You may think the classic Holmes stories are moth-eaten and overfamiliar, but they're perfect bitesize holiday treats. Transport yourself to the breakfast room at 221b Baker Street, where Holmes and Watson listen to their clients' macabre stories, lose yourself in that late-Victorian prose (clapped my service revolver to his brow) and marvel at Conan Doyle's fascination for Gothic and grotesque effects. Start with "The Speckled Band" and you'll be hooked inside two pages.
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2. Double Fault by Lionel Shriver Tennis is as integral to the Great British summer as sunburn and 99 flakes. Here’s a brilliant novel to get you in the mood for Wimbledon fortnight, through the tale of two struggling players who pound the professional circuit during the 1990s. Shriver uses the vagaries of the sport to explore the rivalry and petty jealousy in many a human relationships or competitive marriage. The result is as finely crafted as Roger Federer’s backhand. Publisher: Serpent’s Tail How much: £7.99
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3. The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford 2006 saw the long-awaited launch of The Lay of the Land, the third in a lauded series of novels by a writer whom some fans daringly describe as “better than Updike”. Ford is a master craftsman of melancholic, suburban stories, and his hero Frank Bascombe fares no better in this latest update on his fragmented life: he begins the novel with radioactive pellets implanted in his prostate in an attempt to cure his cancer. Late last year, publishers Bloomsbury also rereleased the first two novels in the series, The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1996). Publisher: Bloomsbury How much: £7.99
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4. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins The first “sensation” novel, a thriller with Gothic-romantic overtones, it took English readers by storm in 1860 (Gladstone stayed up all night to finish it.) The story is pure melodrama – cute heiress Laura, threatened by scheming aristocrat Sir Percival and his panto-villain friend Count Fosco, is locked in madhouse but eventually rescued by handsome Walter Hartright and her plainbut- plucky sister Marian – but it’s giddily readable, and great fun. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £6.99
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5. Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart The young writer-diplomat’s account of a year spent trying to govern two provinces in southern Iraq will endure as a classic of the misbegotten war. Stewart’s urgently gripping prose, sharpened by an internal battle between the cold-eyed writer and the on-message neocolonial ruler, brings out both the farce and tragedy of the aftermath of 2003’s invasion. He begins in hope, tiptoes across vividly evoked human and political minefields, and ends pretty near despair. TE Lawrence meets Catch-22 – with a touch of Evelyn Waugh. Publisher: Picador How much: £8.99
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6. The Secret History by Donna Tartt Amodern crime classic, The Secret History reads like Brideshead Revisted meets Lord of the Flies, with sinister undertones. Richard, a misfit at an exclusive New England college, finds himself drawn to a secretive group of classics students. Soon he becomes inextricably caught up in their bacchanalian cavortings, until things go wrong and the strength of their incestuous friendship is stretched to its absolute limit. Reading this on holiday is somehting of a rite of passage in itself. Vintage stuff. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £7.99
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7. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell David Mitchell, already twice shortlisted for the Booker, described Black Swan Green as a “first novel”. He meant that it was semi-autobiographical, as many first-timers are, and drew on his boyhood. But Mitchell’s writing has always sung with newness, from Ghostwritten to Cloud Atlas, and this novel is as brilliant as ever as his schoolboy hero tries to master his stammer and stand up to the bigger boys. The casual brutality of childhood is evoked as beautifully as in Graham Swift’s Waterland. Where from: Sceptre How much: £16.99
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8. DB by Elwood Reid In 1971, a man calling himself DB Cooper hijacked, and then threw himself out of a passenger jet strapped to $200,000 in used notes and a parachute. He was never seen again. Elwood Reid’s novel – gripping at times, and infuriating at others – imagines what happened next both for Cooper and for the FBI agent on his case. Publisher: Bitter Lemon How much: £9.99
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9. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Kingsley Amis said it: readers never have to make allowances for Fielding. A founding father of the English novel, he had comic exuberance to burn. This intricate, 800-page epic (1749) follows the loveable rogue Tom as he’s ejected from his benefactor’s home and runs away to Bristol, then London, cross-crossing journeys with his true love, Sophie, falling foul of redcoats, pressgangs, judges and randy miladies. One of the great plots in world literature. (You can skip the stodgy Introductions.) Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks How much: £6.99
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10. City of Oranges by Adam LeBor Not only does this book uncover shoots of hope in the political desert of Israel-Palestine; it offers a gripping, humane read. LeBor explores the historically tolerant port of Jaffa, and its neighbour Tel Aviv, via six interlinked families – three Arab, three Jewish. Although ethnic barriers have lately risen, young people also want to revive the city’s old civility, such as the (Arab) judo champion of Israel: “I am a mix, and I decided to enjoy it.” Publisher: Bloomsbury How much: £8.99
