Ten Sound Summer Holiday Reads

Curating a summer holiday reading list is one of life’s great pleasures. Never mind how lousy the campsite or fractious the children, lying in the sun, reading for guilt-free hours on end is holiday perfection. With just a handful of books it’s possible to gallop through large portions of British history. The novels below convey something of the temperament of the British and our history. Unlike the suggested reading from the Telegraph – which included the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all three volumes) – these books are manageable and easy to read, yet contain profound meaning. They are novels that do not caricature people into types; that will be the nearest thing to experiencing a life that is not our own. Mostly, they also encourage us to remember that, in the end, the good will triumph. I hope readers of the Daily Sceptic will also share their own best reads.

An Instance of the Fingerpost (first published 1997)

Murder, medicine, Roundheads, Cavaliers, Puritans and Catholics all dance together in 1660s Oxford in a fever pit of religious, political and scientific change. A girl has been murdered, and the whodunit is told from four conflicting points of view: a Venetian, a traitor’s son, an antiquarian and a cryptographer. A subtle and scholarly book that reads as neither – rather a rollicking mystery. On the way we pick up details concerning early blood transfusions, treatments for blindness and the eternal nonsense of Oxford collegiate life. There is much to enjoy here: “Going to a play in England, for any person of sensibility who has been exposed to the refinements of Italian and French theatre, is something of a shock and more than anything else reminds one how very recently this race of islanders has emerged from barbarism.”

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian (first published 1969)

Captain Aubrey: be still my beating heart. As publishers today would say, in Master and Commander we are fully immersed in life at sea on Captain Aubrey’s 14-gun sloop Sophie. Aubrey’s first captaincy, she gusts along the Mediterranean during the French Revolutionary Wars, seeking French and Spanish ships for booty. Through heroic action we learn what the sailors eat, how the Marines fight, how the guns work, how sailors are lashed, how the barnacles are cleared away. We learn also of the great talents and friendship of two brilliant men: Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. What makes the novel dazzle is O’Brian’s piercing psychological analysis of the follies and audacious genius of man. Here is Stephen contemplating the French Revolution: “I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes… man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.” Aubrey is the best of man: a man of carnal appetites, a dread of being ‘popular’, wants to succeed, a Tory, is competent with a sword, thinks, teaches children and – though coming ashore after winning a sea battle with a face mandrill red and blue – seduces his boss’s wife. Heady stuff. Best of all: it’s the start of a series, each book better than the last.

An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer (first published 1937)

Set in the frivolous and tremulous days before the Battle of Waterloo, Georgette Heyer charts the love story between outrageous heroine Lady Barbara Childe and Charles Audley, Wellington’s dashing aide-de-camp. It is a pity that Georgette Heyer has been reduced to a sub-Austen lady’s novelist, because her historical detail is pin-point accurate. Words spoken by Wellington in the novel are lifted from his recorded conversations or letters elsewhere; it’s as close to 1815 Brussels and the Duchess of Richmond’s ball as is possible to get. The battle details are accurate and more human for being revealed through the observant eyes of society ladies: “Like bright colours in a kaleidoscope, merging into ever-changing patterns, the troops were being drafted over the countryside. Life Guardsmen in scarlet and gold, mounted on great black chargers, sleek as satin and splendid with polished trappings, woke dozing villages on the Dener.”

Adam Bede, George Eliot (first published 1859)

Only take Adam Bede with you on holiday if it’s a long one and you are prepared to ignore all other demands on your time. People often show off about loving Middlemarch and overlook her wise younger sibling Adam Bede. A small English village community of Hayslope is evoked beautifully by Eliot as she charts the seduction of silly Hetty Sorel by the village squire. An early examination of the demands and frustrations of morality, Adam Bede the novel lingers long. Of the character Adam Bede, just revel in his solid English capabilities and good sense: “Adam hastened with long strides, his dog Gyp close to his heels, out of the workyard, and along the highroad leading away from the village and down to the valley. As he reached the foot of the slope, an elderly horseman with his portmanteau strapped behind him, stopped his horse when Adam had passed him, and turned round to have another long look at the stalwart workman in paper cap, leather breeches and dark-blue worsted stockings.”

