No beach reads here – Caroline Sanderson on this summer's publishing trends
Including non-fiction recommendations to transport any summer traveller
A chill wind is scything through the streets of the Cotswold town where I live, I’m in my cosiest cardigan at my desk looking out at stop-start drizzle, and Summer is a coming in. Such weather conditions are the reason why it peeves me that summer reading books are almost always characterised as ‘beach reads’. What about those of us who won’t be anywhere near a beach? Or risk a chill if we expose ourselves on a deck chair?
In my view, summer reading is not about choosing books suitable for reading as the sun beats down. It’s much more about the fact that people on holiday have more time to read than usual. And while for some this might mean something light and undemanding, for others – and I include myself in this cohort – holidays provide a golden opportunity to immerse ourselves in something more substantial, that we wouldn’t have the headspace for in ‘term-time’. In this spirit, my husband took The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer on our honeymoon thirty-something years ago. Though let me tell you, dear reader, he didn’t finish it.
Talking of non-fiction, here’s my other gripe about the books typically presented as suitable for summer reading. They are invariably novels. There isn’t enough space here to launch into my full manifesto about how non-fiction can be as gripping as fiction. But I wish we could see more transporting non-fiction writing suggested alongside the thrillers and the blockbuster romances. So here are three new books coming out this summer that will take you to other places, even if you are staying at home.
The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North (July) is Jenn Ashworth’s multi-layered account of walking the 190-mile Coast-to-Coast path across the north of England. Beautifully evoking the north country landscapes through which she passes, the book also represents a kind of pilgrimage inwards as Ashworth reflects on life, death, bereavement, motherhood, being a northerner, friendship, what it means to care for someone, and be cared for in turn; and the limitations of one body and a single lifespan.
In Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe (May), Adam Weymouth (a previous RLF JB Priestley Award recipient) charts his epic Alpine walk from Slovenia to northern Italy, following the 1000-mile journey of a trail-blazing wolf named Slavc by the scientists who tracked him via GPS. On arrival, Slavc met a female wolf, also on a walkabout and together, they founded the first colony of wolves in northern Italy for a century. It’s a profound book about rewilding, migration, nationalism, climate change and more.
As chief theatre critic for The Guardian, Arifa Akbar is used to keeping late hours. And in Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey Into Night (July), she is prompted by her encounters with other nighttime workers, and memories of her own father’s experience of working night shifts as a security guard, to embark on an alluring journey into night, encountering those who inhabit it. From the ‘dark sky’ island of Sark to the pulsating rhythms of the coolest of Berlin clubs, it’s a beguiling blend of memoir and travelogue – and about those who stay awake, so you don’t have to.
Also out this summer is Recommended! by Nicola Wilson. It’s a history of the Book Society, a monthly subscription book club which thrived between 1929-1968, helping to shape reading tastes long before Richard & Judy or Oprah Winfrey came on the scene.
I was particularly intrigued to read that when the Book Society began, the culture of book buying we now take for granted was not yet widespread. In fact, Wilson quotes HG Wells, writing in WH Smith’s 1927 Guide to Book Buying and Book Reading, as being of the opinion that it is “extravagant and wrong to own books.” It is good to know that some things have changed for the better, and there is now plenty of extravagance going on.
Here's a less welcome trend all authors will continue to grapple with this summer and beyond. Recently, The Atlantic revealed that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, publishing a searchable database of affected books so authors could check whether their books were among them. Hundreds of us did, and they were. This must change. Meanwhile, publishers can certainly do better in centring and supporting the human writers, without whom they wouldn’t be in business. When compiling my preview of July non-fiction, I received far too many submissions where the translator of the work was not credited. This, too, must change.
My day job as a non-fiction previewer for The Bookseller means that my reading consists almost entirely of new and forthcoming books. So in an annual bid to avoid a busman’s holiday, my own summer reading is usually retrospective, consisting of books I’m keen to re-read, or which I somehow missed the first time round.
This year, I want to return to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (my Penguin Classics edition is 896 pages, so that should keep me going). I’ll also be packing 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro which, to my shame, I still haven’t read, despite it being chosen as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction’s Winner of Winners in 2023.
That way, I’ll be able to shelter from the rain with a nicely balanced reading pile containing both fiction and non-fiction. Though if you don’t mind, I’m going to leave The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at home.
Caroline Sanderson is a writer and books journalist. She is Associate Editor of The Bookseller for which she has compiled the monthly New Titles preview of forthcoming non-fiction since 2000.
Caroline is a Writing For Life Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, and is currently Writer in Residence at South Tees NHS Foundation Trust and the Programme Director for Stroud Book Festival.
Caroline is the author of six non-fiction books, including biographies of Jane Austen and the singer, Adele. Her memoir – Listen With Father: How I Learned to Love Classical Music – will be published by Unbound in July 2025.
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Great article. I don’t necessarily agree with her choice of reading, although the coast to coast book looks good. But the sentiment is Excellent.