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11. Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh Immerse yourself in the golden age of detective fiction courtesy of Ngaio Marsh and Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, her upperclass sleuth. Fans of Agatha Christie will recognise a vanished world of drawing rooms, parlour maids and vanished social mores, but Marsh’s fiction has a little more bite than Christie’s. Artists in Crime is an early Alleyn case and is wonderfully evocative of 1930s bohemia, full of flowing garments, free love, opium and murder most foul. Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers How much: £6.99
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12. The Book of Dave by Will Self Fans of Self’s trademark verbal pyrotechnics will love this apocalyptic saga, which must be the first in which a London cabbie takes on near mythic significance. In the tradition of gritty London novels by Real Bloke authors, Self describes a much-reduced capital, postflood, in which the “Six Families” live in what is left of Hampstead, by the moral code of the mysterious “Book of Dave”. This relic from a marginally happier time is the forgotten rant of a dysfunctional cabbie. Publisher: Viking How much: £7.99
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13. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai The winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize, this second novel proved Kiran Desai to be a bold and original voice. Set alternately in India and the US, the novel tackles the big questions: nationalism, migration, home, belonging. In glowing prose, Desai concerns herself with the little people that history is really made of. “The most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice vs injustice,” she writes. Publisher: Hamish Hamilton How much: £16.99 (H/B)
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14. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford The first of Mitford’s comic quartet about the Radlett family, whose six siblings are modelled on the Mitford girls and their dad, Lord Redesdale, fictionalised as the irascible Uncle Matthew. The bohemian upper-classes have never been so bittersweetly portrayed – the girls divide the world into “Hons” and “Rebels,” but the mood darkens as the Thirties slide towards mayhem. Linda’s rescue by a French aristocrat in Paris sent droves of English gels across the channel hoping for the same fate. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £5.99
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15. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson Fans will find Bill Bryson’s memoir of a blessed 1950s childhood in Des Moines as sweetly adorable as they could wish. Yet there’s an ironic chill beneath its charm. This is a sophisticated book about simplicity, a knowing account of heartland ignorance in the first consumer boom, “an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron”. In his droll and deadpan way, Bryson lays bare the cosy but somehow stunted emotional roots of Bush’s own America. Publisher: Black Swan How much: £7.99
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16. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan Described by its author as a “shocker” – meaning full of shocks, rather than a dreadful read – The Thirty-Nine Steps is a mix of espionage and murder. Set in the run up to the First World War, the novel follows the return to England from Rhodesia of one Richard Hannay. Fresh off the boat, he learns of a political assassination plot and is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Hannay heads for the Highlands to escape his pursuers. A classic. Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics How much: £2
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17. Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay This sharp and witty collection has a bit of everything: Greek beaches, Scottish Munros, Hampstead Heath and silences “like snow sitting on a wall”. Many of the stories describe couples who have been together “for so long that we look like we could have knitted each other up”. Many are about loss and regret. Some are surreal and silly, like “Not the Queen”, in which Maggie is daily tormented by her astonishing similarity to her maj. Perfect. Publisher: Picador How much: £7.99
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18. The Diviners by Rick Moody Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, has a crack at writing the Great American Novel, with 600 pages of scorching state-of-thenation satire set in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. The eponymous “Diviners” is a hot TV script that nobody’s read but everyone wants to buy. A virtuosic, globestraddling prologue will either have you hooked or put you off forever. Publisher: Faber and Faber How much: £12.99
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19. Howards End by EM Forster Forget the Merchant-Ivory films. This novel (1910) was the quintessence of intelligent English fiction a century ago. It’s about class and commerce, tradition (represented by the wych-elm at the titular country house) and the encroachments of the modern world, as the posh and civilised Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret, encounter the philistine, businesslike Wilcoxes and the aspirant, over-pushy clerk Leonard Bast. A study of who really owns (or deserves to own) England. Publisher: Read Books How much: £17.45
