking forward to reading is Tonight The Music Seems So Loud (Picador), Sathnam Sanghera’s portrayal of the extraordinary life and times of one of Britain’s most loved musical heroes, George Michael. 

What could be headier than the rush of an all-consuming, incandescent crush that threatens to upturn your life? Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer? (Fitzcarraldo) follows the lovelorn narrator as she relocates to Frankfurt to work for a video game company, only to find herself in thrall to a near-stranger known only as “the umbrella man”. Propulsive and fiercely intelligent, Barton’s prose is equally confident discussing the hypocrisies of heteronormative conventions and the ego-dissolving wonders of karaoke. I am very much looking forward to M John Harrison’s The End of Everything (Serpent’s Tail), a Ballardian tale of post-apocalyptic survival featuring shadowy aliens, societal collapse and existential malaise. It opens at the edge of the sea, where the protagonist comes across a mysterious, shapeshifting item: the beach would be a perfect setting to dive in.

Emma-Lee Moss, known to many as Emmy The Great, went from anti-folk troubadour gigging around London with Lightspeed Champion (aka Devonté Hynes) in the early 2000s to releasing albums sung in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and eventually retiring her stage name in 2023. Moss was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK as a girl, a dual identity she explores in her debut book My Cantopop Nights (Jonathan Cape). Part memoir and part biography of the Cantonese pop artists, huge in the 90s, that she adored in her adolescence, it would make a great holiday read. I’d never heard of Faye Wong and Anita Mui, rebellious singers who defied convention, but Wong’s song Dreams has been on repeat ever since. In terms of what I’m planning to take away with me …  fine! I admit it: I too want to read Jem Calder’s buzzy novel I Want You To Be Happy (Faber & Faber), about a relationship between a millennial copywriter and a wannabe gen Z poet, and get into debates on the beach about the price of flat whites.

In All Grown Up (Century), Daisy Buchanan takes Little Women’s March sisters to a suburban semi in Manchester, but you don’t need knowledge of Louisa May Alcott’s classic to love this. It’s the funniest, sweetest domestic comedy-drama, with beautifully drawn characters and a tender warmth laced through it all. A particularly brilliant audiobook features comedians Stevie Martin and Isy Suttie in the cast. I’m planning to take The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (Picador) on holiday. It was recommended to me because it features a character who freelances for an arts magazine and a grim encounter with a seedy 1990s comedian. I’m in. I’ve peeked at the first few pages and the prose is so soothing.

This summer I’m recommending Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Atlantic critic and author Sophie Gilbert (John Murray). She is illuminating on how mainstream culture delights in shaping the ways women view themselves and the rise and fall of troubling trends – from the cruelty of the early 00s tabloids to the diluted versions of pop feminism – and brilliantly puts everything into perspective. I’ll be taking Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi (Borough Press) to the quiet of the countryside to read. I adore historical fiction, and I expect El-Arifi will really bring Cleopatra to life in her retelling of one of history’s most misunderstood women.

You can buy all our summer selections at a discount from the new Nerve Bookshop: click here to see the full list

You can buy all our summer selections at a discount from the new Nerve Bookshop: click here to see the full list