Text on the beach - the 50 best summer reads ever

Grayson Perry, artist

The French Lieutenant's Woman- John Fowles

It's about a woman who becomes a scandalous figure in Lyme Regis because she had an affair with a French soldier. He leaves and she spends her days gazing out to sea, and becomes an object of fascination for the hero. I loved the way the opening of each chapter is presented as documentary evidence. I was about 20 and working in the kitchens of an army camp in Cornwall, and was surprised to find this on a rack among the usual seaside trash. I devoured it.

Rosie Boycott, chair of Food London

Something Is Going to Fall Like Rain - Ros Wynne-Jones

The Something in question is the horrors, brutality and famine that descended on southern Sudan at the end of the 1990s. This extraordinary book follows a young British woman who drops out of medical school to join an NGO working in a remote village in Sudan. Her emotional journey and the bleak landscape of a once-beautiful country are powerfully described and the plot moves with intensity towards a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.

Sophie Dahl, writer and ex-model

The Greengage Summer - Rumer Godden

I first read this book when I was about 13. It is all about that strange transitional time from gawky adolescence to womanhood, taking place during a hot, indolent summer in France, and it whetted my appetite for coming-of-age stories. It reminds me of being by the seaside and staying up eavesdropping on the grown-ups. Godden's young protagonists are incredibly compelling and authentic. She breathes total life into teenagers.

Alain de Botton, author and philosopher

The Death of Ivan Illich - Leo Tolstoy

A powerful if slightly morbid summer read (but only 120 pages long), this tells of the decline and death of a Russian civil servant. It is a terrifying book, the literary equivalent of receiving the news that the dark shading across your liver is, unfortunately, the worst possible of the 12 scenarios you'd Googled. Why is this good on holiday? Because reminders of mortality tend to accentuate pleasure.

Richard Eyre, director

The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

My favourite beach read would have to be this novel (and its sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire) by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004. A middle-aged man (financial journalist) teams up with a young woman (sociopathic computer expert) to investigate a wealthy family devoured by its secrets. It's an intelligent thriller that never disappoints: complex plot, inspired sleuthing, social comment, violence, sex and almost credible characters.

Jackie Kay, poet and novelist

Brown Girl, Brownstones - Paule Marshall

First published in 1959, this is the coming-of-age story of the feisty Selina Boyce, daughter of Barbadian immigrants living in Brooklyn through the Depression and second world war. With great wit and brio, it tells of what goes on behind the walls: "Her house was alive to Selina. She sat this summer afternoon on the upper landing on the top floor. Listening to its shallow breathing." A moving story about poverty and racism, it's also very funny.

Andrew Marr, presenter and journalist

In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, from In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

What a title, eh? Proust is an addiction, not a writer. He changes the way you see - though you have to be prepared to be bored occasionally en route. I began the great work first one snowy weekend in Belgium and later read this on Hampstead Heath in midsummer, getting horribly sunburned. The belle epoque summer seaside is all glitter, wit, sea shadows and urgent adolescent eroticism in Normandy's Balbec resort.

Simon Schama, historian and TV presenter

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

There must be some people who when parked on a beach feel they should be in the permafrost with Ivan Denisovich, but I'm not one of them. No, give me the sumptuous, wistful, sensual, warm-blooded Leopard any day. It may be Sicily in the 1860s but everything is in there: appetite, love, history's cruel laughter, lamplit Palermo, the rustle of silk. You live the Prince of Salina's life and revisit your own with an almost unbearably sharpened awareness of the texture of life.

Our selections

The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell

This quartet of novels - Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960) - presents four perspectives on events in Alexandria in the 1940s. The scenery is luxuriant and the behaviour bohemian.

Amours de Voyage - Arthur Hugh Clough

This unconventional novella, which Clough completed in Rome during the revolutionary year of 1849, takes the form of letters in verse, mostly written by a bored Englishman named Claude who falls in love with a fellow tourist.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

There have been few better evocations of an English summer than the first section of McEwan's novel, set on a sweltering day in a country house

The Beach - Alex Garland

An account of the search for a secluded utopia off the Thai coast, Garland's novel remains a cult read for young travellers.

Body Surfing - Anita Shreve

It's high summer in upmarket New Hampshire and a young tutor is lusted after by her charge's two brothers.