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20. DH Lawrence and Italy by DH Lawrence Rediscover the warmest, wittiest side of Lawrence with this splendid one-volume edition of his three non-fiction books on Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places.Asuperbly gifted travel writer, Lawrence thrills to the pagan, sensual past and present of the towns, lakes and islands. But there’s also quirky humour, drama and keeneyed sympathy for the people he meets. It adds up to triple-headed delight from a pioneer of green-minded, new-age travel. Publisher: Penguin Classics How much: £12.99
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21. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith The first novel to feature Patricia Highsmith’s amoral anti-hero, The Talented Mr Ripley is a supremely stylish read. Published in 1955, it celebrates a bygone era of preppy playboys and glamorous gels. If you saw the 1999 film version, it will be impossible to imagine anyone other that Matt Damon as Ripley, but if you’re new to the character, read this chilling tale of duplicity and murder before watching the movie. Publisher: Vintage How much: £7.50
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22. Sunday at the Crossbones by John Walsh John Walsh’s debut novel – about the real life Rector of Stiffkey, who took it upon himself to save prostitutes – has been some time in the writing. It has been worth the wait. Walsh renders 1930s Britain in the kaleidoscopic style with which readers of The Independent will already be familiar, and offers an ambiguous, compassionate account of his hero. Publisher: Fourth Estate How much: £12.99
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23. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell Madness, jealousy, loss and betrayal pervade O’Farrell’s fourth novel. Committed as a teenager to a mental asylum by her socially ambitious family, the spirited Esme is rescued a lifetime later by Iris, a feisty young relative who too has family skeletons in her closet. O’Farrell successfully challenges the essence of madness in this warm but disturbing book. Publisher: Headline How much: £7.99
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24. Middlemarch by George Eliot Go on, you always meant to read Eliot’s 1871 masterpiece. It’s accessible, hugely intelligent and clearly imagined, as Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman, cleaves to the stickdry intellectual Casaubon in hopes of bettering the world, but comes to realise that her lively cousin Ladislaw is the real thing. In the background is a bustling “Loamshire” town full of vivid characters. The tone can be a touch didactic, but this is a novel you’ll congratulate yourself for liking so much. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £7.99
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25. A Lie about My Father by John Burnside The “misery memoir” comes of age as a work of art. The poet and novelist John Burnside’s account of a childhood filled with pain and fear transcends self-pity to achieve a hard-won serenity. With clarity and compassion, he brings to tender life his damaged and damaging father, a drunken, violent steelworker “falling at his own velocity” from Cowdenbeath to Corby. His glorious prose, finding nuggets of beauty in a stream of hardship, manages to “love the world” as his dad never could. Publisher: Vintage How much: £8.99
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26. Restless by William Boyd The year is 1976 and single mother Ruth Gilmartin is fast finding out that there’s a lot she doesn’t know about her own mother, Sally. Namely, that her name is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée and former expert spy during the Second World War. The narrative switches between Eva’s account of her wartime missions and love affairs and Ruth’s gradual acceptance of her mother’s past. Exciting, tense and thought-provoking, Boyd’s novel is a beach read par excellence. Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing How much: £7.99
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27. Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan There are not many authors, however sensitive to their subject or thick-skinned in their response to criticism, who could get away with poking fun at mental illness. But debut author Clare Allan exploded on to the literary scene doing just that. After 10 years in and out of institutions, she knows whereof she speaks, and her slack-jawed anti-heroine, N, does not hold back. A brutal satire and a moving tribute, you won’t find many novels like it. Publisher: Bloomsbury How much: £7.99
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28. You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem One of New York’s most acclaimed young novelists moves to the West Coast for an offbeat romantic comedy about a nameless LA alt-rock band. This hipster riff on music, relationships and, yes, intellectual copyright concerns a love triangle between the “handsome” lead singer, the bassist Lucinda, and a man on the other end of the phone whom she dubs “The Complainer”, before plundering his complaints and turning them into lyrics. Publisher: Faber and Faber How much: £10.99
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29. The Private Memoirs… by James Hogg Nothing like as famous as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but more alarming, this haunted tale, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), starts in Calvinist smugness (the “chosen” can get away with anything) and turns into demonic possession. A weak man, Colwan, comes under the baleful influence of Gil-Martin – whom we gradually realise is the Devil – and finds he is being blamed for terrible crimes. An enduring, scary masterpiece. Publisher: Wordsworth Editions How much: £8
