Celebs book their holidays

We're fast-approaching the holiday season and everyone likes a trashy blockbuster, classic novel or crime-story thriller to keep them entertained on the beach. We asked celebrities to tell us which of their all-time favourite books would be sure to make it into their suitcases...

Jeanette Winterson, writer

I love Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It's a new way of writing fiction. I first read it around 1986 after I'd written Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and before The Passion. It gave me the confidence to be free.

Amy Winehouse, jazz singer
Catch-22 is my favourite book. When I was a kid, I used to pick up stuff my brother was reading and I read Catch-22 after him. I must have been about 12. Oh, and the man I marry has to be as crazy as Yossarian. He'd have to be like that to tolerate me.

Dave Gorman, comedian
Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? is the most captivating and hilarious book I've read. I told a friend: 'Pick a number between one and whatever the last page of the book is, and I'll open it at that page and find a sentence that will make you laugh out loud.' He had 25 goes and I got him each time.

Peter Ackroyd, writer
I've loved Homer's Iliad since I studied it as a boy. It's sublime, supreme and serene. It differs from the Odyssey by being set in a brief period with very specific events, and it's not at all fantastic or surreal. It's a story of event and action.

Graham Coxon, ex-Blur guitarist
Narcissus And Goldmund by Hermann Hesse is my favourite book. It's about two monks who journey through their lives in very different ways and how in the end it's all a spiritual journey. One of them, Narcissus, leaves where he's being taught by the monks, travels through Europe and indulges himself in pleasures of the flesh during the Black Death. When I was 17, a great art teacher told me to read it. Years later, I actually did.

Kathryn Williams, folk singer
I love The House Of The Spirits by Chilean writer Isabel Allende because of its magic realism. I love a book where you see someone begin as a child, go through their life until old age, and then follow the generation that goes after them, because you don't get to see that in your own life. And I love the way the book goes into phantasmagorical stuff too. Phantasmagorical - is that a word?

Eliza Dushku, actress
I love Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible about a Baptist pastor, his wife and their four daughters moving to Africa. I never had sisters, just three brothers, but I have always travelled around the world with my family. My mum's this mad travelling professor and she's always been in love with Africa. So there's something about this family in the middle of Africa that strikes a chord. On the flipside, I love The Godfather, that's my father's crazy Albanian influence in me.