What you should read this summer

The sun may have been playing hard to get lately, but the official marker of the summer season – the Guardian’s summer reading special, of course – dropped yesterday, with plenty of recommendations of books to read at home or away, whatever the weather.

More on that right after the week’s highlights, from Zoe Williams’s takedown of Tom Bower’s spiteful biography of the Beckhams, to the news that Joseph Coelho has become the first ever Black British winner of the prestigious prize for children’s writing, the Carnegie medal. And scroll down to read our science fiction and fantasy reviewer Lisa Tuttle’s picks of the best recent sci-fi novels.

An occupational hazard of working on the Guardian’s books desk is that friends, family members and people I’ve just met will ask me what they should read – and never more so than at this time of year, when even those who don’t usually get round to reading are looking forward to relaxing with a book over the summer.

Whatever you fancy dipping into over the next few months, there truly is something for everyone in our bumper list of summer reading picks. Fiction-wise, anyone who loved Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn should have its long-awaited sequel, Long Island, at the top of their to-read pile. And the similarly titled – but very different! – Long Island Compromise is the second novel from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose debut Fleishman Is in Trouble was widely regarded as “the book of the summer” in 2019. If you were one of the many fans of the author’s smart, funny, shocking first novel, then pre-order her second (out in July), a sharp family epic set in a wealthy Long Island suburb.

If you’re looking for a summer of love (at least when it comes to your reading) then you’ll be pleased to hear that the king and queen of romcom books – David Nicholls and Marian Keyes – both have new titles out. Or, if you want to try something by a new writer, debut novelist Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands is an extremely fun, high-concept romance novel about a woman who experiences a series of men descending from her loft, each believing himself to be her husband.

Another brilliant debut, and perhaps an aptly sporty choice given this summer’s Olympics, is Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, set during a fictional amateur boxing tournament for teenage girls. And for a fresh take on a classic, Percival Everett’s retelling of Huckleberry Finn, which won critics over when it came out in April, is a brilliant, gripping story – perfect for a long summer day of reading.

If nonfiction is more your thing, you might want to get to know our likely next prime minister, Keir Starmer, via former journalist and Labour strategist Tom Baldwin’s biography. And it may not be exactly a typical beach read, but Knife by Salman Rushdie, the author’s extraordinary memoir of the attack that almost killed him on 12 August 2022, is well worth reading – and slim enough to fit into even the smallest of baggage allowances. The inaugural winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Doppelganger by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein, is newly out in paperback, and would make a brilliant choice for anyone looking to learn more about truth in politics and why conspiracy theorists think the things they do. Klein is an elegant, thoughtful writer, and Doppelganger is as enjoyable to read as it is insightful.

And if you just want to find out what Zadie Smith is reading (or Bernardine Evaristo, or Armistead Maupin, or Michael Rosen) then check out our holiday reading list compiled by leading authors. Happy reading!

Dystopian sci-fi has long been recognised as being more about the writer’s view of the present than a vision of the future. Advance reviews of Kaliane Bradley’s debut The Ministry of Timesuggested a romantic comedy – which it is, but with a much grimmer subtext, as it becomes more murky spy thriller than romcom. A secret experiment with time travel has brought half a dozen people from earlier centuries to 21st-century London where they are taught about modern life and kept under surveillance by government agents: comparisons with the experiences of immigrants and refugees cannot be avoided.

I’ve been thinking for some time that science fiction, as a genre, is finished. The world it once imagined has arrived, and interest in the future and new technologies is widespread. Instead of appealing only to a niche audience, sci-fi has been absorbed into the mainstream of fiction. And as fantasy enjoys a boom in popularity – the “Romantasy” subgenre in particular – much of what is now published as science fiction has a fantasy element to it: space opera, alternate histories, sagas set on alien worlds.

Cyberpunk was perhaps the most important trend in science fiction in the 1980s and 90s, but since then it’s often reduced in memory to a particular aesthetic of future-noir thriller represented by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. So The Big Book of Cyberpunk, edited by Jared Shurin is a huge, eye-opening, mind-blowing surprise. Two fat volumes with more than 100 stories, by authors from at least two dozen different countries (some published here in English for the first time), ranging from proto-cyberpunk stories from the 1950s and 60s through genre-defining tales by William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Neal Stephenson and many newer names, right up to 2021 with a post-cyberpunk story written in collaboration with AI.