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30. England’s Mistress by Kate Williams From Soho tart to glamour model, diplomatic wife in Naples to the most famous extra-marital passion in UK history: Emma Hamilton’s amazing tale is hardly unfamilar. Williams tells it shrewdly and well, with access to recently discovered letters and a sharp contemporary spin. In her skilled hands, Lord Nelson’s lover, for all her “charisma, intelligence and charm”, falls foul both of ingrained misogyny and a fledgling celebrity culture that both gave her stardom and exacted a fearsome price. Publisher: Arrow How much: £7.99
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31. The Lighthouse by PD James Every new Adam Dalgliesh novel is a treat and James’s latest is sublime. Set on a remote island used by holidaying top-secret VIPs, The Lighthouse follows the fall out of murder in a cloistered environment. For much of the book, Dalgliesh takes a back seat while his team, including the capable and likeable Kate Miskin, attempt to investigate without him. The only trouble with reading this on holiday will be that at the end of the book you’ll yearn for more Adam Dalgliesh. Pack an extra one, just in case. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £6.99
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32. Twenty-Something: by Iain Hollingshead Twenty-Something: the Quarter-Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster is an expose of the modern yuppie that can make uneasy reading for the average male under the age of 30, but it’s a funny all the same.Byway of an added distinction, it also scooped this year’s Literary ReviewBadSex in Fiction Award. “Then I’m inside her,” reads the winning passage. “And everything is pure white as we’'re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.” Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co How much: £7.99
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33. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl The lavish scope and encyclopaedic breadth of this debut novel have already seen its author hailed as a new Donna Tartt, and in this thrilling, almost exhausting, campus novel, it is not difficult to see why. Blue is in her last year of high school, her mother has recently died, she is under pressure from her academic father and developing a slight crush on her film tutor. This fast-moving novel is one for the hardcore holiday readers, and only those who can keep up with the pace. Publisher: Viking How much: £16.99
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34. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton The 1920 Pulitzer-winning masterpiece set in Old New York City’s rigid aristocratic society of the 1870s, in which Wharton herself grew up. Newland Archer, a successful and rich lawyer engaged to the beautiful heiress May, finds himself embroiled with the mysterious, exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, supposedly corrupted by Europe, bent on a scandalous divorce. The subject matter is pure Henry James, but Wharton’s narrating voice is more Dorothy Parker-meets-Jane-Austen. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £1.99
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35. The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery The zoologist, explorer and storyteller Tim Flannery is a hyperactive Australian intellectual tornado whose writing kicks up a storm. This sweeping book offers a wide-angle “ecological history” ofNorth America, showing how climate, landscape, flora, fauna – and, of course, humanity – have shaped a continent where bear and bison ruled. Penguin has also re-issued Flannery’s terrific account of global warming and its outcome, The Weather Makers. Publisher: Penguin How much: £9.99
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36. The Hard Way by Lee Child The hero of this book is US hardman and ex-soldier Jack Reacher. According to his mythology, “men want to be him, women want to have him”, (a sentiment with which my mother, at least, would agree). Reacher’s latest adventure sees him swap the streets of New York for the leafy lanes of the English countryside. You won’t believe for a second that Reacher will meet his maker but, despite that, this ridiculously macho hero is a winner. Publisher: Bantam How much: £6.99
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37. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon In its comic ordinariness and its beautiful understatement, this novel is in many ways quintessentially English. The follow up to Haddon’s successful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, this time the main character is an adult man, but just as out of place as the previous book’s autistic hero. George Hall is a family man, in a family whose every relationship seems to be broken. It takes a while for them even to notice he is having a breakdown. Publisher: Vinatge How much: £7.99
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38. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Celebrate the centenary of the great Cornish novelist by burying yourself in this dark romance from 1938 about the naive young lady’s companion (never named) who is wooed by the surly (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool!”) Max de Winter, and finds stepping into the shoes of his glamorous, dead, first wife Rebecca thoroughly uncomfortable. Trembling with nerves, dread and conflicting emotions, its first-person narrative exerts a ferocious grip. Publisher: Pan Books How much: £7
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39. The Sunlight on the Garden by Elizabeth Speller Part-family and social history, part-raw, touching autobiography, Speller’s book wrily and bravely explores the links between Britain’s obsession with class and the suffering of those who fall between the cracks. Over three generations, her clan mixed up aristocracy and “trade”. Her ironic and insighful tale shows how the women, in particular, were torn apart by the snobbery and confusion that ensued. Publisher: Granta How much: £7.99
