The pick of the summer reads

It's the time of year when you have to decide which chicklit yarn or latest blockbuster to pack for your holidays and you don't want to be stuck on the beach with a turkey. David Sexton reveals his favourite reads and the ones that should definitely be avoided....

Saturday by Ian McEwan (Cape, £17.99): Some people have objected both to the sceptical politics and the intricately contrived plot of this novel about 24 traumatic hours in the life of Henry Perowne, a successful London neurosurgeon who gets caught up in violence on the day of the Not In My Name anti-war march. But you will not meet anybody who has begun the novel and not rapidly finished it. McEwan's prose is a marvel of precision and clarity, and this is by far the most deeply considered imaginative response in British fiction to the changes in our lives, in our sense of security and the possibility of simple happiness, imposed by 9/11 and the resulting wars. Among much else, it's also a loving portrait of London, "the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who have ever lived here". If you're going to take just one of this year's new novels, this has to be it (and it's now available in paperback at airports).

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £16.99): Ishiguro's new novel is extremely strange, beautifully done, highly affecting - and deeply, deeply saddening. Many people who have read it report that it has entered their own dreams for months afterwards. In a parallel England, back in the Seventies, a group of children grow up together in a weird school, deprived of all family, being prepared for a mysterious purpose - to act, it gradually emerges, as organ donors. Yet they accept this doom with, if not equanimity, only the feeblest efforts to escape, while moreover failing, like so many in Ishiguro's fiction, to realise the love they have been offered. Ishiguro never lets the reader brush this off as science-fiction fantasy or single-topic protest: it's an inescapable image of life for us all.

The Early Stories 1953-1975 by John Updike(Penguin, £18.99): Here's a brick of a book - 880 pages, no less - that will be a good companion on the beach, in the bar, on the bus. Updike is probably the best short-story writer alive and these pieces, written between the ages of 21 and 43, during his first marriage, are some of his finest, most touching work, nearly all, in the end, about the relationship between men and women, about attraction and betrayal, about love and sex and their intermittent overlapping.

About Grace by Anthony Doerr (Harper Perennial, £7.99): As a boy in Alaska, David Winkler is cursed with an ability to dream the future. He grows up to steal another man's wife; the child they have is the joy of his life. However, when he dreams that his daughter meets a watery death he runs away from the future and takes refuge on a Caribbean island. Twenty-five years later he returns to find out what has happened. Our reviewer Melanie McGrath reported: "I can't remember when a novel so entranced me."

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst(Picador, £7.99): Last Year's Man Booker winner, now out in paperback: a glittering gay soap set in the Eighties. Nick Guest, just down from Oxford, lodges in Notting Hill with the rich family of a Tory MP, and begins on a hedonistic odyssey through that materialistic decade, even, high as a kite on coke and champagne, scoring a dance with Lady Thatcher herself. "She moved in her own accelerated element, her own garlanded perspective ..." It's the funny, bitchy novel Ronald Firbank would have written were he alive today.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Cape, £25): Taking a smalltype, 832-page biography of a totalitarian tyrant for holiday reading might seem a little too much like hard work. But this long-awaited study by the author of Wild Swans, although showing signs of hasty writing in the end, makes the most fascinating reading. It paints an entirely new picture of Mao as a completely ruthless opportunist, wholly uninterested in either ideology or the peasantry, concerned only with power, revelling in destruction, welcoming the prospect of a Third World War. Mao was responsible for more deaths than Stalin or Hitler: this book is part of the historic shift in which we are all, even the Left, finally beginning to accept that communism was as murderous and devoid of all excuse as fascism - and now attention is shifting east, where the immediate future of the world economy may lie. The most important book of the year.

Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection by John Man (Bantam, £7.99): If you want to read some exciting history, there's always the Second World War again - notably Max Hasting's apocalyptic Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 (Pan, £9.99) - or you can reach a little further back with this thrilling account of a brutal military leader of genius, who founded a land empire twice the size of Rome's, leaving, DNA analysis has revealed, many millions of direct descendants today, before he died mysteriously in August 1227. John Man has not only uncovered his story so far as it can still be known, he has also covered the ground, in this diverting travelogue. Just out in hardback is his equally good follow-up, Attila (Bantam, £20).

Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (Fourth Estate, £12.99): Stuart Shorter was a homeless, alcoholic drug addict, with multiple convictions for theft and violence, living on the streets of Cambridge when Alexander Masters, a "middle-class scum ponce" in comparison, met him and decided to write his life, going back into his past to try to understand what had happened to him in his childhood to bring him to this pass. Before the book was finished, Stuart had been killed when he stepped in front of the London to King's Lynn express. But he lives on in this amazingly engaging and funny book, a wholly original debut.

Quicksands by Sybille Bedford. (Hamish Hamilton, £20): If you've never read anything by Sybille Bedford before, begin with her wonderful novel A Legacy (Penguin Classics, £7.99) of 1956, so admired by Evelyn Waugh, or Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education (Eland Books, £9.99), a great autobiographical novel about racketing around the Riviera between the wars. But anybody who knows those books won't be able to wait for the paperback to read Quicksands, this time formally titled a "memoir", again returning to Berlin and the Côte d'Azur, and moving forward to the Fifties, in an extraordinary performance from a writer now in her nineties.

River Café Two Easy by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers (Ebury, £20): If you're on a holiday that involves cooking, here's the book to pick up en route this summer. The River Café duo have steadily reduced the complexity of their recipes down to a point where they are largely about good buying and basic assemblage - but they're all the more delicious and inspiring for it.