Summer reading special

Lynn Truss

Daphne du Maurier was the subject of a splendid panel event at the Charleston Festival recently; in the course of it, one of the speakers referred to the pleasure of "innocent reading" - and everyone knew exactly what she meant. Personally, I had re- experienced "innocent reading" just a month or so previously, when I'd picked up My Cousin Rachel, started it on a Sunday afternoon, and actually stayed up half the night to finish it. It was fabulous. I was feverish with narrative anxiety. Did Rachel kill Ambrose, or did she love him? Was she bad, or just beautiful? Why didn't any modern novels make me stay up all night? Why did I usually turn a page or two in a ho-hum fashion and then think, gratefully, "Well, early start tomorrow!" and switch off the light?

I'm assuming a perfect summer read is one that hooks you in this way, but maybe I'm thinking only of single people who don't have to consider the feelings of companions who might welcome an occasional chat (or, indeed, any other sign of life besides rhythmic page- turning). Oh well. It can't be helped. For all happy solipsists, then, I would certainly recommend any Daphne du Maurier, but in particular The Scapegoat (Virago), which is one of the least well known. It's a doubles story set in France, in which one man not only takes on the life of another, but tries to live it better than its true owner, and I haven't read it for years but am really looking forward to it. I remember the bloated "Maman" with her addiction to morphine, and the child who's a religious maniac, and the moment our hero innocently doles out presents to the wrong people in his family, causing a lot of offence and confusion. The only trouble with such a summer read, in my view, is that it will last you a few hours at most, and then you'll want another one. So take a few, is my advice.

'A Certain Age', 12 monologues by Lynne Truss is published by Profile

Owen Sheers

The Welsh poet Dannie Abse's latest book, The Presence, might not be the most obvious summer read, but this journal/eulogy in memory of his late wife, his "lover, ally and friend" Joan, is, for all its painful honesty, a surprisingly joyful and compelling book. It is also simply too good and beautiful not to mention. Both a map of Abse's grief and his love, The Presence is a powerful reminder of how those two emotions are the rough and smooth sides of the same coin. Using contemporary triggers, Abse, one of the world's great anecdotalists, travels between "then" and "now" to paint not just the journey of his married life, but also a touching portrait of the man in the writing life, and the writer in the man's life.

Scattered with poems, extracts and reflections on art, The Presence is imbued with all the best qualities of what it means to be human and in love. Although the pain of loss is acute throughout, the book reaches a calm and confirming conclusion. The past may haunt us at times, but, Abse reminds us, "it can indeed be a sanctuary", too.

'Resistance' by Owen Sheers is published by Faber

Lavinia Greenlaw

Earlier this year I saw Katie Mitchell's remarkable stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and I've been hearing its voices ever since. As a student, I self-consciously read it as Modernist statement but what Mitchell made me think about was Woolf 's more fundamental interest in how we build ourselves out of perpetual reconstruction and breaking down, and how the parts of ourselves can brighten or harden; how apart we are within ourselves as well as from each other. I am 25 years older than when I first read it, less interested in theory and more in "life in general", which is what Woolf intended the book to be about. I'll take it somewhere quiet and read it slowly , maybe even aloud.

'The Importance of Music to Girls' by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber in August

Neil Gaiman

Right now I'm sort of on holiday and when I can snatch a moment to read I'm rereading Kipling's The Jungle Book, and am surprised and fascinated, as I always am with Kipling, how what I imagine to be comfort reading really isn't - it's too spiky and too sharp. Kipling's jungle isn't Disney's, and death is always present. I think in memory I'd smoothed out some of the bumpier, stranger stuff, but Kipling is an author who can bear rereading. You aren't the same person you were the last time you read him.

'Fragile Things', a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman, is published by Headline Review

Antony Beevor

Carmen La Foret's astonishing first novel Nada (Harvill Secker trs Edith Grossman) is set in post-civil war Barcelona, an era made famous by The ShadowoftheWind, but her book is far better written and more important. Her semi-autobiographical character comes to Barcelona to study and has to lodge in a nightmare apartment inhabited by her grandmother and mad uncles and aunts. This bildungsroman is undoubtedly the most original and fascinating work revealing the moral vacuum at the heart of Franco's "New Spain" and Harvill is to be congratulated for bringing it to an English audience at long last.