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40. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Another audaciously epic story of exile and survival by another hugely talented young woman. The follow-up to Adichie’s Orange nominated debut, Purple Hibiscus, this novel is set during the 1960s Nigerian-Biafran conflict, and sees a houseboy, Ugwu, tested in his loyalty to his fiery academic employers. The novel tempers brutality with humanity, and has already seen Adichie named as the successor to Africa’s best writers. Publisher: Harper Perennial How much: £7.99
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41. The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld A big hit with readers on the Tube, this mystery looks set to appear on beaches everywhere this summer. Afictional account of Sigmund Freud’s visit to the US, this literary thriller offers an interesting – if simplified – overview of psychoanalysis and the historical details are meticulously researched. At a not inconsiderable 500 pages, The Interpretation of Murder is great book to get your teeth into this summer. Publisher: Headline Review How much: £7.99
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42. The Damned Utd by David Peace Brian Clough was the kind of character you couldn’t make up. This fictionalised account of his brief but pyrotechnic reign as manager of Leeds United, a club he despised, combines George Best charm and Roy Keane grit with blistering Cristiano Ronaldo pace. A film version starring the inevitable Michael Sheen is in the works. And no, you don’t have to like football, but it helps. Publisher: Faber and Faber How much: £12.99
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43. Everyman by Philip Roth At 182 pages, Philip Roth’s 27th novel is light. But Everyman packs more metaphysical heft into its slight frame than most novelists manage in a career. Roth’s subject – an elderly, unnamed narrator facing up to death – may be bleak, but his crisp, elegant prose is enough to ward off sombre thoughts. Publisher: Vintage How much: £6.99
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44. The Go-Between by LP Hartley “The past is another country – they do things differently there.” A perfect summer read, as a desiccated narrator (in 1952) recalls the hot days and night of 1900 when, as a schoolboy, he stayed with a friend in a Norfolk country house (teas, cricket matches, bathing) and became embroiled in the illicit affair between the friend’s classy sister and a local farmer. Troubled romance and social observation for Edwardiana fans. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £7.99
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45. Bad Faith by Carmen Callil By chance, Carmen Callil (founder of Virago) discovered that her admired therapist was the daughter of the Vichy regime’s chief persecutor. This selfish bureaucrat had sent tens of thousands of innocent French Jews to their deaths. Her enthralling blend of historical detection, memoir and reflection on evil paints Louis Darquier as a vain opportunist whom war and Fascism allowed to direct a machine of mass murder. Publisher: Vintage How much: £9.99
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46. The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney A bleak depiction of life in a frozen frontier town circa 1867 might not sound like something to read beside the seaside but The Tenderness of Wolves is a deceptively simple story that is beautifully written. Made up of a number of interwoven narrative threads, the main story is that of a mother whose son is accused of murdering a French trapper in the wintry wilds of Ontario. Utterly gripping. Publisher: Quercus How much: £7.99
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47. The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton by Michael Collins If you like plot, you’ll love this no Irish thriller about a failed writer and his doomed suicide attempt. There’s enough plot here for three holidays – stuff just keeps on happening. When you’re not being drowned by events, though, Collins’s novel contains some bravura passages, including one memorable episode concerning a rabbit with a death wish. Publisher: Weidenfeld How much: £12.99
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48. Nature Girl by Carl Hiassen Boyd Shreave, a disgraced telemarketer and one-time salesman of orthotics footwear, is duped into travelling to the Florida Everglades, where a depressive Seminole Indian, a nymphomatic college girl and an elaborate revenge await. Featuring a cast of endearingly repellent characters, Hiassen’s 11th novel is barmy and brilliant in equal measure – a US farce to put Molière to shame. Publisher: Bantam Press How much: £12.99
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49. The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope Penguin has reprinted six tales of classic derring-do (the others are The 39 Steps, The Man Who Was Thursday, She, The Riddle of the Sands and The Lost World) and chaps in search of stirring thrills will enjoy the 1894 tale of Rudolf Rassendyll, distant cousin (and spitting image) of the new king of Ruritania. His adventures there involve kidnap, impersonation, swordplay – and the delicious Princess Flavia. Ripping stuff. Publisher: Penguin Books How much: £5
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50. The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple Much more than a retelling of the 1857 Uprising (or “Mutiny”) in north India, Dalrymple’s sumptuously sourced and beautifully composed narrative follows the downfall of the Mughal dynasty, and celebrates the perishable elegance of its culture in early 19th century Delhi. He spices his story with a passionate insider’s knowledge of the city and its people, past and present. Publisher: Bloomsbury How much: £8.99
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