Bonjour Tristesse - Françoise Sagan

A slip of a novel that scandalised 1950s France, Bonjour Tristesse captures a single southern French summer as Cécile, an indulged 17-year-old, schemes to depose her father's mistresses.

Chocolat - Joanne Harris

When a young single mother arrives in a French village and opens a chocolate shop, weird and wonderful things start to happen, leading to a conflict with the local priest.

Chronicle Of a Death Foretold - Gabriel García Márquez

Rumours of an illicit affair between Santiago Nasar and a neighbour betrothed to someone else tear apart a small Colombian community in Márquez's haunting novella.

Cider With Rosie - Laurie Lee

Lee's account of his childhood in a Cotswolds village chronicles the end of traditional English rural life. An enduring evocation of summers now long past.

Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie

When a large group of rich eccentrics gather for a Nile cruise along with a certain Belgian detective, you just know what's going to happen next. Cue dastardly deeds and much intricate plotting in one of Christie's most satisfying novels.

L'Eau des collines - Marcel Pagnol

Two volumes - Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources - made famous by the excellent films about life in rural France. Despite the hardships endured by the impoverished community, the countryside is alluring and the people full of the joys of life.

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

As the second world war draws to a close, a young nurse tends a badly burned invalid in a ruined Italian convent. The heat and light of Italy and North Africa suffuse this passionate modern classic.

Flashman's Lady - George MacDonald Fraser

One of the best of Fraser's dozen-strong Flashman series, set in Borneo and Madagascar and hurling the cowardly Victorian soldier into scraps with murderous pirates, a despotic queen, and fearsome cricketer WG Grace.

French Leave - PG Wodehouse

All the French toffs and visiting Americans you'd hope for descend on two French resorts. If you can't find a second-hand edition of this work, which is out of print in a standalone version, Jeeves and Wooster will prove welcome holiday companions instead.

The Go-Between - LP Hartley

Exuding such a sense of summer the pages might be warm to touch, Hartley's coming-of-age tale is set during the heatwave of 1900. It all ends in tears, but not before there have been plenty of cucumber sandwiches on the lawn.

Le Grande Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier

The only completed work by Alain-Fournier, who died in the first world war, this is one of the great novels about the romance and mystery of youth, featuring masquerades and fantastical encounters in the French countryside.

The Grandmothers - Doris Lessing

Sun and sand appear to have aphrodisiac qualities as two mothers go on holiday and sleep with one another's sons. This is the title piece in a collection of short stories, the fourth and final of which tells of a soldier 's affair in Cape Town.

A House for Mr Biswas - VS Naipaul

Mr Biswas, a Trinidadian of Indian origin, is prophesied at birth to have an unlucky life. The forecast turns out to be not entirely untrue, but Mr Biswas is determined to put his demons to rest by building himself a place he can call home.

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

The story of three generations of the same family living in South America, Allende's novel is a wonderfully readable saga with magical realist touches, spanning every aspect of life from politics to pregnancy.

I Like It Here - Kingsley Amis

Mean, narrow-minded but at times very funny, Amis's novel about an intolerant writer who has an "acute prejudice about abroad" was based on the author's trip to Portugal, with his young family in the 1950s.

Imogen - Jilly Cooper

The story of a librarian whose holiday on the Riviera provides experiences beyond the bounds of any of the worthy fiction she's read. There are models, grandees and more playboys than you can shake a stick at - and the scenery is enchanting.

The Lady in the Lake - Raymond Chandler

Private eye Philip Marlowe travels from Los Angeles into the mountains in pursuit of a rich man's missing wife. The hard-boiled narration - and the corpse in the water - don't entirely negate the beauty of the surroundings.

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

Lazy afternoons at the Hampstead bathing ponds and trips to France feature in this Booker-winning story of the highs and lows of the 1980s.

The Magus - John Fowles

To escape an unsatisfying relationship, a depressed English poet takes a teaching job on a Greek island and becomes drawn into a twisted and dangerous friendship with a wealthy Greek recluse.

Mother's Milk - Edward St Aubyn

The follow-up to St Aubyn's critically acclaimed Patrick Melrose trilogy, Mother's Milk finds Patrick on holiday with his family in the South of France, struggling to salvage his inheritance and marriage.