Brendon Chase, BB (first published 1944)

Don’t be put off by it being aimed at children – in those days children’s books were far more sophisticated than they are today. Set in the early 1900s, three brothers, John, Robin and Harold, run away from home and live like fugitives in the wild and lovely English forest. There is plenty of shooting, trapping, fishing and use of cunning and initiative to evade their adult pursuers. This is a perfect read for all of us who wish to escape the modern world and live on pigeon eggs and squirrel. “There was a new and subtle change in the forest. The boys noticed it especially first thing in the morning and late at night. Though they were barely conscious of it, July had come and gone – a sullen, sweating July it had been too – it was now mid-August. A strange silence was everywhere; the leaves seemed tired; no birds, save robins, sang in all that great tract of forest land.”

Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household (first published 1939)

A classic cat-and-mouse chase, Rogue Male is an extended male fantasy about one man’s mission to assassinate a European dictator. Foiled at the last moment, our hero literally goes to ground in a self-created burrow in Dorset. Which man has not fantasised about evading the skills of a foreign agent, living only on his wits and his ability to fashion a gun out of cat gut? And which woman has not wanted to be with a man who could do this sort of thing? “I stared at my face today, hoping to see those spiritual attributes… I wanted comfort from my face, wanted to know that this torture, like the last, had refined it. I saw my eyes fouled with earth, my hair and beard dripping with blood-red earth, my skin grey and puffed as that of a crushed earthworm. It was the mask of a beast in its den, terrified, waiting.” A fast-paced, rollicking read with emotional depth.

A Dark-Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine

The pen name of Ruth Rendell, Barbara Vine’s novels are tremendously clever – less grisly than the murder mysteries but no less chilling. A Dark-Adapted Eye begins with the hanging of a woman for murder. As the story unravels we are taken to 1930s and ‘40s England and its now alien manners and habits: high tea, sewing, permed hair. Vera is an extraordinary character who transforms from villain to victim… or is it the other way round? I’ve lent my copy to a friend, so can’t include a quote, sorry!

The Feast, Margaret Kennedy (first published 1950)

It’s the original White Lotus: a lot of flawed people all on holiday together. The TV series uses the same format as Kennedy’s excellent novel, dividing the plot into days of the week. Like the TV series, the Feast begins with a catastrophic scene of death and then announces… A Week Earlier. The backdrop is a touch Famous Five: a precarious hotel in Cornwall where various families are trying to holiday, with each character representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Who will die, and do they deserve it? “Each guest had retired, as an animal retires with a bone to the back of its cage, to chew over some single obsession.” It is a lavish holiday read – funny, moral without lecturing and the description of Nancibel having a stand-up wash is just lovely.

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym (published 1952)

Women in Barbara Pym’s novels are entirely sidelined by today’s social mores. No power-dresses they, no Barbara Pym heroine would consider having ‘me time’ or employing ‘girl boss’ attitude. Yet Pym does not idealise such stalwarts as Mildred Lathbury whose life is dedicated to running jumble sales. This novel is quietly devastating in its expositions of the meagreness of the lives of such over-looked women. When Mildred’s old school friend comes to stay, Mildred writes: “Dora decided to do some washing before supper and within half an hour the kitchen was festooned with lines of depressing looking underwear – fawn locknit knickers and petticoats of the same material. It was even drearier than mine.” A humorous world of stolid endeavour awaits, with a gentle assurance nevertheless that such lives depicted are infinitely better than those that are currently lionised.

Flesh, David Szalay, (first published 2025)

Oh how far we have fallen, both as a literary nation, a nation and our conception of manhood. Flesh won the Booker prize in 2025 and is famous for its spare dialogue. The novel is a modern version of a picaresque adventure as we track the voyage and return of István. He travels from Hungary and finds fortune in London – a place of superficial wealth and squalor. Accurately named Flesh, it appears that István has no soul or internal life to speak of. Save a couple of moments involving dogs, István shows no emotion whatsoever. The dialogue is realistic:

They leave the lift at one of the upper floors and his friend knocks on the door of a flat. It’s opened by a girl of about their own age. “Hi,” she says. 

“Hi,” István’s friend says. 

She stands aside for them to step into the entrance hall. 

“This is my friend,” István’s friend says. “You know. The one I  told you about.” 

“Okay,” the girl says. 

She and István look at each other for a moment. 

“Okay?” István’s friend says. 

“Yeah,” the girl says. 

The three of them just stand there. 

The girl looks at István again. 

He doesn’t look at her. 

Thanks to this technique, Flesh is very easy to read, two days full sun lounger reading action at most. It will also provoke conversations between men and women about whether modern men really are like István: do they all go through life without any sense of agency? Is it possible for men who are not handsome to live like this? Do some men, really, really, not think?

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.