A Murder of Quality - John le Carré

Smiley's second outing sees the master spy called out of retirement to solve a brutal murder at a public school. It's set in the English countryside, thousands of miles from the grit of Cold War battles, but the villains are as ingenious and vicious as ever.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold - Evelyn Waugh

On a cruise aboard the SS Caliban, a middle-aged novelist starts hearing voices. Waugh's late novel is far from relaxing, but provides insights into a certain kind of holiday paranoia.

Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene

With a sticky Cuban setting, Greene has fun with this story of James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman who gets into bother with a corrupt local police chief and inadvertently becomes a British spy. Or does he?

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters - JD Salinger

Salinger's lightest story about the Glass siblings (characters revisited several times in his novellas and short stories) takes place on a sweltering day in Manhattan, hours after the aborted wedding of the eldest Glass, Seymour.

The Reconstructionist - Josephine Hart

Harley Street doctor Jack Harrington and his model sister are the central characters in this novel about the hold childhood events can have over the rest of our lives; but the real star is the Irish countryside - part realm of gothic fantasies, part rural idyll.

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe

Arguably the first novel in the English language, Defoe's classic adventure story takes place on a tropical island location off the coast of South America - where the eponymous castaway spends 28 years.

Romola - George Eliot

Set in Renaissance Florence, Eliot's 1862 novel charts the political and religious upheaval of the period, as well as many of its foremost figures, including Machiavelli and Savonarola. Best read while on a cultural tour of Italy.

The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch

When arrogant theatre director Charles Arrowby retires to the coast to write his memoirs he finds his seclusion dramatically disturbed by an encounter with his first love. The sea is almost a character in its own right.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

Port and Kit set off from New York hoping to rekindle their romance in the deserts of Africa, but when they get there they find themselves more tested by the exotic locations and other temptations than ever.

Summer's Lease - John Mortimer

The detective novel aspect of this light Tuscan-set tale is secondary to the social satire of Brits abroad and the etiquette of villa life. Mortimer is excellent, as ever, on the foibles of the middle classes at play.

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's first major novel, published in 1926, chronicles the lives of the "Lost Generation" in France and Spain against a background of bullfighting, drink and debauchery.

The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

Ripley's first outing takes him to the Italian Riviera, where he learns his trade by stepping into the shoes of a glamorous young socialite.

Talking It Over - Julian Barnes

Barnes's witty trialogue - following the entangled fortunes of best friends Stuart and Ollie, and Stuart's wife Gillian - turns on an innocuous summer trip to the beach. One of the three will have cause to regret building that sandcastle.

Tender is the Night - F Scott Fitzgerald

Set on the French Riviera, Fitzgerald's 1934 novel tells the story of the drawn-out disintegration of the marriage of the glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver.

Up at the Villa - W Somerset Maugham

In a villa above Florence, genteel summer is interrupted by suicide when a visiting violinist shoots himself through the heart.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - EM Forster

A summer jaunt to Tuscany brings romance, marria ge and ruin in quick succession for Lilia Herriton. Forster sends a gang of typically repressed chatterers from England in hot pursuit.

The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Rhys's vivid re-imagining of the early life of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre follows the Creole heiress from her youth in lush but oppressive 1830s Jamaica through her transformation into English literature's most famous "madwoman in the attic".

10 of the best new contenders

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro
(Faber £14.99)

Musical short stories set in Europe.

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
(HarperPerennial £7.99)

Cricket and crime in post-9/11 NYC.

Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks
(Penguin £7.99)

007 versus a villain with a monkey's paw.

Deadly Sins - Nicholas Coleridge
(Orion £12.99)

Entertaining battles between the super-rich.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
(Canongate £12.99)

Fictionalised trips of a renegade writer.

God's Own Country - Ross Raisin
(Penguin £7.99)

Dark goings-on on the Yorkshire Moors.

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
(Virago £16.99)

Glorious supernatural escapism.

Heliopolis - James Scudamore
(Harvill Secker £12.99)

Class war and moral uncertainties in São Paulo.

The Standing Pool - Adam Thorpe
(Vintage £7.99)

Sabbatical stress in the Languedoc.

Call Me By Your Name - André Aciman
(Atlantic £7.99)

Teenage homosexual passion under the Tuscan sun.

What have we missed?

Tell us in fewer than 50 words (by Wednesday) why your book should be on the list. A bottle of Veuve-Cliquot champagne for the most persuasive suggestion.

books@observer.co.uk

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